Like other documentary works that deal with pivotal periods of Canada’s past, Lionel Kearns’s long poem Convergences (1984) incorporates evidence from the historical record into its imaginative revision of British explorer James Cook’s early encounters with the Mooachaht people of Canada’s West Coast. Formal analysis of the poem’s unique structure suggests that Kearns’s poem foregrounds the convergence between past and present, and between truth and representation, with a complexity lacking in other documentary poems dealing with exploration. By representing history as chronological, cumulative, and connected while simultaneously rendering it as a series of accidents, coincidences, and non-convergences, Kearns finds a unique way to suggest that history is both convergent and non-convergent but not entirely either.