The Missouri Review, Vol. 42, no. 3, Fall 2019, pp. 177-188.
I came to Rukseyer’s The Book of the Dead via Kathyrn Nuernberger’s review essay in The Missouri Review, “Radical Research and the Scientific Method: Tracking a New Tracjectory through Four Recent Poetry Collections.” In that essay, Nuernberger places recent poetry collections that are responding to and adding “empathetic imagination” to certain scientific research. Rukseyer’s The Book of the Dead, is not one of the recent collections that Nuernberger reviews, as it was reissued in 2018 and the poems were originally featured as part of Rukseyer’s 1938 collection U.S. 1. They were written in 1936 regarding the Hawk’s Nest Tunnel Disaster in West Virginia.
Nuernberger writes of Rukseyer’s collection as context for “docupoetics” — the tradition of which
“is typically defined as a poetic mode rooted in documentary techniques. A docupoetic poem draws upon fieldwork, interviews, oral histories, or archival research. Much of this work has also focused on questions of social justice, since complex geopolitical questions benefit from meandering, collaged, often book-length forms that can hold multiple perspectives, a range of historical contexts, and rhetorical modes that move between the personal and political” (177-8).
Neurnberger could be speaking of a lyric essay or a nonfiction book-length essay here (Tell Me How It Ends by Valeria Luiselli comes to mind first). Nuernberger then references Hass’s idea that docupoetics is an extension of the Georgic tradition, and that poets have long responded to scientific research and methodologies (and many essayists have, too. Jericho Parms’s essay on Nabikov’s butterflies comes to mind here), before describing the genre as one “that has always had a disposition toward hybrid cross-genre aesthetics” (181).
What I find so exciting about Nuernberg’s description here and the grounding of docupoetics is that if one were to hold up Tall and D’Agata’s first description of the lyric essay and Nuernberger’s description here of docupoetics, the two would be very similar. The fact that the docupoem is also a sort of hybrid and even incorporates images into the text gives CNF writers a new tradition to draw upon.
Where the two forms may differ is in what Nuernberger calls the “empathetic imagination.” Not that creative nonfiction works do not “leap into the unknown” (as I would argue they very much do, as well as imagine), these imaginings and leaps are framed in the experience of the writer, rather than interwoven as parts of the piece itself. This is also important because this difference also tells us that docupoetics is not just another term for the lyric essay in a different genre, but rather these can be thought of as two distinct genres that share overlapping characteristics.
Compsing 