Author: fuzzybrain

Documentary poetics rose out of Modernist approaches to poetry and the act of “making it new,” but the form didn’t fully manifest itself until the 1990s-2000s, where the emergence of new technological advancements changed our society’s relationship to the nature of a rapidly expanding news cycle (Leong 5). The turnover of current events into archived historical events increased in an unprecedented manner, and the impact of these moments was felt by more people than ever before, as the emergence of new technology provided extensive additions to the ways in which media, news, and societally impacting moments were consumed. But, understanding documentation processes also includes how these moments are narrated by the bureaucracies and institutions who hold control over the news cycle itself. As a result of the new state of technological advancements, the social circles of those impacted simultaneously expanded to include more people, but became shallower in their meaning within people’s lives.

Modernism theorist Zygmunt Bauman writes that this “disintegration of the social network,” or the expansion and devaluation of the news cycle, is a symptom of what he coins as “liquid modernity” (Bauman 14). Bauman defines liquid modernity as “the falling apart, the friability, the brittleness, the transience, the until-further-noticeness of human bonds and networks” (14), where the value of the human, social moment is lost to the constant march of the “next new thing” the present moment is made to engage with. 

The relationship between cultural memory and the news cycle then lies in the lasting representations of people’s lives. Documentary scholar Maurizio Ferraris signifies the social aspect of documentary work as its primary driver of meaning-making in a text, regardless of the text being intrinsically artistic, strictly archival, or existing in the liminal plane between the two. Ferraris augments Jacques Derrida’s claim of “nothing existing outside of the text” by claiming that, rather, nothing social exists outside of the text (Leong 4). Poetry scholar Michael Leong corroborates Ferraris’ claim, stating “Social life, according to this view, depends upon – and is mediated by – documentation” (Leong 4). Thus, in the ever-evolving news cycle that values the next great upset over lasting advocacy and change, documenting marginalized lives has become an act of resistance to their “social deaths,” (Leong 4) or public erasure. Leong then understands documentary poetry as an extension or critique of history as an engagement with “the texture of social reality” (7). Documents that support, or undermine, cultural memory can then be reordered and redefined by documentary poetry, as the form relies on both individual and collective identities to frame a given event’s place in its historical moment. Activated through the understanding that bureaucratic documentation alters the cultural memory of an event, documentary poetics functions as a counter-hegemonic practice that validates the experiences of marginalized groups within the social network.

Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Modernity. Polity Press, 2000.

Leong, Michael. Contested Records: The Turn to Documents in Contemporary North American Poetry. University of Iowa Press, 2020.

In 1993, the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to Toni Morrison, whose “novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, [gave] life to an essential aspect of American reality” (The Nobel Prize in Literature). In her acceptance speech, Morrison frames language and writing through a fable of a blind woman being presented with a bird by a group of young strangers, who ask her if she believes the bird to be dead or alive. Morrison understands the fable through the woman as “practiced writer” and the bird as language itself. She thinks of dead language similarly to the prone body of a frail bird, “certainly imperiled and salvageable only by an effort of will” (Morrison 2). Only when the young strangers express belief in language and narrative as alive and radical, “creating us at the very moment it is being created” (7), does the blind woman say: 

“Finally,” she says, “I trust you now. I trust you with the bird that is not in your hands because you have truly caught it. Look. How lovely it is, this thing we have done – together” (7). 

“This thing we have done – together” encapsulates the communal effort to preserve the move toward a productive use of language in changing the trajectory of history, and of recognizing the systematic use of language that allows the transpiration of stagnant, oppressive perspectives. Morrison questions the Tower of Babel itself, stating that “the weight of many languages precipitated the tower’s failed architecture,” and one monolithic language would have saved the building and heaven could have been reached. Morrison reflects back to the blind woman, asking “Whose heaven? […] And what kind?” (4). The paradise that Babbel would have brought was one version of paradise for one group of people, and the dead languages left in its wake would still linger in the rubble of the fall. Their lingering presence still persists in the present moment, where statist systems of language that protect the interests of oppressors and polices the power of the oppressed must be “rejected, altered, and exposed” (3) in order for language to become generative and alive once again. 

