“Trapped Boulder, White Mountains” (1859) | Franklin White / Smithsonian American Art Museum / CC0
Poet and educator Wendy Xu’s new book, Your Historical Loveliness Knows No Bounds: Form, Futurity, and Documentary Desire (University of Michigan Press, 2025), traverses multiple genres of poetry, poetry criticism, essay, and memoir, presenting close readings and “thinking-throughs” of works by poets such as Layli Long Soldier, Inger Christensen, Ocean Vuong, Liu Xia, giovanni singleton, Bei Dao, Diana Khoi Nguyen, and others. In an interview with Gabriel Chavez, Xu discusses how documentation defines our contemporary life—and what it means to defy those expectations through poetry.
Gabriel Chavez: My first question is how you were approached with a project like Your Historical Loveliness Knows No Bounds, your first book of criticism. Why say yes at this time in your life, at this point in your career?
Wendy Xu: I gave a reading during COVID-19, when we were all online. The editor of the [University of Michigan Press] Poets on Poetry series was in attendance, and he wrote to me afterwards. For a long time, I’ve been teaching documentary poetry and weird intersections of all that stuff in my life, so I thought it would be fun to propose a book that essentially gathered up a lot of the things that I’ve spent years in the classroom talking to students about. When I started, I didn’t really understand the details of peer review for an academic book. Sometimes I would Google what happens next, but I learned a lot about, well, how books that aren’t poetry books get made. So for me the book also represents a way to create a capsule of some of that thinking. It can be a container.
Chavez: The book defies form and genre. Even the description on the publisher’s site moves through monologues, poems, close readings. I began to think about it as a kind of mixtape. How did you decide to structure the book into these four parts?
Xu: I compiled everything chronologically at first, and it became this very weird twilight zone, sort of revisiting my own past. I tried—very loosely—to include some personal writing towards the end; some of the more straightforward close reading, which I think can also be personal, is upfront. And then like any good poet I just put the weird stuff that I don’t understand in the middle. If you’re already halfway through, maybe you’ll just keep reading.
Chavez: Many of your close readings are also an act of writing alongside these texts. In the book you write “Sisyphus, From Memory” alongside giovanni singleton’s “Black Sisyphus.” Reading “Sisyphus, From Memory” was one of the moments where I had to confront my own genre expectations. I was wondering if you could talk about that kind of approach to the essay form?
Xu: For that essay in particular, I was literally trying to see if I could remember all the details of Sisyphus’s legend without looking it up, because that giovanni singleton poem is so good, but it also doesn’t explain who or what Sisyphus is. It’s drawing on cultural memory and association with Sisyphus.
When I read texts that give me the kind of experience that you had—if I get irritated, if I can feel myself getting annoyed or a little confused, or if I feel my own desire to have a categorical genre box to put it in and the piece is denying me that—there’s something about that frustrated energy that to me feels really close to writing. It always feels like an urge that wants to write itself.
Chavez: I was thinking about documentary poetry in relation to documentary film, specifically how memory as a primary source text for docupoetry puts memory in tension with documented reality, whereas in documentary film, memory or eyewitness accounts are in concert with documented reality. Why do you think that difference is there, in two forms that are ostensibly quite similar?
Xu: Documentary filmmaking, and its burdens of genre conventions and expectations, is so relevant to documentary writing—a lot of documentary writers are drawing from the conventions of documentary film, if only because culturally, we consume more documentary film than documentary poetry as a whole.
Your question is an existential one. It does seem to me that in our judicial system and in the carceral world that we live in, eyewitness accounts are, in one way, king. At the same time, I would say that in both situations, in documentary and in the judicial system, often that’s where conflicting accounts come in.
What’s interesting to me about docupoetry is that in a judicial sense—and, I think, in documentary filmmaking—sometimes conflicting memory is presented as a problem. Certainly in the judicial system, it is a problem. But in the realm of poetry, it’s the opposite of a problem. Many documentary poets are explicitly interested in that weird tension between what I remember to be true and what the historical record says is true. Well, then where does that leave me and my memories? That becomes such an interesting wellspring of poetic energy, and it’s not a problem or an issue to be addressed.
Chavez: In your section on teaching, you write that you open your classes by asking questions: What is a document? How do you or your students think about the question of accessing certain documents, particularly in the digital age? How does one go about creating documentary art forms in a digital age?
Xu: I think there’s at least two valences to it. One is the logistical, all these abstract portals where digital bits of data are stored reflect part of the world we live in—fractured, fragmented realities stored in all kinds of places. That’s something that we contend with. The other valence is more about equity. Every year, my students and I end up having a conversation about when is a document a burden or even an oppression—and can it ever be a privilege? Is it unwanted or wanted? Once you start thinking about what a document is, once you start trying to pin it down in terms of how documentation defines our contemporary life, where we’re all hyper-surveilled, hyper-documented, avatars everywhere, portals all the time … then you quickly realize that you’re also dealing with the privilege and the right to be documented, to exist to a state apparatus is also a huge part of documentation. What documentary art thinks about is who is erased.
Documentation feels like an umbrella category for a lot of other aspects of being alive in this contemporary moment—surveillance, the police state, the carceral state, mass incarceration all fit under this umbrella.
To go back to what we were talking about just at the beginning, writing a book that’s not poetry is so funny to me because I go to the page and write poetry because I don’t know stuff.
My poetry is animated by not knowing. If I know something, I probably don’t want to write a poem about it. And what was funny and challenging and still weird to me about writing a book that has expository sentences in it is that you are, to an extent, purporting to know some things. And then of course, that opens up more questions.
Click here to read an excerpt from Your Historical Loveliness Knows No Bounds: Form, Futurity, and Documentary Desire, reprinted courtesy of Wendy Xu and University of Michigan Press.
