'Daily I sit | with the Language': Solmaz Sharif's and Philip Metres's Documentary Poetics of War. (18th March 2021)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Anderson, Lauryn
• Is Part Of: Cambridge quarterly. Volume 49:Number 4(2020)
• Page Start: 372
• Page End: 395
• Publication Date: 2021-03-18
• Subjects: Literature -- History and criticism -- Periodicals; Literature -- Periodicals; 809
• DOI: 10.1093/camqtly/bfaa032
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0008-199X

Abstract

Abstract: The Cambridge Quarterly endows a prize for the dissertation gaining the highest mark in the Cambridge University final examination in English . The article printed here is the Prize Essay for 2020 The documentary poem is a genre increasingly associated with providing a 'second life' for voices excluded from or misrepresented in official documents. Solmaz Sharif and Philip Metres enact such a poetic extension of archival memory; through scarred and redacted textual bodies, their poetry re-examines documents relating to recent US military operations, reflecting the insidious ways through which 'truth' is rendered a casualty in the official discourses of war. In these wounded texts, the reader is subsequently faced with a position of failed witnessing. This dissertation proposes that an affective and self-aware position of 'with-ness' must be taken in response, which makes no claim to completeness or authority. By validating personal acts of 'with-ness' rather than giving any stamp of authority to an official record, such poetry therefore constitutes an alternative archive. This, however, must be one that mirrors the act of 'with-nessing', continuously adopting a self-reflective and interrogative stance.