Poetic Possibilities

Abstract

Exploring Paul Ricoeur's hermeneutics, we craft a collection of generated and found poems reflecting Ricoeur's philosophies. Also, we represent transcripts of interviews with a graduate student as found poems to explore the nuances of her life as a student of qualitative research. We invite our readers into a coconstructed space of poetic interpretation.

Attending to emotion in a metaphor for success in physics with poetic analysis

“…This poetic analysis, guided by Colby and Bodily's work [8], consists of three steps: (1) presenting the original text and explaining what is said in it; (2) reading behind the text, consisting of explicating the original context of what was said and reshaping the text to develop a deeper understanding; and (3) reading in front of the text, consisting of constructing a poem which captures the essence of the intended meaning, opening the text and poem to possible interpretations, and considering our worlds that led to our interpretations. For the analysis, BZR and AVS met for four one-hour-long weekly meetings at AVS's home nearly a year after the initial interview.…”

“…Reconstructing transcripts into new forms also leads to thinking about data in new ways, leading to new insights [38]. To guide the analysis of the transcripts, we apply Ricoeur's hermeneutics as done in Colby and Bodily's poetic analysis [8].…”

“…This naïve understanding demands consideration of the dialogue's original contexts (who said something and to whom was it said) for a deeper understanding of the author's intended meaning (the "about something"). Once this deeper meaning is attained, it can then be inspected to reach deeper understandings of interpreters and their worlds influencing their interpretation, what Ricoeur calls appropriation [8,10,40,41]. The process of interpretation is central to analyzing metaphors, which often lack explicit explanation, and thus it is appropriate to implement Colby and Bodily's hermeneutic poetic analysis [8,10].…”

“…This concern with being faithful to participants' voices demanded us to seek novel methods of representing the participants' intended meanings [7]. To capture the emotional essence of a participant's metaphor, we follow the poetic inquiry of Colby and Bodily [8]. This consists of restructuring the transcript of a participant's metaphor of a Dandelion into a poem, while interpreting it through the lens of Ricoeur's hermeneutics to reach insights hidden in the contexts [8][9][10].…”

“…To capture the emotional essence of a participant's metaphor, we follow the poetic inquiry of Colby and Bodily [8]. This consists of restructuring the transcript of a participant's metaphor of a Dandelion into a poem, while interpreting it through the lens of Ricoeur's hermeneutics to reach insights hidden in the contexts [8][9][10]. This study also serves as an example of how poetic inquiry can be used to explore qualitative data in PER.…”