Poetry as method – trying to see the world differently

Research with communities, even co-produced research with a commitment to social justice, can be limited by its expression in conventional disciplinary language and format. Vibrant, warm and sometimes complex encounters with community partners become contained through the gesture of representation. In this sense, ‘writing up’ can actually become a kind of slow violence towards participants, projects and ourselves. As a less conventional and containable form of expression, poetry offers an alternative to the power games of researching ‘on’ communities and writing it up. It is excessive in the sense that it goes beyond the cycles of reduction and representation, allowing the expression of subjective (and perhaps sometimes even contradictory) impressions from participants. In this co-written paper we explore poetry as a social research method through subjective testimony and in the light of our Connected Communities funded projects (‘Imagine’, Threads of Time and ‘Taking Yourself Seriously’ ) where poetry as method came to the fore as a way of hearing and representing voices differently.


Our projects
The four of us (Zanib, Elizabeth, Kate and Helen) have worked on linked funded projects which were nurtured by a large Economic and Social Research Council funded project that explored the cultural context of civic engagement called, 'Imagine' (ESK/002686-2). All the individual projects were underpinned by the core research questions of 'Imagine'. Two of these questions were: "What role can imagining better futures play in capturing and sustaining enthusiasm for change?" and "Is community research being transformed by developments in social research methodology, particularly the development of collaborative methods?" The 'Imagine' project encouraged community partners to develop, shape and write up research that explored the ways in which every day cultures were experienced and the relationship between culture and civic engagement (Williams 1958(Williams /1989. One of the core concerns of Imagine was to develop an understanding of the ways in which communities can imagine hopeful futures, another was the development of a knowledge base about the possibilities of the use of co-production methodologies to influence social change (see Banks, S., Hart, A., Pahl, K, & Ward, P. (2019).
Many of our projects used arts-based methodologies to pursue this enquiry. In our funding proposal, two of us (Zanib and Kate) developed the idea to work with South Asian women poets together with contemporary poets in order to recover the lost heritage of women who wrote poetry in Pakistan. We situated the work in the Northern town of Rotherham. As part of the Rotherham project, we drew on a number of methodologies, including oral history, arts practice, collaborative ethnography and poetry as method, which we wrote up in a cowritten book (Campbell et al 2018).

Commented [EH2]:
Additional contextual information about Imagine added here.

Commented [MOU3]
: -Pages 3-5. The links to the Threads of Time project are clear in the body of the article but it would be useful to clarify whether and how the discussion of poetry relates to Imagine. At the moment, especially on a first reading, it feels like this project is referenced just to prove the authors' credentials rather than as an integral part of the discussion.
used poetry as method as well as visual arts. For that project, Kate (author) worked with poets Andrew McMillan and Helen Mort (author) in a school in Rotherham.
Elizabeth's contribution to Imagine drew on literary methods more widely than a specific focus on poetry to consider the applications of open reading techniques to the way that men in prison talked about their futures -'Reading Resilience in a Prison Community'. She used science fiction films to explore the ability to tolerate multiple meanings and to talk about global and personal futures in ways that straightforward interviews would not allow. Whilst that project is not a feature of this paper, the thinking that went into it (see Hoult, 2019) and the discussions with other project leaders here, were a part of the intellectual development of the project.

Poetry as method
Our argument here is that poetic methods can surface voices in different ways. Social science methodologies that explore everyday cultural practices recognize the material and storied nature of everyday life (Hurdley 2013, Highmore 2014. Everyday cultural practice resides within a shifting materially situated landscape. The opening up of the research methods landscape has included a turn to more embodied and materially situated modes of inquiry. A recognition of the visual, and sensory nature of the world has been developed through sensory and visual ethnographic methods (Pink 2009). Everyday language has its own cadences and rhythms, complexities, ellipses and oblique moments. Hidden within language are 'small stories' and aesthetic forms (Georgakouplou 2007(Georgakouplou , 2015. The 'art of common talk' (Carter 2004) includes a lived aesthetics, beauty and forms of resistance that are not always oriented towards representation (MacLure 2011, Ivinson 2017. Arts methodologies Commented [EH6]: Extra context about Imagine added here.

Commented [MOU7]
: -Pages 2, 9 and 14. On a related note, if the authors want to argue that poetry is a good way of collecting data, it would be good to have some reflection on what kind of data that is and what it can be used to show. In arguing that poetry moves us beyond representation do they mean that creative texts are constitutive (rather than reflective) of reality or do they mean that poetry gives direct (rather than mediated) access to feeling/emotion? Or it might be that it gives us an insight into what participants enjoy and want to create, which is also extremely interesting in itself. What is Hafash's poem Lily useful for? What does she think it is for? notion of single voice (see Mort, 2015, 'Made in Derbyshire' for a full account of this process and the outcomes).

