Poetic Inquiry as a Research Process 

BY CAMEA DAVIS

Poetic Inquiry is a research process created by multiculturalists and feminists in the 1970s who urged the field of qualitative research to make substantial space for the ways of knowing and being of minoritized people, including but not limited to women, people of color, among other groups. 

We, at Creative Generation - especially through our Institute of Creative Social Transformation - seek to produce new and honor existing forms of knowledge and ways of knowing, while dismantling systemic barriers to sharing and learning. Poetic inquiry is one of those ways.

A Brief History

Some of prominently published poetic inquiry scholars in academic spaces were working and creating in Canada and the United States, such as Carl Leggo, Patricia Leavy, Sandra Faulkner, Monica Prendergast, and others. As this type of research grew in popularity, scholars began to ask for more criticality in research methods to address the potential harm inherent in historic western research processes that failed to acknowledge the diversity of researcher identities and see research participants as agents. 

At the same time, spoken word poetry and poets were tangentially using word play, literary craft through poetry to critically analyze and synthesize the human condition in communities of people of color. These poets worked in the ancestral oral traditions of African Griots, Indigenous nonlinear storytelling, intuitive knowledge, and call and response communication styles among other cultural communication styles. 

Recently, Black women poet-researchers - likeQianna Cutts, Syreeta McTeir, and me, among others) began to expand theorizations on poetry as a research tool including Ars Spirituality, and culturally relevant poetic inquiry, and call and response critical poetic inquiry in collaboration. 

Culturally Responsive Critical Poetic Inquiry

While in a doctoral program studying qualitative research methods after having grown up and being educated in youth spoken word community spaces and pedagogy, I saw a clear fusion of the tools of poetic inquiry and spoken word to craft what I titled a Culturally Responsive Critical Poetic Inquiry Method. In the description of this method, I borrow from hip hop music’s notion of sampling to combine elements of traditional poetic inquiry, critical research orientations, and culturally responsive pedagogy to articulate a qualitative research method that sustains the cultural voices of participants, the quality of the sound of a human voice, and present research that challenges the status quo. 

My research process to conduct critical poetic inquiry includes a series of steps grounded in text based qualitative research methods and the craft of poetry writing. My work specifically focuses on criticality in issues, which questions justice, representation, harm, and works to amplify the voices of minoritized groups. These research poems work to do something beyond their craft.

It’s important to note that the poet-researcher should have 

  • an epistemological stance committed to a creative process of knowledge generation and that participants' words hold meaning prior to a researcher’s application of theory of analysis; and

  • a positionality that resists objectively and instead fully acknowledges and owns the unique experiences and identities they embody inform everything they do with the data.

The researcher is the instrument. 

A Process and a Product for Research

The critical poetic inquiry process includes listening to the participants in the research to respond to the initial research questions, going through a recursive five step process detailed below, and lots of interpersonal research, memoing and reflection. 

In poetic inquiry, data may include transcripts of interviews, focus groups, fieldnotes, written text (survey responses, narratives, etc) and other text based data. The data does not have to be in poetry initially, although participants may write poems as a part of a research inquiry. 

One product of this type of research can be the way text is arranged on the page. The poet-researcher uses enjambment, line breaks, and stanzas to creatively illustrate meaning through the poem’s structure. 

Personally, I also use spoken word where relevant to emphasize the sound quality of the human voice. One element that is challenging to capture in text format is the vocality of the spoken word poems. It is challenging to track the vocality of the work and the exchange in print, thus the power of vlogs and podcasts become uniquely valuable for this methodology. 

Data Analysis Process in Five Steps 

Here are the five steps of critical poetic inquiry

Step One:  Thematic Analysis 

Data analysis includes thematic coding which can include inductive coding - where the codes are derived from the data or a priori coding where a list of pre-existing terms/ideas often from a theoretical frame are applied to the data. The code list is distinguished. Then, poetic analysis can begin. 

