Poetry As Research

"Elegantly written, convincingly argued, and interspersed with hauntingly beautiful and poignant poems written by his ESL students, Hanauer's book draws attention to the unexplored potential of poetry writing in a second language classroom." Aneta Pavelenko, Temple University --

This book takes an interdisciplinary approach to using and creating poetry for conducting and reporting social research. It includes examples of poetry, interviews of poets, and practical exercises that will enhance the discussion of poetry writing as a method. When used as a teaching guide this book will encourage students to consider the importance of form and function in poetry for qualitative methods. It also answers the question of how to teach the creation and evaluation of poetry, it combats the perception that poetry is too difficult or mysterious to use as research and that only poets should be concerned with poetic craft.

Poetic Inquiry: Vibrant Voices in the Social Sciences, co-edited by Monica Prendergast, Carl Leggo and Pauline Sameshima, features many of the foremost scholars working worldwide in aesthetic ways through poetry.

Poetic Inquiry: Craft, Method and Practice examines the use of poetry as a form of qualitative research, representation, and method used by researchers, practitioners, and students from across the social sciences and humanities. It serves as a practical manual for using poetry in qualitative research through the presentation of varied examples of Poetic Inquiry. It provides how-to exercises for developing and using poetry as a qualitative research method. The book begins by mapping out what doing and critiquing Poetic Inquiry entails via a discussion of the power of poetry, poets’, and researchers’ goals for the use of poetry, and the kinds of projects that are best suited for Poetic Inquiry. It also provides descriptions of the process and craft of creating Poetic Inquiry, and suggestions for how to evaluate and engage with Poetic Inquiry. The book further contends with questions of method, process, and craft from poets’ and researchers’ perspectives. It shows the implications for the aesthetic and epistemic concerns in poetry, and furthers transdisciplinary dialogues between the humanities and social sciences. Faulkner shows the importance of considering the form and function of Poetic Inquiry in qualitative research through discussions of poetry as research method, poetry as qualitative analysis and representation, and Poetic Inquiry as a powerful research tool.

Poetry as Research develops an approach that allows poetry writing to be used as a research method for exploring questions relating to second language learners and more broadly for studies within the humanities and social sciences. The book investigates the characteristics of poetry writing and situates poetry writing as a qualitative, arts-based, research process. The book utilizes computational linguistics, qualitative, bibliographic, and philosophical methods and investigates the process of writing poetry, the textual and literary characteristics of second language poetry, poetic identity and inquiry. The developed methodology is exemplified through a poetic inquiry of the study abroad experiences of ESL students. The book provides a comprehensive, informed and innovative approach to the investigation of understandings of personal experience. This book should be of interest to the fields of applied linguistics, stylistics, literary studies, creative writing and composition as well as anyone interested in using writing as a research method.

For the first time, Navigating CHamoru Poetry focuses on Indigenous CHamoru (Chamorro) poetry from the Pacific Island of Guåhan (Guam). In this book, poet and scholar Craig Santos Perez navigates the complex relationship between CHamoru poetry, cultural identity, decolonial politics, diasporic migrations, and native aesthetics.

This book examines contemporary forms of digital poetry in emerging technologies such as drones, machine learning, Instagram, virtual reality and mobile devices. Theoretical frameworks that engage with posthumanism, multimodality, hermeneutics and eco-writing are used to examine the changing shape of the literary artefact in the second age of machines. The book contextualises the necessity of a multidisciplinary approach for a complex artefact and gives a broad overview of the field and history of digital poetry as a subset of the genre of electronic literature. Naji examines Instapoetry and the literary algorithm, haptic hermeneutics and poetry apps. The discussion also engages with eco-writing and drone poetry, poetic mirror worlds, and mixed reality poetry, concluding with an examination of the future of poetics and literary expression in the second age of machines.

Provoking Curriculum Studies pushes forward a strong reading of the theoretical and methodological innovations taking place within curriculum studies research. Addressing an important gap in contemporary curriculum studies—conceptualizing scholars as poets and the potential of the poetic in education—it offers a framework for doing curriculum work at the intersection of the arts, social theory, and curriculum studies. Drawing on poetic inquiry, psychoanalysis, phenomenology, life writing, and several types of arts-based research methodologies, this diverse collection spotlights the intellectual genealogies of curriculum scholars such as Ted Aoki, Geoffrey Milburn and Roger Simon, whose provocations, inquiries, and recursive questioning link the writing and re-writing of curriculum theory to acts of strong poetry. Readers are urged to imagine alternative ways in which professors, teachers, and university students might not only engage with but disrupt, blur, and complicate curriculum theory across interdisciplinary topographies in order to seek out blind impresses—those areas of knowledge that are left over, unaddressed by ‘mainstream’ curriculum scholarship, and that instigate difficult questions about death, trauma, prejudice, poverty, colonization, and more.

'Writing Poetry Through the Eyes of Science' presents a unique & effective interdisciplinary approach to teaching science poems & science poetry writing in secondary English & science classrooms.

Winner of the 2020 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets "Layered, complex, and infinitely compelling, Chet’la Sebree’s Field Study is a daring exploration of the self and our interactions with others—a meditation on desire, race, loss and survival." --Natasha Trethewey, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Memorial Drive Chet’la Sebree’s Field Study is a genre-bending exploration of black womanhood and desire, written as a lyrical, surprisingly humorous, and startlingly vulnerable prose poem I am society’s eraser shards—bits used to fix other people’s sh*t, then discarded. Somehow still a wet nurse, from actual babes to Alabama special elections. Seeking to understand the fallout of her relationship with a white man, the poet Chet’la Sebree attempts a field study of herself. Scientifically, field studies are objective collections of raw data, devoid of emotion. But during the course of a stunning lyric poem, Sebree’s control over her own field study unravels as she attempts to understand the depth of her feelings in response to the data of her life. The result is a singular and provocative piece of writing, one that is formally inventive, playfully candid, and soul-piercingly sharp. Interspersing her reflections with Tweets, quips from TV characters, and excerpts from the Black thinkers—Audre Lorde, Maya Angelou, Tressie McMillan Cottom—that inspire her, Sebree analyzes herself through the lens of a society that seems uneasy, at best, with her very presence. She grapples with her attraction to, and rejection of, whiteness and white men; probes the malicious manifestation of colorism and misogynoir throughout American history and media; and struggles with, judges, and forgives herself when she has more questions than answers. “Even as I accrue these notes,” Sebree writes, “I’m still not sure I’ve found the pulse.” A poem of love, heartbreak, womanhood, art, sex, Blackness, and America—sometimes all at once—Field Study throbs with feeling, searing and tender. With uncommon sensitivity and precise storytelling, Sebree makes meaning out of messiness and malaise, breathing life into a scientific study like no other.