posted by Heidi Smith

on August 31, 2006

Currently I am working on creating some poems out of court case testimonies I found at the Philadelphia City Archives. I got the idea for this because a poet named Charles Reznikoff made poetry out of testimonies he found in volume 1 of the Reporter series, in two volumes: Testimony 1885-1890 Recitative, and Testimony Volume 2: 1885-1915. Although he was writing in the 1960’s and 1970’s, the time period of the court cases used for the poems was 1885-1915.

So anyway, early in the project, I was frustrated by the lack of direct quotes and narratives from people who lived in the Seventh Ward. I decided that Reznikoff had a good idea, and that I would be able to get a sizable amount of direct dialogue from testimony transcripts. While the Reporter Series offer lengthy summaries of court cases, the brittle, tome-like testimony transcripts at the City Archives are word-for-word.

Although almost every case I have read is a murder case, and I was worried about finding stories having only to do with crime, there is a great deal to be gleaned from these testimonies. I have found an interracial couple (a black man and a white woman), a scuffle probably resulting from class differences between several African Americans during a Republican parade down Lombard Street in the Seventh Ward, a witness in a murder trial who was a waiter and lived on the Seventh Ward, an accidental murder resulting from accusations of homosexuality, some young men who killed a little girl because they thought she was a ghost, and others.

I have been struck by how contemporary the language is, although I cannot repeat some of it here. I am in the process of converting my notes into summary/poems, but it has been difficult because I think about the audience (high school students) and I am unsure how to convey the shifting witness perspectives and differing stories, the levels of interpretation that occur, while making a unified narrative. There have been some interesting twists, and unexpected acquittals, and I have found that many of these cases read like small mystery stories, so hopefully the poems will convey my enthusiasm.