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This paper is written in a personal capacity and mainly takes the form of a poem - in five sections - composed as a response to some of the ideas in the article by Hannu Heikkinen and colleagues in this same issue of "Educational Action Research": 'Action research as narrative: five principles for validation'. The poem takes its title and structure from that article: its coming-into-being as a piece of work is described in the short introduction. As the introduction mentions, the author-poet has discussed, in previous papers, some of the connections and disconnections between the practices of educational research and poetry. The present paper offers actual work-in-practice that illustrates how these have been played out in one context - which was as poet-in-residence at a conference on inter-professional learning and practice in healthcare. The author is very keen to tempt others into dialogue on these issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It may appear that the act of writing is fruitless in the face of the size and open-ended complexity of gathering environmental calamities including global heating, species extinction, and the appearance of plastic in everything. And yet – and yet – poets and others continue to write in ways that allow us to think about the earth's futures and, more specifically, the future of place in catastrophic times. Geo, Eco and Topo – poetics are acts of making – making earth, home, and place. Making earth as homeplace. This paper considers Juliana Spahr's book Well Then There Now as an entry point into thinking and writing about place in a relational way appropriate for a time of emergency. It focuses on the ways writing-as-making (poiesis) can help us to diagnose troubled worlds and prefigure new ones. The paper surveys the connections between geography and poetry, outlines the contributions of eco, geo and topo poetics and explores the hybrid poetics of Well Then There Now before advocating for the affordances of creative writerly approaches for geography more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Empathy is an important aspect of therapeutic relationships in health and social care settings. Health educators can foster empathy development in learners through creative writing activities. Drawing on the humanities, specifically poetry, this paper offers strategies for educators to support empathy development in learners, with a focus on service user poetry and associated creative writing activities. We discuss how poetry can enable alternative perspectives about care to emerge thereby challenging previously held assumptions about mental and physical states. Using poetry can enable a rehearsal of empathy by bringing experiences to the learner in a safe and facilitated environment. Through creative writing activities, we believe that students can learn to better understand and empathise with others, as well as explore their own feelings and experiences related to caregiving, to support self-care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the concept of emotion and its relevance to education via character education through the medium of poetry. The objective is to demonstrate the potential implementation of character education through poetry, and to show the intrinsic link between poetry and virtue, knowledge and reasoning. It is argued that poetry serves as a bridge between emotion and character education. The philosophy of emotions is explored through the works of Aristotle, Karin Bohlin and David Carr. Character education is understood in terms of a Neo-Aristotelian approach, drawing on Kristján Kristjánsson, Bohlin and Carr. My position is that, through exercising the craft of poetry, children and young students are provided with tools for exploring emotions, and for discerning and deliberating about virtues and moral contextual nuances in the broader context of human experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As digital photography proliferates in the contemporary world, theorists and creative writers continue to debate what photographs signify and how the poetic ekphrasis of photographs should be understood. This has become a pressing issue in an age when new technologies allow the easy manipulation of digital images – which, depending on the context in which they are viewed, are increasingly being characterised as creative, imaginative, unreliable or deceptive. Yet nineteenth- and early to mid-twentieth-century theorists tended to assume that photographs had a direct, if complex, relationship to observable, external reality, something reiterated by Susan Sontag as late as 1977. This paper discusses how ekphrastic poems by Thomas Hardy and Philip Larkin enshrine assumptions about photography that are now shifting, and how contemporary ekphrastic poems about photographs increasingly challenge, sometimes subversively, photography's link to the 'real'. Such poetry continues to emphasise the way photographs connote a 'chasm' or 'thickening' of time but are more troubled than earlier authors by the idea that photographs may not represent anything clear or knowable. Eve Joseph's and Leslie Scalapino's poetry demonstrates ways in which photographs tend to juxtapose a sense of transience with a new sense of photography's sometimes obdurate problematics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of European Journal of Psychotherapy & Counselling is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In a personal paper about the author's animus, Watsky explores his fascination with Louise Glück, after attempting to solicit first her poetry for Jung Journal and then an interview about her voice in her poetry shortly after her death. He realized he had projected his anima onto a complete stranger known only through her writing. Suspicious of his motives, he proceeds to read her entire oeuvre during a two-week period, exploring their intersections and their divergences. Watsky then narrates a previous projection onto the writer Joanna Field who turned out to be the Freudian analyst Marion Milner. After reading all of her work and convinced that she had been influenced by Jung, he sought her out in Hamstead, England. