Documentary is witness, testament and evidence. It is of the order of knowledge, even when it is experimental, and exposing the limits of knowledge or the aporias and violent effacements of history. Poetry, by contrast, aims to cultivate the “creative faculty to imagine that which we know,” as P.B. Shelley once wrote (“A Defense of Poetry”). The poems and still imagery of this sequence, entitled “The Deep,” accompany the videographic fragments of THE ZAMA ZAMA PROJECT. They are intended to supplement and reveal the poetic intention of the assemblage-as-work, which does not aspire to completion or finality, but rather asks people to re-imagine what they think they can know on the basis of documentary, and to listen differently.
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