disembodied voices, snatches of songs, unattributed quotations could be understood to perform the way history creates subjects.  But there is of more than this: there is a counter-thrust; an opposition not just to the way things happened—but to the way-things-are-told.  How do you understand the function / phenomenon of poetry in relation to that of "history?" Can a poem be history?

​

Brenda Marie Osbey: ... . Isn't history always the way/s in which things are told, who does the telling and on what authority? Antar ibn Shaddad, the Black Raven of Saudi Arabia, wrote that three things define man: “to make love, to make war, to make verse.” Long before his 6th century epic of war and love, the Gabon Death Rite Suites and hunting poems were composed, and the Khoikhoi lyric poems on the nature of the universe, all of which tell such a great deal about ancient sub-Saharan African social and political life, religion, mythology and warfare. The teachings of Lao-Tsu come to us in verse. Much of the accepted history of Western antiquity comes to us from Homer. And, of course, the Nahuatl philosopher-poet-king and master craftsman Nezahualcoyotl recorded in poems and songs much of what we've come to understand about life in the pre-Columbian Americas. Indeed, much if not most of what we know (or claim to know) about the ancient worlds of Africa, Asia, the Americas and Europe, we know through poetry anyway. What ancient societies can we claim to know that didn't have generations of peripatetic bards carrying news and history in some combination of song, lyric and narrative poem?

 ... .