David and Mary Hunting Graduate Fellow
About
“Towards a Disobedient Poetics: The Generative Practices of Contemporary Documentary Poets of Color”
How do poets reckon with the past? What’s at stake when we teach poems that converse with “difficult” historical legacies? My dissertation engages these questions by studying the work of contemporary poet-educators who write about transnational American histories. Specifically, I focus on North American documentary poets of color who incorporate into their poetry and teaching multimodal historical material such as maps, photographs, grammar textbooks, cartographic coordinates, and legal testimony. Through close readings, archival visits, and interviews, I explore how such poets push aesthetic, syntactical, and pedagogical possibilities for writers of color past the limiting discourses of “authenticity” and “diversity.” Such poets make space for the visually opaque, the somatic, the environmental, the humorous, and the linguistically experimental as necessary and varied methods of documentary poetic innovation. In doing so, these poets avoid reducing poetry to a form of protest. Instead, they encourage a multi-faceted framework of documentary poetics as a poetics of play, proximity, materiality, and sensory intimacy, in addition to a poetics of explicit political resistance against institutional and historic violence. I explore how the works of such poets shape our collective engagements with cultural memory, and how their poetic strategies may lead to new possibilities for reading, teaching, and writing alongside historical texts.
Carlina Duan is a Ph.D. Candidate in English and Education.
