"Where do we see it from": Revising Documentary Perspective in Adrienne Rich's "An Atlas of the Difficult World"

Abstract:Critics have traditionally traced the lineage of contemporary documentary poetry from leftist documentarians of the 1930s to the present through experimental movements. However, the current form of documentary poetry responds to a second line of aesthetic influence from queer and feminist women poets who attended to issues of positionality. This article will consider the role of Adrienne Rich's 1991 long poem "An Atlas of the Difficult World" in translating feminist concerns around positionality to documentary poetry. Rich does so by developing an auto-cartographic poetic process that centers the self in the ecological world. Rich uses the process of mapping to demonstrate the ability of poetry to extend from the self into a feminist reclamation and reimagination of the ecological world. Consideration of "An Atlas of the Difficult World" as a documentary project illustrates how Rich anticipated and provided a model for contemporary ethical debates in documentary poetics.