Revivifying Attention: Reading Contemporary A/PIA Documentary Poetry

Abstract

How do poets reckon with the past? What’s at stake when we read poems that converse with “difficult” historical legacies? Situated at the intersection of literary studies, history, Asian American studies, and creative writing pedagogy, Revivifying Attention engages these questions by studying the works of three contemporary A/PIA documentary poets—Craig Santos Perez, Divya Victor, and Paisley Rekdal—who write about transnational histories. Such poets, working within the documentary poetic mode, incorporate varying multimodal materials within their poems, including maps, soundscapes, letters, geographic coordinates, digital video installations, and other documental forms. Scholarship on documentary poetry attends to definitions of the genre and its important connections to reparative archival work, yet few studies approach the documentary poet as reader or recognize the different modes of reading opened up by the documentary poem. Revivifying Attention addresses this gap by exploring how Perez, Victor, and Rekdal read archival materials related to different histories and model additional possibilities for readers to engage with such materials and histories. I argue that these modes of reading enable A/PIA documentary poets to negotiate overlapping political, social, and cultural demands placed upon their historicizing work, including pressures to transparently uncover hidden histories, bear witness to violent historic events through first-person testimonies, represent histories related to their own subject position, and produce linear, one-note accounts of a historic time period.

Drawing on close readings, interviews, and archival research, each of my chapters explores a different reading mode opened up by A/PIA poets working within the documentary: reoriented reading in Craig Santos Perez’s from unincorporated territory series (2008-2023), which modulates distances between readers and poetic subjects through reorientations of archival source material, thus countering pressures to produce transparent representations of cultural community; “effortful” reading in Divya Victor’s CURB (2021), which reconfigures stances of poetic witness, challenging assumed proximities and misplaced empathies; and prismatic reading in Paisley Rekdal’s West: A Translation (2023), which multiplies and refracts voices, identities, and timelines in a historical archive, moving away from linear representations of chronology.

By studying how these three contemporary A/PIA poets negotiate documentary forms, I suggest that these poets’ modes of reading poetry do not seek to monumentalize history by bearing witness, as early twentieth-century models of poetry of witness did, nor do they seek to repair the fissures of a historic archive. Rather, these writers use documentary poetry to explore somatic, material, spatial, and sensorial textures of historical events. In doing so, they offer new forms of attention that reroute our understandings of a documentary poem, moving away from viewing the poem as a simple commemoration of what happened and moving toward multiple understandings of our ethical relations to history and the readerly labor involved in engaging with historical narratives.