How do you write about poetry? Am I a poet? Not formally, no. But then I remembered that I have been a poet all my life. I am a sensitive being who has always paid attention to the subtleties around me, attempting to record them as creatively as possible. If poetry is both word-craft and person-craft (Chang & Beavington, 2020), then I have always been a poet. I learned to be a poet by reading, feeling, and continuing to craft words as well as myself. Becoming a poet – like all the arts – involves becoming familiar with and apprenticed to the craft of poetry, engaging with its traditions and contemporary forms within and across cultures, and developing a poetic sensibility and ear through sustained practice. Yet, to practice poetic enquiry in an everyday sense, all you need is to be a living, feeling, and storytelling human. We need to be open to showing, not telling, about our (in)humanity and all of its mysteries (Faulkner, 2017). As creative arts therapists, we are invited to live in the world as poets, vigilant about seeing the world with our senses, hearts, and imaginations (Leggo, 2008). We know that strong emotions must leave their traces somewhere. In our research, poetry can provide the place to record these traces (Woolf, 1976). Through encountering our poems, other beings can come to recognise themselves. The poetic recording of experiences can kindle an appetite for life (Steffler, 1995).

Poetry draws attention to the micro-things

It is for those who acutely feel sensations

Of the world whipping around us

Seeing rich colours and bright lights 

Through poetry, we can access somatic knowing (the body’s interaction with culture) through semantics (language). Poetry is the linguistic articulation of what gets into the body and why. (Spry, 2011)

Poems tend to stick around in our chests. One of the most potent poems I remember being gifted was Mary Oliver’s ‘Wild Geese’. I heard it for the first time in 2017 when I was a student in Creative Arts Therapy. The reason this poem left such a lasting impression on me is mysterious, but it has something to do with the person who recited it, the time in which I received it, and the ways it has returned to me over the years in unexpected places. Poetry can animate what Western ways of thinking often deem the inert parts of life, unworthy of moral consideration (Beavington, 2017), like geese. With poetry, we are invited to listen both to the poem and to that part of us that is reawakened by the poem, momentarily made aware emotionally and physically (Rich, 2003). Geese do this for me. These creatures have become a motif in my life, and I have read about how the Anthropocene has disrupted their migratory patterns and offered strange new spaces for them to claim territorial rights (Green, 2021). Mary Oliver’s ‘Wild Geese’ is a poem about many things, and every time I encounter it, I do so differently, noticing how Mary announces my place in the family of things, over and over again. Poetry is powerful like that. When we use poetry as part of our research, it offers more than just intellectual connections and stimulation. Poetry also offers spiritual, ecological, somatic, and temporal kinships, allowing us into the more-than-human chorus of voices (Leggo, 2019a).

Poetry offers spaces for our feeling bodies to slip through temporalities

It is for those who notice everything

Sensitive beings

Breath-takers

Poetry magnifies and puts into action sensory experiences, inviting the reader to interpret through their senses, too. (Madison, 2014)

The Greek word poiesis, translating roughly to ‘art’ in English, suggests both a process and the act of making. The philosopher Heidegger (1935/1975) wrote about poiesis, and creative arts therapy scholars such as Levine (2009) and Knill (2011) have borrowed from and expanded his theorising that poiesis, in the act of creativity, is a surrender to the process. As a generative performance, it cannot be willed or controlled as it is about becoming receptive to whatever is unfolding and allowing new forms to emerge without directing their outcomes (Levine, 2009). Engaging poietically is a shift toward welcoming surprises and unpredictable moments in our creative work (Knill, 2011). Poiesis is a force we can be in partnership with when engaging in poetic inquiry, as it involves paying close attention to the world around us, noticing what moves or calls us, and allowing our writing to flow through our bodies in a way that captures the movements of these poietic encounters.

A love of poetry and language can help us live poetically by noticing and recording moments of wonder and moments of remembrance (Leggo, 2019b). The specificity of poetry creates portals through which we can honour the past. We can acknowledge what has come before to appreciate better what we have now (Kimmerer, 2013). Leggo (2018) notes that poets are not scared to know the sacred. They learn to lean on uncertainty. Poets know that our first poems are our hearts beating and our breaths breathing. Through our words, we can return to these ancient languages and rhythms (Leggo, 2018). When you hear or read a good poem, you feel it reverberate in your chest. Poems possess a potency that makes our breaths catch. Words can stick to our ribs. This is why poets hum and click their fingers when they hear a fellow poet reciting a stanza that lands with a thud in their chest cavity. We hum in recognition of and solidarity with the sacred heartbeat of poetry. Poetry is prophecy, where doubt and despair live alongside creative imagination (Leggo, 2012).

Poetry offers breath

Space

Perspective

Momentary portals

Poetry does not describe. It is the thing. It is an experience, not the secondhand record of an experience, but the experience itself. (Griffin, 1995)

As a lecturer, I am warmed when students engage in poetic inquiry and carefully craft poems amongst the cramped words of essays. Well-written poems convey much more than conventional academic language can. Poetry invites writers and readers to pay attention to the semiotics of figurative language. Sound effects, texture, voice, rhythm, shape on the page, line breaks, and stanzaic structure. Everything in a poem can have significance. Glesne (2010) articulates that poets hear the spaces between the words, pick up on unsaid words, and find meanings beneath the words.

