I love headlines and revealing quotes and surprising statistics. Since the early 1990s, I’ve worked in most every form of the news, from writing newspaper columns to book length non-fiction, magazine features, daily breaking newspaper stories, and radio. Lately I’ve become fascinated with a genre that’s at the intersection of poetry and journalism, known as documentary poetry. Its hallmarks are using techniques like interviews, archival material, and official documents to create news in verse.
This kind of "poet’s report" has been around for ages and serves as a kind of historical map of our times. I started reading everything by Muriel Rukeyser, whose 1938 "The Book of The Dead" poem chronicled, and served as an investigative piece into a mine disaster in West Virginia. In a time of news fatigue, maybe this is a way to hear or read the news in a new way. And why not create a TTBOOK show about it.
So we chose two modern documentary poets, with the help of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, and asked them to write original poems for this episode. You’ll hear Philip Metres as well as the subject of his poem, Suncere Ali Shakur, talk about how "The Gospel of Suncere Ali Shakur" came to being. And Kaia Sand tells us through "This is How I Drew You" about life on the streets in Portland. We end with poet Camille Dungy who writes her poems about everyday life, and hear a little bit from the godmother of docupoetry herself, Muriel Rukesyer. Maybe this episode will inspire you to find other poets who cover climate change, war, politics, or, like Dungy, the ecology of her backyard garden.
– Shannon