Starting with Muriel Rukeyser writing about the aftermath of an industrial health disaster in the 1930s, poets have manipulated, subverted, and destroyed official documents to reflect the incompleteness of the historical record and the limits of public memory.

In the current century, writers of colour in particular have turned to these techniques to overcome the limits of the line.

M. NourbeSe Philip, Tarfia Faizullah, Anthony Cody, Emily Jungmin Yoon, and Don Mee Choi communicate through innovative texts the effects of state or capitalist violence on bodies marginalised for their race, gender or nationality.

Highlighting techniques from these wide-ranging docu-poetic practices, participants in this workshop utilise personal or inherited memory, archival video, and Roland Barthes' reflections on photography to create their own texts that fracture history's apparent completeness.

The workshop is led by former Southbank Centre New Poets Collective member April Yee, a London-based writer, former journalist, and winner of the Manchester Fiction Prize and the Ivan Juritz Prize.

With generous support from the TS Eliot Foundation

Age recommendation

For ages 18+