Step 2: Critical Poetic Analysis 

After initial coding, critical poetic analysis includes reading data within each code aloud and listening for what Qianna Cutts describes as an intuitive, creative knowing of “what feels right” that Black women poets and poet-researchers employ as a reflexive and necessary practice. 

Next, I recommend extensive memoing about the possible themes and what the data says in free verse poetry to capture salient points in the data. 

Then, I write poetic memos for each set of coded data detailing researcher emotions, participants’ key ideas, metaphors, imagery, and phrases that lingered as significant. It is important that the images and key ideas come from the data. 

Some poetic inquiries detail the voice the poem is written in to help readers distinguish how the poetry was crafted. Sandra Faulkner in her 2016 book Poetry As Method: Reporting Research Through Verse assigns voice descriptions to the poems to indicate whose perspective the poem is from. For example, a participant-voiced poem is written from the perspective of the participants. Whereas a researcher-voiced poem is written from the perspective of the researcher. A literature-based research poem is written based on the literature about a topic. 

Then, I edit the poetry to ensure trustworthiness that aligned with the propositions

for critical poetic inquiry as a culturally relevant methodology (Davis, 2019):

  1. Research poetry that produces trustworthy research findings

  2. Research poetry that uses cultural competence as a sense-making tool

  3. Research poetry that develops research that can critique and address social inequity

Editing the poetry in this way moves the poetic analysis from free writing into poetic craft while also ensuring that the product accomplishes the goals of critical culturally relevant poetic inquiry. 

Step 3: Identify Key Themes 

A poet-researcher can pull verbatim participant quotes that illuminate the themes and put them into a poem for each theme or write several poems under each theme.  

Then I recommend using elements of ars spirituality by Qianna Cutts and ars criteria by Sandra Faulkner to craft quality participant-voiced research poems illustrative of the data excerpts. My process includes: 

  • Identify the salient meanings 

  • Pull key images, words, concepts from participant transcripts 

  • Add/layer in poetic craft such as metaphor, form, spacing, enjambment. etc. 

  • Quality and member check with collaborators/participants or community members

In the project used as an example here I chose free verse, spoken word poetry as instruments and technique but other forms could be chosen at the poet-researcher’s discretion. For example, the theme presented by the researcher. 

Step 4: Meet as with Poets/Artists to Conduct Art Quality Check 

Quality check with other experienced poets and poetry readers to ask: Does the research stand up/accomplish artistic quality? Is it quality art? 

Quality in arts-based research is long debated. The key point here is that the research art is representative of quality poetry based on the elements of craft and communal feedback. For me, I need to know does the poem move the human spirit? Does the poem effectively employ craft? And do other poets/artists confirm the artistic viability of the art? For me, research poetry must accomplish its task as art to be defined as such. 

Step 5: Data Presentation: Poem as Process & Product  

Lastly, it’s important to share the poems with the collaborators/participants that provided the data and share the data back to the communities it can support or serve. The data presentation may be the product of a series of research poems or the process of an open mic sharing time in a community. It could also be a workshop where participants are invited to read/hear the research poems and respond to them in a call and response format. I expound on the call and response format in other works. This element is essential as it gives the research art back to its originators, it attempts to make the data accessible to as many people as possible, and serves the first purpose of poetic inquiry methods which is to conduct research in the language of the people: poetry. 

Example Project: Creative Generation Why Change? Season Two Poetic Analysis 

This poetic analysis synthesizes Why Change? Season 2 podcast guests’ responses. At the end of each episode guests were invited to offer rapid fire responses to these five closing questions: who inspires you, what keeps you motivated, where are you most at home/where are you grounded, how do you stay focused, and why change?

To generate this analysis each participants’ answer to each question was pulled from the transcript and grouped by question. Then all the responses to each question were inductively coded for key ideas within each response and salient themes across all the responses. The words, key ideas, and all images of the poems are direct quotes from the transcripts. The poet-researcher gathers the data and re-presents it as a synthesis of how all participants responded across the 2nd season of the Why Change? podcast. 

Click here to hear and read the poems in this series.