Paisley Rekdal’s hands-on class is designed to help you explore the very special challenges poets face when writing documentary poetry. Whether you are expressing individual occurrences or a series of events, this class will focus primarily on developing new techniques and exercises for the creation of a longer series of compelling poems.

What is a documentary poetics, and how can a poem suggest, if not actually become, a collection of “facts”? How might a poem, or a series of poems, become spaces that respond to traumatic events? Who gets to document, who is documented, and what are the formal (and ethical) issues inherent to documentary poetics? This class will give you a hands-on approach to these issues and more while helping you create poems that explore the ever-changing field of documentary poetry. Students will read and respond to assigned poems, read mini lectures online as to the evolving history of documentary poetics, as well as write their own poems for classroom comment; there will be a one-on-one Skype session with the instructor after the class. This is a class for those interested in engaging with longer, perhaps research-based material and subject matters, or for those interested in working on a poetic series.