More on Documentary Poetics

And another thing: after the reading on Saturday night, during the interview portion of the events, Kristin mentioned that she fact-checked the poems in The Straits. The implication, of course, was that accuracy was important to the documentary work she was doing.

Several years ago, when I was writing Valley/Ridge, I was in a workshop in which Remy (who now blogs at Autotypist) wanted me to throw out all the statistics in my poems. Rather, he wanted me to make up the numbers. His argument, if I am remembering it aright and I'm probably not, was that statistics are another form of damn lies and that instead of repeating someone else’s damn lies, I should use my own. And while he was probably right, I just couldn’t let go of the impulse to push toward some “real” representation, some objective documentation or observation.