Frank Smith
Poet
I write what I call forensic poetry - poems built entirely from real documents, reports, coordinates, court records, never invention. It is a writing of the real, close to what is sometimes called factography. In Sri Lanka, I want to test this method on three broken infrastructures, a cable, a dam, a port, and let what they already record speak, undecorated, as verse.
Frank Smith (b. 1968) is a French poet, writer, and filmmaker based in Paris, founder of the Bureau d'investigations poétiques. His work builds poems and films from real documents - UN reports, court records, declassified war logs - on landscapes marked by state violence, borders, and displacement, from the Korean DMZ to the Calais coastline. His book Guantanamo was named best poetry book of the year in the United States in 2014 (The Huffington Post); Irak 24 heures, drawn from the WikiLeaks war logs, followed in 2025. At Villa Swagatam, he develops Paysages de la Coupure, on Sri Lanka's cables, dams, and ports.
