UC Berkeley

The Unfeeling Poem: Documentary Scenes from Reznikoff to Rankine traces the evolution of documentary from the early 1930s to the American present, examining how experimental writers have recorded reality in their work. Developed through close readings of three long prose poems – Charles Reznikoff’s Testimony (1934), Bernadette Mayer’s Memory (1972) and Claudia Rankine’s Citizen (2014) – the unfeeling poem is characterized by its resistance to immediate affective engagement and its emphasis on the gaps between document and event. Rather than attempting to close these gaps, the unfeeling poem makes them visible and meaningful. The dissertation introduces “the unfeeling poem” less as a critical descriptor for documentary works than as a provocation to consider how much transparency or immediacy is possible, or even desirable, across the distance between document and event. In Testimony, the unfeeling poem manifests in the stark presentation of reworked legal documents, which displace emotional response from the poet onto the reader. Memory pushes the unfeeling poem further, overwhelming the reader with an excess of documentation that challenges our capacity for affective response. Citizen mobilizes the unfeeling poem to engage present absences, employing a carefully modulated affective register to train readers in a set of critical reading practices, an alertness to what is not documented as well as what is. The dissertation situates these works within their specific historical and artistic contexts, examining Reznikoff’s participation in the “Objectivist” movement, Mayer’s forays into conceptual art, and Rankine’s interventions in contemporary digital culture. By reading these “scenes” from each writer’s career, the dissertation shows how documentary practices contribute to the formation of sensible, cultural, and intellectual communities. Methodologically, the dissertation combines literary close reading with art-historical description, sketching connections between poetic texts and visual media including FSA photographs, conceptual artworks, and online content. Activating three landmark projects in twentieth and twenty-first century American poetry, The Unfeeling Poem provides a new framework in which to understand the relationship between documentary practice and readerly response.