In this exposition, seven research practitioners investigate how creative practice can be applied as a form of knowledge production in order to disrupt or re-define the dynamics of power in a range of different contexts. These applications of creative practice take varied and complex forms, often transferring creativity from the practitioner-researcher to their participants, increasing participant agency or re-defining existing hierarchies, as they form, empower, and enlighten real and conceptual communities. This collaborative exposition has been developed through presentations and discussions over the course of two years. Although each researcher applies different methodologies to their individual projects, our work as a group followed a pattern of creative practice, reflection, and reformulation, as we responded to each other’s research, creating a research community of our own. We want to emphasize that creative practice can not only disrupt or re-define the dynamics of power in a range of different contexts, but that it can do this in an infinite number of ways. In this variety and adaptability lies the potential of creative research.

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Emily Berry and Ocean Vuong have each written about their fascination with the physical and linguistic arrangement of a poemon the page, and yet their poetry has typically been read as purely confessional, concerned primarily with emotion and the revelation of personal experience, rather than an attempt to interrogate the nature of language itself. This article examines Emily Berry’sStranger, Baby and Ocean Vuong’s Night Sky with Exit Wounds,analysing their use of blank space in these collections, and the way in which they use this space, in its physical, linguistic and metaphorical forms, to emphasise the constructed nature of their poems, to evoke a sense of absence, distance or detachment, presentingus with the emotional complexities of grief, abandonment and dislocation, whilst also demonstrating these emotional states to the reader. It will propose that this use of blank space creates, ineffect, a new form of lyric poetry, one which combines the experiential focus of the confessional lyric with the self-analysis of the Imagists and Language poets, so that Berry and Vuong interrogate the inevitable failure of their own poems, emphasising theimpossible gap between traumatic experience and its articulation through language.