Beloved’s publication and themes of lingering trauma related to American systems were highly influential to Morrison’s reception of the Nobel Prize, and in the novel she herself contributes to the resurrection of a dead language in the resurrection of Beloved herself. Beloved is a ghost of a child killed in a desperate act of mercy, but she also encompasses the trauma of America’s history of slavery and racism that lingers just the same as systems continuing to effect because they have not been rejected, altered, and exposed. Only then can those systems of language and history be broken, and only then can Beloved and everything she represents be freed from the purgatory she has risen from.          

At the end of the fable, the blind woman only trusts the young strangers with the bird, or language, when they assert they understand its ever changing nature and how they must question its meaning in order to take care of it. Whether it be language and the purpose of its uses or the ghost of a dead child, Morrison uses the power of narrative and confrontation to change the ways in which we operate within our surrounding systems.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               

 

Morrison, Toni. “Nobel Lecture.” Nobel Prize for Literature, 7 December 1993, Stockholm, Sweden, Speech. https://www.nobelprize.org/mediaplayer/?id=1502 (Transcript: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1993/morrison/lecture/) 

The Nobel Prize in Literature 1993. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Prize Outreach. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1993/summary/

I. Secondary/Theoretical Works

Ehlers, Sarah. “Introduction” and “I. Documentary.” Left of Poetry: Depression America and the Formation of Modern Poetics. The University of North Carolina Press, 2020.

Evans, Olivia Milroy. “Ekphrasis as Evidence: Forensic Rhetoric in Contemporary Documentary Poetry.” Word & Image (London. 1985), vol. 37, no. 2, 2021, pp. 142–51, https://doi.org/10.1080/02666286.2020.1866969. 

Leong, Michael. Contested Records: The Turn to Documents in Contemporary North American Poetry. University of Iowa Press, 2020.

Michaels, Walter Benn. “Formal Feelings.” The Beauty of a Social Problem, University of Chicago Press, 2015, https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226210438.003.0001. 

Nelson, Maggie. “All That Is the Case: Some Thoughts on Fact in Nonfiction and Documentary Poetry.” Lit from Within, 1st ed., Ohio University Press, 2011, pp. 154-.

II. Primary Sources

Jess, Tyehimba. Olio. First edition., Wave Books, 2016.

Nelson, Maggie. Jane: A Murder. Soft Skull, 2016. 

Osman, Jena. Public Figures. 1st ed., Wesleyan University Press, 2012.

Smith, Patricia. Blood Dazzler: Poems. Coffee House Press, 2008.

Wright, C. D., and Deborah Luster. One Big Self: An Investigation. Copper Canyon Press, 2007.

III. Academic Journal

Word & Image. Taylor & Francis., est. 1985. (Survey 2023)

IV. Keywords

documentary, poetics, genre, subversion, representation

V. Initial Inquiry Framework

I’ve admittedly been struggling to decide on a topic for my thesis, as there is so much that interests me, and so much that I could satisfyingly write about. The original topic I thought of just had too many answered questions, and would not produce an original or innovative final paper. So, I started thinking about what I wished I could’ve written more about in past classes, and I began reflecting on a class I took my first year of college, U.S. modernist poetry. I enjoyed this class so much because as a songwriter I’m interested in ways to use the poetic form and what can be conveyed through existing structures. In the class we read Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead, a documentary poetry collection about a West Virginian mining company’s deadly conditions. Modernist forms of poetry have always been my favorite because they push the boundaries of the genre, and this was no exception. Using poetry to both represent and expand upon existing images and events interests me because of the layers poetry must use to incite meaning-making. Documentary poetics that deal with crime are particularly demonstrative of this idea, as both the event and the poetry itself hide aspects of the whole that can only be uncovered through analysis of context and genre formation. Hopefully through an exploration of this genre I can solidify some of these ideas about the form, function, and how real-life events and poetics converge through the inner workings of both.

 

Update: 

In preparing the Updated Reading List for my projected thesis, I tried to hone in on specific themes I want to explore in my reading of documentary poetics. The first collection I knew I wanted to read was Jane: A Murder by Maggie Nelson, about the murder of her aunt. From there, two areas of thought emerged in the kinds of poetry I want to read: poetry about identity and poetry about traumatic events. Nelson’s work encapsulates both. From there I chose Blood Dazzler by Patricia Smith about the events and aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and One Big Self by C.D. Wright, which explores the Louisiana Prison Systems through poetry informed by interview. These two collections explore trauma and emotional expression through documentary poetics, but the following two collections merge this idea with concepts of identity and the self. Olio by Jess Tyehimba explores the lives of unrecorded African American performers through the events of the Civil War up to World War I, and Public Figures by Jena Osman that aims to express the perspective of the eyes of statues of public figures. I hope by reading these 5 poetry collections I’ll form an avenue for which my thesis can continue to head toward with a clear purpose in topic and theme.