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Siculo-Norman king, Roger II (1095–1154), created a courtly culture that used art, architecture, and literature to reflect the symbolic and cultural values of the states that ringed the Mediterranean. An essential vehicle for Roger's cosmopolitan dialogue was the performance of court poetry that was broadly inclusive of the poetic conventions of the Latin, Greek, and Arabic-speaking worlds. Poetic performance at Palermo created an integrative dialogue of cultural valuation that crossed political as well as linguistic boundaries. While such acts of statesmanship might seem quaint to modern eyes, the potential of Siculo-Norman cosmopolitanism becomes more intriguing when we reflect on the current reality of failed states (Northern Africa), continuous conflicts (Israel), and fissured unions (EU) that ring the Mediterranean today. Roger's diplomatic use of poetry offers a refreshing alternative to the broken dialogue that exists in contemporary interstate relations in the Mediterranean. This paper illustrates that diplomatic poetic exchange has the ability to create cross-cultural commensurability in ways that modern cosmopolitan practices rooted in international law cannot. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper defines the notion of dialogic local space and highlights its importance to teaching and learning. A dialogic local space values multiple local realities as it invites us to listen to, take up, and have confidence in our own local everyday and personal realities, and to listen to, consider, and respond to other local realities. This openness can deepen and widen how we know and see our own realities. We show what a dialogic local space can look like in a second grade classroom community. We employ sociocultural discourse analysis to illuminate one teacher's pedagogical choices in a month-long poetry Writing Workshop unit for seven-and-eight year olds. We present a big picture look at the unit and then take a close look at five minilessons. Findings detail ways this teacher's minilesson design, flow, and content cultivate dialogic local spaces, and how a dialogic stance, manifest in classroom talk practices, encourages students to participate in these spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theorization of cultural and political issues of Northeast of India often creates a disengagement from the actual cultural performances produced in the region. This unique geo-cultural place is sometimes homogenized. In actuality, it is the home of diverse socio-cultural practices and performances. In the context of globalization, deforestation, Christianization, other internal clashes and external influences, material bodies, here, are continuously being rewritten in socio-cultural sphere. Non-representational theory considers poetry as an effective mode of exhibiting the virtual multiplicity of the nonrepresentational world. This paper will focus on exploring the corpus of Northeast Indian English poetry that focuses on social practices and bodily experiences to interpret the entire cultural flow of everyday life. As Non-representational Theory positions 'affect' as a central issue to individual and collective disposition in constituting the affective political discourse, this paper will also indicate some political imperatives by advancing a politics of hope in the realm of socio-political sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since its inception, Nigerian poetry in English has always been characterized by protest in nature. Beyond its aesthetic scope, it has been critical of socio-political and environmental problems that have bedevilled the nation. This paper is concerned with such literary instrumentalism; the use of poetry by Nigerian writers, living in Nigeria, as an instrument against abuses of human and environmental rights. The theoretical framework that is employed is drawn from the notions of protest writing in Africa and ideas of postcolonial ecocriticism. This will provide a context that brings the fate of humans and nonhumans together under the weight of a failed home government and multinational capitalism in contemporary Nigeria. This study will trace the development of literary and political events in Nigeria, followed by a textual analysis of selected poems. Attention will also be paid to the growth of environmental legislation in Nigeria since the colonial period. This article concludes by arguing that in the absence of an effective or practical legal framework, poetry remains one of the most significant instruments for highlighting the violation of human and environmental rights. As such, the study benefits contemporary scholarship by drawing attention to the social dimension of poetry – and the arts generally – as well as the role literature plays in foregrounding environmental crises in postcolonial societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper emerges from a seven-year, ongoing relational poetics between two poets and their former secondary English teacher. Organized by the world's urgencies, the three authors have studied the force of poetry throughout incidences of violence against Black lives close to home and across the United States. This practice began in the classroom and continues beyond graduation through remote correspondence across three cities. Through it we develop the concept of study as love, engaging with Moten & Harney's concept of study as irreducibly social and in excess of institutional parameters. We also develop the concept of poetics as more than methodology, engaging with Glissant's poetics of relation. Through love and poetics, we call for literacy studies engaged with the ontogenesis of Black life, moving beyond institutionally white disciplinary methods and standard research outputs. We ask how the poetics of relation and the love