A note on 'Us'
In poet Zaffar Kunial's first collection Us, (2018) the title poem problematises the notion of a singular, collective voice. As the narrator declares in the opening stanza: If you ask me, us takes in undulationseach wave in the sea, all insides compressedas if from one coast, you could reach out to the next… There's a playful subversion at work in the first line ('if you ask me…'), the poet foregrounding the piece with an expression of opinion. The word 'us' is also contained in the word 'undulations' if the reader cares to look for it, but it is fragmented and changed, one letter at the start of the word and one at the end. Throughout the poem, the narrator continues to challenge the idea that 'us' can really be a way of ascribing a singular voice to many people.
They note that in Midlands English dialect, 'us' is sometimes used to mean 'me' ('tell us where yer from' -Kunial's father was from Kashmir and in his childhood this might actually have been a phrase used in a challenging way, used to imply divisive lack of belonging). 'When it comes to us,' the poem argues 'colour me unsure'. The attempt to speak with one voice might be a doomed (and charged) endeavour.
As such, we have chosen to reject a singular notion of 'us' in our collective authorship of this paper and instead present four accounts of how poetry has formed part of our co-created practice. Through this, we hope to match the methodology used to the argument proposed and to take in the 'undulations' contained in 'us'.
All four of us have academic and/or professional connections to poetry and see literature in general as core to our intellectual identities. Therefore, we want to explore the power of poetry to work beyond the limits of gathering data or solving problems.
The three 'undulations' we present here are variously explored through individually written pieces of writing. In these sections, the word 'we' is used, but it is used with uncertainty, with awareness of how it might be problematic to even imply a collective voice within this paper.
Taken together with the 'undulations', this paper presents a less conventional approach to representing authorial voice and as such emulates what poetry can do in social research contexts.

The problem of secondary representation
Unknowing as a stance of enquiry is increasingly seen as useful as an orientating standpoint towards co-produced research (Vasudevan 2011, Atkinson 2017. It is hard to put unknowing into academic writing, however. As Richardson argues, academic writing is neither a transparent representation of reality nor neutral (Richardson, 1997). To quote Elizabeth Hoult: "The adoption of a style of writing characterised by certainty, logical linearity and authority moves in a realm characterised by uncertainty and unknowing is . . . problematic. It is a defended form of writing up that covers up more than it reveals and, as a result, it feels dishonest, and it lacks warmth. Crucially, it does not help very much. " (Hoult, 2012).
Here we take seriously Zanib Rasool's assertion in her reflections on community-based research that "poetry captures raw emotions in a way that interviews cannot." (2017, p.313) and we explore this in the light of a) a particular co-produced piece of research between academic, poetic and community partners (Threads of Time); and b) theoretical considerations of the particular contribution of poetry from literary and social theory. Poetry has a peculiar and unspeakable ability to join writers and readers together in ways that transcend both place and hierarchy. We will explore here whether it is possible to argue that this works in three ways: 1) As a way of collecting data and making meaning from that data from communities; 2) As a way of forging a connection between writers and readers (or community participants and academics as writers and readers of each other's work); 3) And finally for both of saying the unsayable, of moving beyond the ineffable and as such moves us beyond representation.
Here we suggest that poetry can play a particular part in direct representation of subject in ways that, along with post-structuralist femininst research stances (see Richardson, 1997 andHoult, 2011, for example), attempt to represent voices and lives without destroying or colonizing them. To quote Helene Cixous on that notion of 'saying the unsayable': "Writing is the passageway, the entrance, the exit, the dwelling place of the other in me -the other that I am and am not, that I don't know how to be, but that I feel passing, that makes me live -that tears me apart, disturbs me, changes me, who? -a feminine one, a masculine one, some? -several, some unknown, which is indeed what gives me the desire to know and from which all life soars. This peopling gives neither rest nor security, always Commented [MOU8]: -Pages 3-5. The links to the Threads of Time project are clear in the body of the article but it would be useful to clarify whether and how the discussion of poetry relates to Imagine. At the moment, especially on a first reading, it feels like this project is referenced just to prove the authors' credentials rather than as an integral part of the discussion.

Commented [EH9R8]
: Please see additional section on how this discussion relates to the core Imagine questions in early section (our projects)

