Shakeout Poetics: Documentary Poetry from Men of Fact to Data Bodies

Poets in North America have frequently used forms of borrowing and appropriation during the first two decades of the twenty-first century. The most prominent of these interrelated modes of poetic production, documentary poetry, has often been characterized as a "boom." Although documentary poetry has been variously categorized and named, I argue that because documentary forms index global and archival crises they are best understood as a crisis poetics. In this "shakeout poetics," the archive, and its epistemological foundations, is itself plunged into crisis. "Shakeout" combines economic and aesthetic registers into the process by which poets make documentary poems during times of amplified economic precarity, by sifting through evidence, borrowing from and rearranging source texts, "shaking out" the archive for creative reuse. The article uses Muriel Rukeyser's The Book of the Dead (1938) and Solmaz Sharif's Look (2016) to show how documentary poetry reorients its archival and representational practices from the Great Depression to the twenty-first century's multiple crises, from the War on Terror to the global financial crisis. Then, two documentary case studies, Mark Nowak's Coal Mountain Elementary (2009) and Daniel Borzutzky's In the Murmurs of the Rotten Carcass Economy (2015), highlight the continuum of documentary poetries. Whereas Nowak's text is made entirely of source texts, Borzutzky meditates on how to document in the absence of archival evidence. In Borzutzky's writing, the migrant and refugee crises, where human beings can disappear without a trace, underscore the limits of documentary practice and, paradoxically, its urgency.