How Can My Poem Be True?

Abstract

How can a poem be true? This autoethnographic study uses poetic inquiry to explore the boundaries between fiction and reality within poetic experience. A series of poems composed during, and about, the current COVID-19 pandemic, provides a means of understanding the experience of having one’s everyday reality overturned by crisis. A central theme of the author’s poems and accompanying reflections is how art can be used to explore psychological experiences, such as melancholia and depression, and, in turn how the experience of suffering can be used to facilitate artistic expression. Using poetic inquiry, the author examines the complex interplay between speaker and authorial intention, fiction and truth, text and the performance of writing, reading, and poetic interpretation.

This Learner's Identity – Lost, Found, or Simply Confused? In Search of a Definitive Identity

“…To address the question of what my identity means in a work-based learning context for me both as a learner and a learning practitioner, I have chosen a figurative autoethnographic camera and a series of lenses to document my experiences as I search for meaning and relevance as a Vocational Education and Training (VET) practitioner and learner. The first is a poetic inquiry lens (Hoben, 2021), chosen in an attempt to capture my inner thoughts about who and what I am, coupled with a heart-full filter (Ellis, 1999) to capture my evocative experience. The second is a subjective academic narrative lens (Arnold, 2015), selected for its ability to reveal fictional truth (Arnold, 2010) in the overall picture that might otherwise not come as sharply into focus.…”

Untitled

“…To address the question of what my identity means in a work-based learning context for me both as a learner and a learning practitioner, I have chosen a figurative autoethnographic camera and a series of lenses to document my experiences as I search for meaning and relevance as a Vocational Education and Training (VET) practitioner and learner. The first is a poetic inquiry lens (Hoben, 2021), chosen in an attempt to capture my inner thoughts about who and what I am, coupled with a heart-full filter (Ellis, 1999) to capture my evocative experience. The second is a subjective academic narrative lens (Arnold, 2015), selected for its ability to reveal fictional truth (Arnold, 2010) in the overall picture that might otherwise not come as sharply into focus.…”