In Morrison’s novel, the titular character Beloved shines. “That’s how Beloved looked – gilded and shining” (Morrison 76), and though Paul D expressed his wariness towards the mysterious young woman that shows up on the doorstep, the two women of 124, Sethe and her daughter Denver, immediately take it upon themselves to become caretakers in ways they’ve never been before. The distinction between humanness and motherhood continually weaves through the timelines and characters of this novel, but in the beginning of the novel, Sethe’s past trauma and its relation to Denver and Beloved walks the dividing line. Beloved is a thing almost entirely other; constantly referred to by her newness and confusing presence, after a month of staying with Sethe, they still had not “gotten used to her gravelly voice, and the song that seemed to lie in it,” “for just outside music it lay” (72) and Sethe, Denver, and Paul D remain enclosed in a vicinity outside of her foreign presence. Denver, entranced by her newness, cares for her as if she were Beloved’s mother, but Beloved is only satisfied when hearing stories of Sethe’s past. 

Sethe was amazed at Beloved’s desire to hear the stories “because every mention of her past life hurt. Everything in it was painful or lost…Perhaps it was Beloved’s distance from the events itself, or her thirst for hearing it – in any case it was an unexpected pleasure” (69). At this point in the novel, Sethe has not questioned if Beloved is connected to her now departed child, but telling Beloved these stories of her past at Sweet Home enacts a caretaking she deliberately avoids with Denver, as the memories are too painful if the distance does not exist between them. Beloved exists in the “gleaming, powerful world” of Sethe’s memory that is “made more so by Denver’s absence from it” (79). Sethe’s “remembrance of glittering headstone” (63), marked only by the name Beloved, establishes Beloved’s belonging inside this past life, as they both shimmer in the light of remembrance, and remembrance is how Beloved asks to be cared for. Though Denver is Sethe’s only daughter still alive, she cannot exist inside the world of memory because she exists in the present moment, and cannot be cared for in this way. Sethe then divides Denver and Beloved through remembrance, or deliberate avoidance, as an act of motherhood.

Alfred Hitchcock was an unusual filmmaker in that he storyboarded the vision of his musical narrative just as he mapped out the plot and cinematography for all his films. Though not trained with any musical education, Hitchcock gradually became more interested in the narrative effects of the musical material in his films, and continued throughout his career to modernize his approach in incorporating it into the larger context of the mise-en-scene (Sullivan Maestros). The use of popular song in Rear Window was one of the most effective and influential filmic designs of musical diegesis Hitchcock implemented into the larger spectrum of the Hollywood canon. Though Rear Window had an official composer in Franz Waxman who contributed the opening credits score and main musical ideas and motifs, he was additionally accompanied by a range of other songwriters and pieces across genres including orchestral, ballet, jazz improvisation, and names such as Leonard Bernstein, Richard Rodgers, and Felix Mendelssohn (Sullivan 170). Hitchcock pioneered popular song as incidental music in the Hollywood thriller, most notably in the film Dial M for Murder, where an excerpt from Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde underscores the realization of the crime the murderer has committed  in the bathroom mirror (Sullivan Maestros). The use of the Tristan chord specifically is crucial in understanding the murderer’s internal dialogue in the scene, as musically the Tristan chord is known for being ambiguous across key designations and tonal contexts. Its use portrays the ambiguity of not only the murderer’s internal feelings concerning the action, but the implications of the action itself. Subsequently in Rear Window, Hitchcock garners the same effect using a blend of pre-composed and score material to impose upon the film a complicated portrayal of authenticity and beauty. 

Though other songs are integrated into the largely diegetic score, Waxman’s thematic musical motives are what ground the intertwined narratological elements. Often, the diegetic pre-composed songs or pieces will have elements of Waxman’s motives woven into them to create a singular musical idea that blurs the intended undertone Hitchcock designs for each character. The concepts of beauty and authenticity then come through in how these popular songs engage with Waxman’s musical material, and what plays at the center of it all.

