Archival Assemblages: Conceptualism and Documentary Poetics in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

n a note on “The Book of the Dead,” Muriel Rukeyser makes a claim that continues to guide contemporary documentary poets: “Poetry can extend the document.”1 But what does it mean for a poem to extend a document? The recent surge in critical work on documentary poetics elucidates the relationship between researchbased poems and their documents. Joseph Harrington has argued that the relationship between poems and documents works differently for documentary and conceptual poets: “documentary poetry makes use of sources rather than simply reproducing them: it combines, paraphrases, and contextualizes them.”2 Harrington’s language suggests that conceptual poets are not doing much to “extend” their documents: Kenneth Goldsmith’s Day reproduces a single issue of the New York Times without changing the text at all. Martin Earl, synthesizing the perspectives from a flurry of posts between 2007 and 2011 on the Poetry Foundation and Kenyon Review blogs about the relationship between documentary and conceptual poetics, argues that conceptual and documentary