In our Craft Capsule series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 234.
A nineteenth-century British legal opinion about an insurance claim. A caption-less photograph of a Holocaust killing ground that goes unmentioned in the surrounding text. The loss of young love, childhood, and a grandmother entangled with text from a decades-old tourist guide to Florida that describes flora and fauna now vanished beneath urban development. What’s going on here? What are these “foreign objects” doing in these poems?
What kinds of things might find a home in your poem if you expand your imagination to include unlikely source material? What could a foreign object—text, document, photo, image—contribute to your poem? It might offer context. A photo of a room or landscape, a fragment of a primer or contract, might bring background or other important information into a poem. The object might offer another, perhaps contrasting, point of view, overlapping with or at an angle to the reader’s initial experience of the poem. The object might offer authenticity. It may present contradiction or provoke surprise.
The incorporation of “foreign objects” in poetry is rooted in modernist works like T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, first published in the U.S. in the Dial in 1922, and Ezra Pound’s The Cantos (New Directions, 1948). The practice also takes over subsequent works such as William Carlos Williams’s Paterson (New Directions, 1963) and Charles Olson’s Maximus Poems (Jargon/Corinth Books, 1960). This method is neither commentary, nor ekphrasis, nor simple allusion, nor paratext. It has been described as literary collage and “citational” or “documentary” poetics. Its practitioners include poets such as Charles Reznikoff, Muriel Ruykeyser, Susan Howe, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Layli Long Soldier, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and Heimrad Bäcker, as well as the writers I alluded to earlier: M. NourbeSe Philip, W. G. Sebald, and Heidi Lynn Staples. At the moment, “foreign objects” seem to be everywhere in poetry.
Recent discussions of documentary poetry explore a wide range of approaches to the questions that pop up around “foreign objects.” In addition to numerous articles and craft essays, critical single-volume works like Michael Leong’s Contested Records: The Turn to Documents in Contemporary North American Poetry (University of Iowa Press, 2020), Marjorie Perloff’s Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century (University of Chicago Press, 2012), and Paul Naylor’s Poetic Investigations: Singing the Holes in History (Northwestern University Press, 1999) offer excellent overviews of such poetics and discuss various historical and contemporary poets working in this vein.
How can foreign objects expand and enrich our own work?
For me the most important thing foreign objects offer, the source of their richness, is a gap. A gap that opens even wider for the reader, a gap that contains what cannot be said, or what, if the juxtaposition does its work, need not be said. The gap between the recovered historical record and the story we thought we knew, between the delicate map and the actual ground, between the image and the description. I have found those in-between places to be fruitful.
I began what would be the long poem Salient (New Directions, 2020) without a plan. I simply knew that two kinds of seemingly unrelated texts were riveting to me: British World War I military maps and field manuals (engineering, artillery, ground and aerial survey) and medieval Tibetan texts on protective magic. I decided to place those texts next to one another and see what would happen. What would appear in the force field between those poles? Into the No Man’s Land of that gap walked the thousands of soldiers who went missing in Belgium in 1917, still lost on dangerous ground, seeking, in lyric space-time, a shell-proof dugout, an amulet, a reliable map.
How might you create, and mine, such gaps in your own work? First, identify an “object” that strikes you as luminous or monstrous, radioactive or ordinary, one that—for some reason—feels deeply important. It can be a piece of text, an image, a photograph, or a portion of a document that you have come across and that matters to you. Then, place it “next to” or “in conversation with” a second such object. (One of these objects can be, for example, a fragment of your own work.) Send your critical and revising self out for coffee on the other side of town. Write into the force field created by bringing these two objects close together. Write into the space between them and around them.
Step away for a bit. Come back. What has been born out of all this? What do the fusions and gaps have to tell you? What is there on the page that could not otherwise be said? Has it changed what you thought you were writing?
Elizabeth T. Gray is a poet, translator, critic, and corporate consultant. Her poetry collections include After the Operation (Four Way Books 2025), Salient (New Directions 2020), and Series | India (Four Way Books, 2015). Her translations from classical and contemporary Persian include Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season, the selected poems of Forough Farrokhzad (New Directions, 2022), which was a finalist for the 2023 PEN Prize for Poetry in Translation, and The Green Sea of Heaven: Eighty Ghazals From the Diwan of Hafiz (Monkfish Publishing, 2024). She serves on the boards of Kimbilio Fiction, World Poetry, Flood Editions, Friends of Writers, the Beloit Poetry Journal Foundation, and Human Rights and Democracy in Iran. She holds a BA and JD from Harvard University and an MFA from Warren Wilson College. She was the founding CEO and Managing Partner of Conflict Management, Inc. and Alliance Management Partners, LLC, boutique consulting firms.
image credit: Andrew Neel
