Poetry of Radical Regimes of Truth: Toward a Redefinition of the Concept of Documentary Poetry

• In Event: Slavic Documentary Poetry

Abstract

In recent decades, numerous studies on documentary poetry have emerged across the United States, Britain, Russia, and beyond. Yet critical and academic discussions of this phenomenon reveal significant definitional challenges. The term "documentary poetry" encompasses diverse works: poetry based on actual documents, compositions derived from interviews (showcasing subjective perspectives rather than "objective facts"), and first-person accounts of real events resembling reportage. Critics categorize certain poems as documentary when they either claim to depict "what is really there" or, conversely, demonstrate how documents and stereotypes obstruct access to "objective reality.”

I argue that scholars writing about documentary poetry are intuitively correct in their identification of a coherent phenomenon, but that this body of work requires conceptual redefinition. Drawing on Michel Foucault's notion of "regimes of truth," I propose reframing what is currently termed "documentary poetry" as the poetry of radical regimes of truth (PRRT). My paper will examine several examples of different PRRT types in Russian poetry from the 2000s-2020s.

Author

• Ilya Kukulin, Stanford U