From Stenotype to Tintype: C.D. Wright's Technologies of "Type"

C.D. Wright's engagement with documentary technology—stenography in Deepstep Come Shining and tintype photography in One Big Self—reveals a contradictory impulse in her poetry: to document individualized data while abstracting this data into "type." Wright uses this contradiction to underline the incommensurability of two literary discourses in Deepstep Come Shining (documentary and lyrical), and of two political ones in One Big Self (neoliberal and materialist). Against the mischaracterization of Deepstep Come Shining as a hybrid documentary-lyrical text, this essay argues that it embodies a renewed commitment to medium specificity; and against the mischaracterization of One Big Self as a testament to the liberating power of self-expression, it argues that the poem shifts attention away from prisoners' identities and toward material forms of subjugation.