Humans, poets with complex brains and feeling bodies, can comprehend multiple matters and communicate these simultaneously in layered rhetoric. We play with this in everyday language: rhyme, interpretation, imagery, humour, oxymoron, satire, and onomatopoeia. Poetic inquiry is this performance in research (Madison, 2014). Poetic inquiry offers a legitimisation in research to stretch the limits of what language can do. Poetry can hold polarities, levity and gravity in the same phrase. The overlap with arts therapeutic practice is clear, as we are often moving into spaces with our clients where multiplicities can and must coexist in order for the sacred work of healing to occur. All people have the creative potential to compose lives with their imagination and words. As Freire (1997) states, we are transformative beings.

Carl Leggo (2008), one of the great scholars in the poetic inquiry space, states that poetry does not pretend to understand anything. There is too much we do not and can never fully know. He goes on to say that poetry seeks not to close anything down or control it. Instead, poetry seeks an openness to the world and its mysteries by embracing fragmentariness. Leggo (2008) says that knowing through poetry is about embracing the archipelago of these fragments. In poetry, we surrender to this archipelago and let it wash over us without trying to impose order or control (Prendergast, 2015). If poetry is an archipelago, an island chain of momentary encounters, then, as poets, we are inviting readers to surrender their cognitive knowings and meet, as much as possible, the itself-ness of a poetic encounter (Wolff, 1972).

Many researchers drawn to arts-based and storytelling methods also gravitate to poetic inquiry. Nestling companionship exists in these realms of scholarship. I noticed this most recently when I attended the 9th International Symposium of Poetic Inquiry in Auckland, New Zealand. When I walked into the conference room, I recognised the many familiar faces of those I had met the year prior at the Critical Autoethnography Conference in Melbourne, Australia. A strong kinship existed between those who engaged in critical storytelling practices and those who desired to use poetry to convey these stories. This is partly because art, storytelling, and poetry help us feel things differently through texture, rhythm, colour, and style (Haase & Large, 2001). These forms of research offer alternative communication portals to the academy’s standardised prose (Faulkner, 2009). Through poetic inquiry, we may explore the lively intersections between critical and creative discourse (Leggo, 2008). Poetry can be used to support writers and researchers in conveying their stories, theories, literature, and artefacts in ways that conventional academic writing cannot get close to. As creative arts therapy researchers, it is unsurprising that many of us are drawn to poetry in our scholarship. Engaging in poetic inquiry can be used in the planning, data generation, analysis, write-up, or dissemination stages of academic work.

Poetry, unlike prose, is a textual event, an act of literature, an experience of spelling and spells. Poetry is a practical and powerful means for reconstituting worlds (Leggo, 2008) that moves writers and readers to consider how stringing words together differently may be a form of resistance (Faulkner & England, 2020; Thomas et al., 2012). Poetry offers a way out of the numbing, deadening, disaffected, disembodied sensibilities of other social science research expectations (Richardson, 1994). Poetry, then, is political. It can catch us off-guard and simultaneously move readers between cognitive and sensory worlds (Sparkes & Smith, 2014). Derrida (1992) articulates this by saying that every poem has its own language, and the powerful ones have several languages crossing together.

I listened to a podcast recently by a scientist who, in their field, broke conventional rules by including poems at the ends of their doctoral thesis chapters. The poems captured the extraordinary wonder of coming to know the amoebas they spent their days peering at through microscopes. The scientist wrote small, powerful poems that conveyed the mystery of their research findings beyond numbers, formulas and graphs. As a poet, they went further than science usually allowed them (Winterson, 1995). The examiners praised their boldness to include these poems during their oral defence. One examiner stated that the poems offered them breathing space and an invitation to be with the mystery of their experiments in amongst the rigour of their scholarship. The poet took a well-received risk to translate their scientific world through poetic language. Not intending to hide behind the illusion of objectivity, their poetic voice was loud about life’s emotional, vulnerable, and sensuous parts (Pelias, 2004). It was written from their heart, in a field where this is usually strongly discouraged.

As creative arts therapy researchers, how lucky are we to be in a profession and academic field that welcomes poetic inquiry? How lucky are we to be able to use poems freely in our writing and not have to hide them deviously? We have a legitimate form of inquiry, through poetry, that we can lean into. Like the scientist, our poems, as creative arts therapy researchers, are part of our ongoing engagement with the living world. The poems are our sites for dwelling, holding up, and feeling these worlds, hoping that others will read and feel these worlds too (Leggo, 2008).

Poetic inquiry is a way to engage in an intentional practice of living, as poems are everywhere (Kingsolver, 2002). As poetic inquirers, we listen and feel, call attention to the poems when they arrive, and dutifully record their pulses. Like the scientist researching their amoeba, as poetic inquirers, we are examining experiences by attending closely to what is unfolding in front of us (Leggo, 2008).

Please enjoy the collection of writers who lean into poetry in their scholarship to attend to the worlds around them.