A discussion of the poetics of my new book, Arsenal/Sin Documentos, from CLASH Books.
Excerpt:
CM:
One of the reasons why I was drawn to your poems is their alignment with documentary poetics. Joseph Harrington’s Tracking Teaching monograph, which is a dossier of practical and theoretical ideas about docpo featuring poets such as Allison Cobb and Kaia Sand in conversation, Philip Metres, Donovan K?hi? Colleps, and others, places emphasis on the preservation of memory, which to me suggests questions concerning epistemology. Mark Nowak calls docpo a “modality” which “participates in the social field” in a short essay over at Poetryfoundation.org and connecting this with Harrington’s introduction to his Tracking/Teaching monograph, which seeks the rewriting and reclaiming of the archive as an aid to the preservation of memory, implies docpo as a mode of investigating methodologies concerning epistemology, among other notions. With this and your poems in mind, do you see them as making an epistemological intervention through poetic discourse?
FL:
I view my documentary work as part archaeological practice—excavating language that might otherwise be hidden and bringing it to light—and part activism in that I use that language to subvert or resist the dominant discourse. The poems from Arsenal/Sin Documentos use the language of the State against it, documenting how the state constructs the Latin American body.
An important note here: as I was preparing for this interview I tried to access “With Liberty and Justice for All: The State of Civil Rights and Immigration Detention Facilities,” the original document used for the construction of the poem “The Maggot Allegations,” and found that it had been erased from the public archives at the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights website (if you search the site it still appears in the results, but clicking the link results in a “page not found” error). For me, this reinforces an essential function of documentary poetics; the preservation of important public documents in the face of systematic institutional erasure.
Read full interview here.