Lisa’s theme is the most important out of all of Waxman’s imposed material, as it exists inside of Hitchcock’s grander musical narrative as well as eventually becoming the end result of the piece the composer writes throughout the film. When the musical theme “Lisa” is first introduced, Leonard Bernstein’s “Fancy Free” plays from the composers radio as he begins to write what will become the “Lisa” theme, which is the music Lisa herself is continually enchanted by, and later is what saves Ms. Lonelyheart’s life. This is the first instance of “simultaneous musical layers” (Sullivan 172), where the musical theme “Lisa” acts as nucleus to the surrounding musical drama. The idea of the authentic nucleus goes back to Walter Benjamin, and the art object as an authentic center with its contexts and outside aesthetic ideas surrounding it. The authentic is then measured through an object’s aura, or the distance between audience and art object (Benjamin 714), with consideration of the internal authentic center and its surrounding contexts performed by audience perception. This is not unlike Lisa’s role in the film, where she is the authentic center to Jeff’s constant aesthetic presumptions. Through the dichotomous musical process of layering pre-composed and thematic musical material, and the composition of Lisa’s theme itself within the film itself, the mise-en-scene then incorporates a sonic representation of the character transformations of aesthetic ideas imposed by Jeff into solid realities. Lisa herself is one of these ideas, and the process of her theme’s composition by the composer reflects her transformation into a real person through Jeff’s eyes.  

Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” 1936.

Sullivan, Jack. “Maestros of Suspense: Music in the Films of Alfred Hitchcock.” YouTube, uploaded by Simply Charly, 20 November 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGv4SqV5BSQ. 

Sullivan, Jack. “rear window: the redemptive power of popular music.” Hitchcock’s Music. 1st ed., Yale University Press, 2006, pg. 169-182.  https://doi.org/10.12987/9780300134667.

Light and Heat as Closeness in Rear Window

The introduction of protagonist L.B. Jeffries in the opening sequence of Rear Window correlates his proximity to the thermometer on his apartment wall with the implication of inescapable heat in a New York summer, and his inescapable position as a voyeur to the intricacies of his neighbors’ lives. The light from his window the first morning shown illuminates the sweat forming on his brow, and the restlessness he experiences sedentary in his cast. The thermometer in this scene is shown well above 90° but at the end of the film, the thermometer is shown around 70°, not only to show the passage of time through the summer, but the change in Jeffries’ mentality regarding the stagnancy of his life. In the beginning of the film, he felt trapped in his relationship with Lisa Fremont because of her perceived perfection and his stunted position as a traveling photographer. Though his body is still confined to the wheelchair at the end of the film, these things he previously believed to be perfect, or even real, no longer constrain him. Shown through Hitcock’s use of light and heat, the evolution of Jeffries’ character comes through his observation of what’s before him, and the illuminated reality underneath it all.

Because of the New York summer heat, most of the apartments Jeffries watches have their windows open at one point or another, and through these openings Jeffries becomes an audience to their lives. Walter Benjamin describes this phenomenon in the realm of film theory through the concept of the aura, or the contexts and histories that reside in the distance between two objects, defining one of them in the process. In film, the distance between actor and audience is immeasurable, so aura dissipates in the process (Benjamin 720). For Jeffries, he doesn’t recognize the lack of aura in his own observations as an audience to their lives, thus Hitchcock creates a suspended distance that closes through the use of light. In Ms. Lonelyheart’s apartment, lit candles and lamps are gradually introduced throughout the film as more of her life is revealed, and Ms. Torso’s dimmed business affairs construe her image to Jeffries, but her true self is shown when she dances alone in the light of day, or the morning her husband comes home from the army. In the confrontation between Thorwald and Jeffries, Jeffries himself uses his camera bulb to create light and heat, illuminating the reality of Thorwald’s aura and his true murderous nature. Lisa’s role grounds Jeffries’ observations in reality through not only her judicious nature, but in her constantly illuminating Jeffries space by lighting candles or turning on lamps. Reality then emerges through a combination of the surveillance he issues on his neighbors throughout the film and the ways in which light conveys the reality of their lives.