Undocumentary Poetics elucidates how poets from across the Americas use poetry’s form to interrogate the bounded nature of form itself, including the forms of the poem, the canon, the nation, and of recounting and knowing history. This project challenges the writing of a hemispheric canon of American poetry that, by largely overlooking women and non-binary poets, especially and including those of color, continues to leave dominant, white hetero-patriarchal forms intact—despite the hemispheric framework’s inherent potential to uncover minor literary networks across borders and destabilize those deep-rooted systems of control. The contemporary poetry I examine confronts those systemic erasures by tackling the constraints of genre and form.

The project’s focus on form and historical power brings it into conversation with recent discussions of historical and documentary poetry. The term “documentary” has been applied to a range of poems, from lyrics documenting personal experience to mixed-media experimental writing that pushes on the genre-categories of documentary and poetry. I ask how poetry itself can be “documentary.” How do poems become “documents” that substantiate official or State versions of culture and history? Do poetry’s canons, histories, and formal and generic expectations also play this documentary role? I propose that undocumentary poetry engages in and undermines poetic documentation in multiple senses. On the one hand, the poems I analyze make visible events, lived realities, or histories that are hidden within ‘official’ versions of history and culture, and they also make visible the forms that have enabled and perpetuated such erasures. On the other, the poems undermine the boundaries of that documentation, ultimately making even themselves provisional. I highlight the ways that poetry’s condensation of forms and language, and its resulting paradoxes and ambiguities, specifically enables such undocumentation. Rather than creating a new category or form of poetry with Undocumentary Poetics, I observe undocumentary poetics as a current within contemporary poetics, one that is invested in imagining a world with more nuanced and fluid, and less rigid, forms. It is a poetry that “inhabits contradiction” as M. NourbeSe Philip put it, “unraveling old systems of control and domination,” without creating new ones.