This essay discusses my attempts to meet the enigmatic character of Percy Grainger in writing—namely, through the intersection of poetry and biography, in the composition of an original work, Suite for Percy Grainger. This work extends from, and contributes to, the tradition of documentary poetry. To locate my work within this tradition, I will first look at three distinctly different works of documentary poetry—Charles Reznikoff’s Holocaust (1975), Mark Nowak’s Coal mountain elementary (2009) and Susan Howe’s The nonconformist’s memorial (1993) —each of which draws on, and utilises, historical/archival documents in order to explore real-world subjects and events through poetic frameworks. The first half of this essay will discuss how each of these three poets retrieves, selects, incorporates and adapts archival source material, in order to present Suite for Percy, in the second half of the essay, as a work that both draws on a varied tradition of documentary poetry, whilst also establishing its own pathways as a poetic exploration of the past.
