CONTACT WITH POETS

esponsible for the drafting of “factual information without argument”
for the appeals of violent sexual offenders. With Statement of Fact Place
relocates these briefs to the arena of poetry by simply changing the names
and any information necessary to protect identities—all of her writing
does:
not violate any formal ethical standards or professional codes of
conduct: all appellate briefs are matters of public record [and]
could be found or read by anyone, as are the transcripts of the
trials themselves.
The statements of facts that constitute Statement of Facts do not
break any ethical codes, but much like the source documents of Bäcker’s
transcript, challenge the reader to incorporate unspeakable violation into
poetics. By moving language that is in daily use in the court, is publicly
archived and accessible to the general public into the realm of poetry,
Place’s Statement of Fact moves through the compositional strategies that
Reznikoff explores into non-poeticized trauma.
In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes referred to trauma as “a news
photo without a caption.” Barthes argues that the photograph cannot be
isolated from the event that it portrays. We do not see the photograph; we
only see the image portrayed on the photograph. The language of the archive
is the language of news photograph captions. The photograph represents
events without representing itself, an event portrayed without a
means of discussing or categorizing. Each of these texts, building on
Reznikoff’s example, reverses this dictum and proves that trauma is a
series of captions without news photographs.
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