Department of English

• Friday, October 6, 2023 - 11:00am to 12:00pm

Fisher-Bennett Hall Faculty Lounge

Abstract: The struggle for people-planetary justice cannot proceed without rigorous efforts to name and reject the racist, colonial systems and processes within which the deathwork of ecological crisis is assured: ecological catastrophe is part of history, and far from prospective or yet to come, the ravages thereof are ongoing. The documentary poetry under consideration in this dissertation illuminates such ongoing people- and place-unmaking processes, rendering them at once intelligible and urgent. Through a combination of archival engagement and formal experimentation, the poets in this study—among them Muriel Rukeyser, Yedda Morrison, Kaia Sand, and Emily Abendroth—use factual elements to presence the complex social realities and preconditions of ecological crisis. Carving out charged spaces for readerly activation, environmentalist inquiry, and prefigurative political possibility, these poets re-socialize “matters of fact” to disrupt the estranging, depoliticizing power of everyday beliefs, institutions, and values. 

In the face of the story- and reality-making, death-dealing capacities of the post-9/11 state, the practitioners examined in this project produce invitational, socially-capacitating work that opens into vital forms of uncommon sense-making. While it’s a wily hulk of a proposition, this dissertation embarks from a conviction that docupoetry has an important social role to play here in the tumult of the now: the public must be re-founded (over and over again, if necessary) and joint interests and lines of solidarity, revealed and fortified. Considered together, the poetry collections in this corpus offer a set of models for how documentary poetry might instigate more active forms of political engagement and compel readers beyond the space of the book and into the terrain of emplaced social struggle.