Instructor: Garza | TuTh 9:30 AM – 10:50 AM
Docupoetics & The Archive: History, Curation, and Accumulation as Storytelling
Historical author Sara Sheridan says that “Without archives many stories of real people would be lost, and along with those stories, vital clues that allow us to reflect and interpret our lives today.” Buried within both the Archive (big A) and the archive (little a) are memories, remnants, microcosms of real life, real people, real stories that have the ability to distort and condense time and place. In this class, we will study contemporary poetic texts that utilize hybridity, curation and accumulation, docupoetics, and archival techniques to communicate personal and collective histories. In so doing, we will learn and put to practice various techniques we learn from authors of archival poetics, expanding our thought processes of ethics and narrative privilege when it comes to who exactly gets to archive a time. We’ll ask ourselves how to tell a story through accumulation; we’ll excavate the overlaps and divergences of the big and little Archives; we’ll create a community in which to practice personal excavation and build new narratives on our own terms; we’ll become docupoetic writers ourselves by working on our own archives throughout the semester. Possible poets for us to learn from include: Jasminne Mendez, Don Mee Choi, Alison C. Rollins, Layli Long Soldier, Khal Torabully, Anthony Cody, Annie Wenstrup, and Monica Ong.