Documentary Poetics: A Bridge Between the Real and the Imaginative

Most people know the term “documentary” through its application to film. Documentary filmmakers take interviews, photographs, news stories, and film footage and splice them together to give a creative slant on real events. Poetry, too, has experimented with documentary techniques to graft the real onto the imaginative. At Pulley Press, this type of collage work is pivotal to our approach to the poetic process.

In 1938, Muriel Rukeyser published The Book of the Dead, a collection that progressed through the Hawk’s Nest Tunnel Disaster in West Virginia, one of the worst industrial catastrophes in American History. In 2014, West Virginia Press reissued the book with a beautiful introduction by contemporary writer Catherine Venable Moore. (For more context, see the Georgia Review’s review here.)

Rukeyser’s work has surged in popularity recently as contemporary American poets interweave documentary materials into imaginative accounts, portraying new versions of real events through their art. In his 2017 Pulitzer Prize winning book, Olio, Tyehimba Jess melds sonnet and sections of narration with the true stories of African American performers from the pre-Civil War era to World War I, shining light on historically unrecorded voices. 

Using this style presents its benefits as well as its challenges. Many poets have struggled to walk the thin ethical line between extracting personal accounts and representing cultural moments. C.D. Wright’s  One Big Self: an Investigation relied upon the first hand accounts of inmates in the Louisiana Prison System, and Patricia Smith’s Blood Dazzler “gave voice to the thirty-four nursing home residents who drowned in St. Bernard Parish” during Hurricane Katrina (Coffee House Press). 

At Pulley Press, we believe that documentary poetry is less about excavation, and more about collaboration. By interviewing the people who have actually experienced the events, the poet works with them to create poems. The “Pulley,” is a process that includes the active participation of those who have borne witness to what has happened in particular places. This leads us to create finished books that are engaged and rooted in locality. The first collection published using the “Pulley'' technique was Ricardo Ruiz’s 2022 book, We Had Our Reasons, which is now available for purchase and we are looking forward to a new book using the pulley from Alabama native, Salaam Green.

–Ailis Murray