Commented [EH10]:
Response to suggestion from reviewer to be more explicit about the links to feminist approaches.
disturbs the relationship to 'reality', produces an uncertainty that gets in the way of the subject's socialisation." ( Cixous, 1976) .We also acknowledge, however, that 'subject's socialisation' is particularly fraught in the academic realm and that this has serious implications for researchers and subjects alike, and especially so when the researcher who is working in a post-colonial and/or feminist commitment to praxis. Richa Nagar has problematized the relationship between reflexivity, positionality and the language of collaboration with skill and we do not seek here to present easy solutions or resolutions in particular to the question of how much is revealed or covered over in an academic text which is co-produced with community partners. Nagar, writing with Susan Geiger challenges the demand for reflexive academic writers who collaborate with community partners to give into the demands to "uncover ourselves in specific ways for academic consumption." Partly. they point out because of the inequitable demands for feminist researchers who work in collaborative partnerships with participants to 'uncover' in ways that other researchers operating in other paradigms do not. But, perhaps more fundamentally, because "uncovering ourselves in these terms contradicts the purpose of problematizing the essentialist nature of social categories, which are, in reality, created, enacted and transformed" (Nagar and Geiger, in Nagar, 2014). It should be noted here, for example, that an earlier iteration of this article included a fourth undulation which was a raw and direct response from Elizabeth to Hafsah Wahid's beautiful poem, 'Lily' quoted below. The ethical and professional problems of including such a reading in an article produced for "academic consumption" were, in the end, too difficult to navigate in this form and the undulation was removed. Our suggestion here is that poetry could allow all participants to divest authentically in ways that resist the confessional direct autobiographical references of the reflexive account, but which have the protection of poetic camouflage. As Yeats put it in his poem 'A Coat ' (1916), "There's more enterprise in walking naked" than producing writing which is weighed down with theoretical (and in Yeats' case, mythological) referencing. But poetry provides a safe place for readers and writers to be radically open without being trapped by the literality of print and its removal of the right to erasure. To put it more bluntly, Elizabeth should have written a poem in response to Hafsah's poem. We are suggesting that there is an immediacy to a poem that is different from other kinds of texts. Karin Barber (2007) writes, "There is no doubt that when we meet certain kinds of texts -many kinds, in fact -there is a sense of encounter with something other and almost beyond comprehension; yet at the same time, curiously close." Here we suggest that the poem. either produced by community partners, or read with them, has a particular capacity to engender this sense of encounter, not just with itself as a text but with the participating partner and thus to begin to bridge the academic/community binary in ways that are not without problems but which allow a curious closeness to develop in ways other kinds of texts used in such work, do not.
We draw on two concepts here to help us stretch the argument. The first is Maggie We cannot get close to the scene, to 'it', without referring to the stories that circulate and precede our encounter, or without academic or psychic defenses. We do great damage in our investigative efforts. But without those efforts, some of those stories would never be told, leading to more silence and more marginalisation. Poetry can act as a creative interruption, an answer to Maggie Maclure's question: "(O)ne productive question for research, and for education, might be how to work the ruins of representation at least long enough to engage the bodily intensities of affect that swim in language. . . and mobilize these creatively." (2011, p.1002).
First Undulation -Zanib -Ways Out I was a child that stuttered and got ignored and learnt to be silent, I am a woman whose words have been strangulated in to submission.
I now articulate my grievances in a different way for I have learned the art of writing poetry in my heart.
The ink bleeds and covers my words and hides them from your unkind gaze.
With each thumping heart beat my voice grows stronger and more powerful.
Can you hear me?
Are you listening to me?
Why are you not answering me back?
Why are you not talking over me?
Why are you not challenging me to be silent? 'Poetry allows individuals to utilise their marginality' arguing that 'it is essential that Black women recognise the special vantage point our marginality gives us and make use of this perspective to criticize the dominant racist, classist, sexist hegemony and create a counter hegemony' (bell-hooks, 1984,.2).
Liz Yorke (1991) stance resonates with me and the research I have been undertaking, she argues for poetic language 'to transform women's relations to myth, to history, and to representation generally, through retelling of the histories, the stories-undertaken when women 'wake up from among the dead' (10).
Hafsah Wahid,19, observed a dead lily on the ground and writes in her poem 'Lily': On a related note, if the authors want to argue that poetry is a good way of collecting data, it would be good to have some reflection on what kind of data that is and what it can be used to show. In arguing that poetry moves us beyond representation do they mean that creative texts are constitutive (rather than reflective) of reality or do they mean that poetry gives direct (rather than mediated) access to feeling/emotion? Or it might be that it gives us an insight into what participants enjoy and want to create, which is also extremely interesting in itself. What is Hafash's poem Lily useful for? What does she think it is for?

Commented [EH15]:
Second undulation removed in response to reviewer's comments experiences (of oppression) and through feelings and emotions' (Crotty, 1998, 27), then we begin to understand the realities of being the 'other'.  Drawing together these threads, we will begin to map out an orientation from a poetry as method perspective that can support a re-thinking of methods to account for the things that cannot be said within traditional social science.
Arts methods are distinctive in that they privilege embodiment, uncertainty and emergence (Facer and Pahl 2017). Studio as method provides a way to think about modes of thinking that are collective, but also to try out new ideas (Pahl and Pool 2018). Our work together here was begun in a room in Sheffield, since then we have emailed, discussed, met, and not met. Sometimes it has been hard to keep going. Our practice is embodied, happening beside a park, in a conversation, and across continents as well as within particular sites and spaces.

Conclusions
This paper has illustrated a more democratic, searching, questioning methodology than the conventional social research model it has sought to critique. Poet Don Paterson has suggested that poems rely on connotation rather than denotation (Paterson, 2018). Writing a poem which will be read by others is an inherently democratic process -though the poem usually privileges one particular standpoint (that of the author or of the poem's narrator) or set of experiences in its writing, it creates a space for the reader too, allowing room for ambiguity and for a range of responses. As many of our readings in this paper have shown, interacting with a poem leaves room for our own personal interpretations. Where the poem is also the product of a workshop environment where the writer has been interacting with others, the process is even more inherently collaborative. As such, our 'undulations' bear witness to a different way of approaching research with communities through poetry.
Through them, we have attempted to show that: "Resistant to capture by ideology or language, wonder could be the proper business, not only of philosophy, but also of qualitative inquiry". (MacLure, 2011.