This generative workshop offers students at all levels the chance to hone their writing skills and explore poetry’s formal possibilities while delving into the expansive field of documentary poetics: making literary art in and of experience as shaped by the efforts to perceive and record. What do we notice and what do we make of it? What matters to us and why? The act of documenting is always creative and critical, based on our lived value systems. We will also investigate how poets use documents and other means to reframe and re-contextualize subjects often considered outside the scope of poetry. Documentary film, photography, and visual art will point toward other nontraditional approaches to archival and living material, and will provide a foundation for the ethics of documental art. Students will be writing and researching topics of their choice throughout the semester to create a chapbook-length work of documentary poetry.LITPA 200 courses introduce students to the study of literature or the performing arts, emphasizing analysis of both particular works and of the range of genres, periods and traditions. Frequent reading and writing assignments will be made.

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