of study produce new worlds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a contradiction in how Stevie Smith saw the relationship between her poems and drawings. On the one hand, she looked at her doodles as vital to her poetry and backed with a great deal of intentionality. She painstakingly cut and pasted them into her drafts and left detailed notes to her publishers when those placements were not to her exact specifications. On the other hand, though, she talked about her doodles as if they were ephemeral and backed only by caprice. This essay argues that Smith's doodles play at the intersection of intentionality and caprice; in doing so, they become deliberately detachable objects that signify both placed with and when displaced from her poetry. Decisions, whether by Smith or by her editors, to move or remove an image have both subtle and dramatic changes for readers' experiencing of her poems. This paper relies on archival and published sources to provide readings of several of Smith's poems including 'Do Take Muriel Out,' 'The Rehearsal,' 'The After-Thought,' and 'Not Waving but Drowning.' In their continual ability to be removed and reattached to her poetry, Smith's doodles destabilize the texts that they supposedly compliment, while at the same time also revitalizing them by allowing them to remain open to new interpretations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates what it may mean to re-imagine learning through aesthetic experience with reference to John Dewey’sArt as Experience(1934). The discussion asks what learning might look like when aesthetic experience takes centre stage in the learning process. It investigates what Dewey meant by art as experience and aesthetic experience. Working with Dewey as a philosopher of reconstruction of experience, the discussion examines responses to poetic writings and communication in learning situations. In seeking to discover what poetic writing (as art) does within the experience of a reader and writer it considers three specific learning situations. Firstly there is an examination of a five-year old child’s experience of shared communication through the story of Horton the Elephant. Secondly there is an account of the responses of an 11-year-old child to poetry in a 1950s classroom setting, and later reconstructions of those experiences by the child as adult. Thirdly, the paper extends to intensive writing with 12 to 13-year-old children. The focus is on the process of learning via acts of expression as aesthetic experiences. Through art as experience the child develops perceptions that recover a coherence and continuity of aesthetic experience in art as in everyday life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper concerns young adults who came to Sweden from Afghanistan as unaccompanied refugee minors (UMs) and their engagement with poetry and other creative activities. The aim was to explore how UMs use poetic writing and other creative activities to handle resettlement challenges. Seven young men and six young women, aged 18–24, participated in semi-structured interviews. The material was analyzed using the three components of poetry therapy, developed by Mazza. Three themes were identified: (1) Encouragement; (2) Creative expressions as a "safe place"; and (3) A sense of recognition. Through creative expressions, our participants could understand and handle the emotional difficulties and the insecurity associated with resettlement. Poetic writing was a way to convey personal experiences of injustices, a source of self-understanding, and a way to establish new social networks. We discuss and present suggestions on how poetry and other creative activities can be integrated in interventions toward UMs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a possible path to overcoming the knowledge/experience dualism that TS Eliot famously labelled the 'dissociation of sensibility' and my related desire to write what I define as an 'omnivorous lyric' - a poem in which a wide range of nonexperiential knowledge is integrated convincingly. Drawing on Lyn Hejinian's essay 'The Rejection of Closure', I explore the opportunities an open poetics presents for the convincing integration of non-experiential knowledge but argue also for a level of closure. Adapting Umberto Eco's idea of 'suggestiveness', I propose that the omnivorous lyric, initially composed in openness, should seek to achieve 'directional suggestiveness' in the later stages of composition. This movement towards closure, which remains resistant to a single or dominant sense, is realised through amplifying patterns of meaning in the work. An analysis of my omnivorous lyric, 'Moderate', demonstrates how these ideas can be practically employed in the compositional process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the impact of a Spoken Word Education Programme (SWEP hereafter) on young people’s engagement with poetry in a group of schools in London, UK. It does so with reference to the secondary Discourses of school-based learning and the Spoken Word community, an artistic ‘community of practice’ into which they were being inducted. It focuses on what happened when secondary students, already enculturated into school Discourses about learning (in their English lessons especially), learned about new ways of being readers, writers, listeners, and performers through the SWEP Discourse. The paper draws on qualitative data collected during the first three years of programme development to consider how an introduction to the social practices of this artistic community appeared to influence 11–18 year old students’ attitudes to poetry study, discussion, writing, and performance both in school and beyond the parameters of traditional secondary school learning. