Blackwell Reference Online

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In his Beat-inflected manifesto, Investigative Poetry , Edward Sanders (1976) argued that “the essence of investigative poetry” is to create “lines of lyric beauty [that] descend from data clusters,” hence both seducing and empowering readers with “a melodic blizzard of data-fragments.” As illustrated in America , his epic collection of data-fragment-strewn poems, Sanders (2000) hoped to merge poetry with the pedagogical imperative to teach his readers their national history and the political goal of empowering them to re-enliven the great traditions of activism and artistry celebrated in his poems. By interweaving the emotional power of poetry with the pedagogical power of historical scholarship and the political power of fighting for social justice, Sanders's America embodies the theory explored in his Investigative Poetry , thus providing a model for writing layered, historically dense, yet beautiful, political poems (Bernstein 1990; Monroe 1996; Hartnett & Engels 2005 ). While Sanders's version of investigative poetry is focused on US national history, other practitioners of the art have sought to write in a comparative, international mode. For example, Carolyn Forché's The Country Between Us (1981) shuttles between the US and El Salvador, where she was both witness to and participant in the nasty wars launched by presidents Reagan and Carter against supposed ... log in or subscribe to read full text