2025-2026 Academic Catalog

Aug 14, 2025

2025-2026 Academic Catalog

CRW 220 - Documentary Poetics: Against Forgetting

In this hands-on Problems of Practice (PoP) class, students will conduct in-depth archival research at the American Antiquarian Society (AAS) and produce a research-based chapbook of documentary poetics. Joseph Harrington defines documentary poetics as writing that: “(1) contains quotations from or reproductions of documents or statements not produced by the poet and (2) relates historical narratives, whether macro or micro, human or natural.” Unlike confessional poetry, centered on the self, documentary poetics turns outward, toward the other; what ethical questions and thorns emerge from this orientation? How can the poet avoid the pitfall of othering or speaking for the other? We will look carefully at how poets have written into violence and disaster in what Carolyn Forché termed “poetry of witness.” We will interrogate “history” and “the archive” as productive and problematic sites of knowledge production. What is left out of the archive and how do we write into these silences? How do we write what has already been forgotten?

Prerequisites: Any 100-level or higher ENG or CRW course.

Course Designation/Attribute: DI, HP, POP

Anticipated Terms Offered: Biannually