Pull of Words

Abstract

Poetic inquirers immerse themselves in the flow of life, listening for art in the ordinary world, offering a response through voice and written word. The biennial International Symposium on Poetic Inquiry, which draws poet-scholars from across disciplines and the world, showcases the artful use of poetry in research as a method of inquiry. In this article, the Fifth Symposium on Poetic Inquiry is relived by two attendees who interrogate found poems they each created from presentations and performances. The poems are brought together as a means of researching each author’s respective approaches to creating found poetry. In this article, the authors converse about their methodological frameworks: phenomenology and metaphor/ narrative. Central to this dialogue is how the found poem is listened for, and how artful responses are made to the pull of words. The authors conclude by considering the ethics of rehousing others’ words and the challenge this inquiry presents to our own private sense-making in academic conferences.

"I Have a Bag of Old Knickers. Do You?"

“…The essence of this research project is the spoken word, the utterances of the participants; my enabling their voices to be heard rather than my reframing of their words in a new format. Found poet Adrian Schoone (Penwarden & Schoone, 2021) described the importance of noticing the body and sounds of both the researcher and the participant when writing poems, yet his work, although evocative and engaging, is composed in the written word. My project aims to build on that work by noticing and using the original sounds of the participants through creating audio found poems which I craft with an awareness that the final product is "a new voice that is not wholly the presenter's nor the found poet's" (Penwarden & Schoone, 2021, p. 359).…”