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper looks at the use of poetry as a social research method and describes the underlying philosophy as well as the practical processes involved in carrying out such an approach. It draws on an ESRC-funded research project which took place at a Sure Start programme in an impoverished town in North West England. Sure Start was a New Labour initiative working with families with young children in disadvantaged areas. The research used poetry as one of several means of working with the community in order to look at the effectiveness of the local programme and to explore people's experiences of parenting in poverty. The paper discusses some of the poems produced during this project and questions the extent to which an arts-based approach to social inquiry can challenge dominant ideologies of oppressed people and provide an alternative discourse. This is particularly important in social work education in terms of addressing pre-conceptions that students may have about those marginalised groups that they are likely to be working with in their future practice as social workers. It concludes that poetic texts can provide insight into the lives of others, and can generate important discussion in the process of their interpretation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Research with young people who 'do not fit the mould' requires innovative and unconventional methods, but what are the implications of such methods for scholarly representation? This paper reports on the development of such a method with students diagnosed Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and offers one view of the borderland spaces and tensions between critical theory and narrative inquiry. In particular, the paper defines the methodology that underpins the 'critical cover narratives' method, describes the application of this approach within a doctoral study, and identifies resultant issues of representation when combining narrative and critical approaches. The paper then details the use of a tapestry metaphor to reconcile these issues. The central premise of the paper is that differing methods produce different knowledge, which demands different forms of representation. In making this case, the paper discusses the importance of a balance between the epistemological and aesthetic within scholarly representations of narrative inquiry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay considers the methodological intervention of understanding a 'mother tongue' (matribhasha) as a gendered vernacular. It seeks to illustrate the subversive potential of the vernacular as a gendered lens though which we can understand the Dalit feminist critiques of caste hierarchies and Dalit and non-Dalit patriarchies, and the places they intersect. The essay considers the works of Anita Bharti and Meena Kandasamy, contemporary Dalit women authors who write in Hindi and English, respectively. Thus, this paper extends the definition of the vernacular beyond the confines of linguistic and regional specificity, allowing for a feminist reclamation of the term. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reading poetry aloud is an extremely useful teaching method for therapists and analysts, one that attunes mind and ear to both self and other. To listen to a poem, one must be open to the experience of physical sensations, affects, silent registers and unknowingness that may take some time to begin to put into words. Becoming conscious of internal resonances coinciding with those of another is the basis for the clinical skills we are hoping to help trainees develop. Being present in an embodied way to the music of what is spoken also develops a heightened sense of effective uses of language in psychoanalytic writing. This paper offers several poems in very different styles in order to think about this process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the foundations of picturebook studies is that the visual- and verbal-texts together create an integrated experience of the whole text. However, for poetry in picturebooks, the designation of "poem" is traditionally applied only to the verbal-text. In this paper I argue that visual techniques can be more than simply "poetic" and can be part of the structural and technical choices that make a poem. I apply this theoretical discussion to the example of Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are concluding that combined visual and verbal techniques create an integrated visual-verbal poem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this research was to analyse poetry written by Israeli high-school students during or after visiting Poland within the framework of Holocaust education. I describe first the stages of shaping the discourse of Holocaust memory in Israel, and of Holocaust education; the Holocaust's place in the world of young Israelis; and the journeys to Poland as reflected in research. Following that, I present the results of the research and an analysis of the findings. The paper will discuss how Israeli adolescents cope with a cultural trauma. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this discussion of David Shaddock's beautiful paper, I strongly agree that our patients need us to serve as witnesses for their traumatic experiences. However, my understanding of what makes the role of witness so profoundly challenging differs from Shaddock's. In contrast to Shaddock who believes that traumatized people live in a separate world, I believe that we all live in the same world, one that is wracked by trauma. I also challenge Shaddock's reference to "the third." I find it difficult to think of the act of witnessing in terms of "the third", "the cultural third," even "a living third." