Multidirektionale Assemblage

Multidirectional Assemblage: Boris Khersonskii’s Family Archive Boris Khersonskii’s most acclaimed and translated volume of poetry Semeinyi arkhiv [Family Archive] (2003/2006) consists of semi-fictional miniatures narrating the sufferings of the members of a Southwest-Ukrainian Jewish Family in the short 20th century. The speaker’s laconic tone invites less of a trauma-studies approach to the Stalinist Great Terror and the Shoah than a media-sensitive update of the formalist focus on material devices and the determination of meaning from below. This contribution proposes to read Family Archive as an assemblage of imagined material media (photographs, letters, auction objects) which trace multidirectional vectors of commemoration. It proposes the notion of directionality for resolving the undecidability of referential and a-referential readings of quasi-documentary poetry.

You Cannot Take War Out of the Soldier

This article is an experimentation in poetry on the topic of combat and killing derived from interview data. Such writing is called many things, but I named it documentary poetry which, regardless of its origins, is a manifestation of the indeterminacy and autonomy of art. I have taken the words of Finnish military cadets, poetic in themselves, and exhausted the possibilities of translation by abandoning accuracy for the sake of sensual precision. The zealless yet unsettling depictions of combat are reassembled in poems troubling the mystique and exceptionalism of the military while pointing to the fragility of the military itself.

الشعر الوثائقي: دراسة لقصيدة امريكية “احدهم فجر امريكة”

The modern age is prolific of literary movements and literary genres. Documentary poetry, which can be considered a new genre, combines both primary source material, such as war, political events, terrorism, people in detention and many other events with poetry. Amiri Baraka is a contemporary American poet whose poem "Somebody Blew up America" belongs to this genre. It records the September 11 blowing up of the Trade Centre from a perspective different from what the American propaganda and mass media tell the world. The recent paper attempts to shed light on Amiri Baraka's attitude towards this event, the reasons behind it, the real terrorists and the intentions behind this terrorist event according to this poem. The poet argues that the American government knew beforehand that the Trade Centre was going to be blown up and they took no action to prevent the catastrophe and, in this sense, they were partners in the crime. Furthermore, he accuses the Americans of blowing up the trade centre.The paper is divided into three sections and a conclusion. Section One is Introductory; it sheds light on documentary poetry, its characteristic features and practitioners. Section Two is a biographical note of Amiri Baraka paying special attention to his attitude to American politics based on domination, persecution and genocide. Section Three gives a detailed analysis of "Somebody Blew up America" as a documentary poem recording the September 11 blowing up of the Trade Centre with the aim of finding a pretext to invade other countries. The paper concludes that this event happened according to a well-made plan in cooperation with the American government and the CIA as partners.

Unknown Roads (poem)

Solidarity researcher and artist Ninette Rothmüller is a visiting scholar from Germany at Smith College, Massachusetts. With a background in Cultural Studies, Social Work and Interdisciplinary Arts, her practice-led and theoretical work is concerned with who humans are to, and with, each other under various circumstances, such as severe crisis. Her autobiographical documentary poetry reflects experiences of forced immobility and displacement across borders and languages.

Fusing an Alloy

This chapter charts the formation of the documentary poetry tradition in the U.S. through a consideration of Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead. It demonstrates how Rukeyser pushed the boundaries of genre and media to imagine modes of expression that resisted traditional notions of liberal subjectivity. Drawing on multiple valences of the term alloy, the chapter argues that Rukeyser imagined documentary writing as a complex fusing of elements that speculates on the ontology of the poem itself. The chapter begins with an account of the historical, definitional, and theoretical concerns that have shaped documentary poetry. The chapter’s subsequent analyses of The Book of the Dead consider the impact of industry on subject formation: demonstrating how Rukeyser experimented with literary and visual genres, as well as poetic tropes and themes, to devise alternate modalities of personhood that interface the human with the materials of history and industry. The chapter concludes by showing how Rukeyser’s plans to adapt The Book of the Dead into a documentary film demonstrate a combination of formal and technical resources that illuminate new principles of composition.

Towards a cultural geopolitics: on the making of a documentary-poetry film about a post-conflict place

Made in collaboration with an independent filmmaker and two poets, the documentary-poetry film Bridges <Bosnia 20> presents life in post-conflict Bosnia-Herzegovina, and delivers a clear message: the war in Bosnia is not yet firmly located in the past. Shot through a computer screen, Bridges <Bosnia 20> forces the viewer to witness the war in Bosnia and its aftermath via-the-gaze of an unknown spectator, sitting on an Apple Mac laptop. Through this modern technological distancing, we re-present here images of war in a digital age, question how war is usually packaged and represented on television, and in turn interrogate, through poetry, how war is traditionally remembered and memorialised. In so doing, Bridges <Bosnia 20> leads us to a conclusion, in Srebrenica, in 2015: in order to invest in the possibility of a just future after conflict, it is necessary to acknowledge the unthinkable realities to which traumatic experience bears witness. Watch the film Bridges <Bosnia 20> here and visit the Bridges <Bosnia 20> website for more information