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a critical discussion of the treatment of mimetic art, and particularly poetry and the theatre, in the work of the Athenian philosopher Plato (427–347 BC). It centres on Plato’s discussion of the corrupting powers of the arts in the Republic, and the implications that his fierce attack on poetry and theatre have for his construction of the ideal polity. The legacy of Platonic ideas in later elaborations of the corrupting power of the arts is discussed. Furthermore, the paper investigates the relationship between current debates on cultural policy and the Platonic idea that the transformative powers of the arts ought to be harnessed by the state to promote a just society. The conclusion thus reached is that “instrumental cultural policy”, rather then being a modern invention, was in fact first theorized precisely in Plato’s Republic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces a new teaching method, poetry, into the geography classroom, accompanied by an out-of-class discussion on a blog, and finds that its effects are rather different from those of traditional teaching methods, as it allows new perspectives on instructional content related to migrant workers’ lives and identities in China. The method enables students to analyse content from the perspective of cultural geography, in which poetry acts as an art form that connects people’s identities and social spaces. On the basis of this, we also provide some suggestions to engage students in critical analysis of poetry, from the perspective of cultural geography, through interactive online platforms such as blogs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is the thinking that poetry does? In his essay, ‘The origin of the work of art’, Martin Heidegger proposes a distinction between two poetic modes –DichtungandPoesie –in which the former is an extra-linguistic framing essence which makesPoesie, the manifestation of poetry in language, possible. In another essay, ‘What are poets for?’ the philosopher claims technology creates a fissure of forgetfulness between selves and contexts, and that ‘To be a poet in a destitute time means: to attend, singing, to the trace of the fugitive gods’. This ficto-critical paper – written after the experience of a week's vipassanā meditation – reads Robert Hass' poem ‘Meditation at Lagunitas’ as a text that aims for chthonic reconnection between objects, experience, and language. In speculating that processes of active and non-linguistic practice are generativeandhumanising, this paper re-reads meditation as a mode of gnostic self-extinction (after Eliot) which can enable access to intuitive zones (Heidegger'sDichtung), and which situates ‘an understanding of reality that transcends ordinary comprehension’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This conceptual paper examines the possibilities for restorying the self through drama conventions using narrative poetry as a stimulus. Using the poem "The Terrorist, He's Watching" by Wislawa Szymborska to engage with drama conventions, we illustrate how educators might support young and marginalised people to participate in the process of restorying. In doing so, we argue for the importance of using poetry and drama to create meta-narratives of discourse which empower participants to restory themselves into the dominant forms of narrative through creative exploration. Szymborska's poem has been chosen as a stimulus due to the poet's use of multiple perspectives and roles, in different times and places, which enable people to reshape and reimagine their identity and explore dominant narratives about terrorism. The authors intend to follow this conceptual piece with an empirical study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the author, who is a single mother of a young man with mental illness, describes her son’s first psychotic break. By melding poetry, prose, dream journal entries, and medical case notes, she explores the embodied experience of witnessing her son’s decompensation. In sharing her story, she reminds other caregivers of people with mental illness that they are not alone. She makes sense of her experience with findings from the literature about posttraumatic stress among family caregivers of people with chronic illness and explores the implications for caregivers, practitioners, and scholars of mental illness, trauma, and loss. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The death of a loved one can create a tear in the fabric of meaning. Grieving involves remaking meaning. In therapy, events can be emplotted into stories, which can return some sense of coherence to the bereaved. In this paper, I present a way of narrating loss through a narrative therapy approach of retelling. This involved writing found poems, known as rescued speech poems, from the conversations of people who had lost a loved partner. The found poetry sought to bring an order to grieving and to polish the beauty of key moments following loss. For one participant, the found poetry amplified a narrative of the biography of the loved one. For another, the poems added beauty to a memory of her deceased partner. Thus, rescued speech poems—judiciously selected from speech, and sensitively arranged on the page—can provide another way to facilitate vibrant meaning-making of life after loss. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay zooms in on the story of the Palestinian body condemned to suffer unspeakable injustices so that a system based on inequity keeps working for the few. It relies on poetic texts written or performed by those whose bodies are controlled by the interrelated forces of settler colonialism, authoritarianism, and imperialism. The storms these forces unleash and the prices they exact in terms of human life cement the condition of the body whose life bears witness to the fall of justice. The essay argues that these poets practice what we would like to call "seizing life from the teeth of death" wherein their determination to fight oppression exceeds national and regional boundaries to embrace and learn from the indigenous nations in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on the experience of composing a book of poems about visual art and on the ways in which this was affected by the institutional circumstances pertaining to its funding. Underpinning the AHRC's support for creative writing is the notion that creative writing should be conceived as a form of practice-led research. The case for support therefore stressed the ways in which the modes of writing about art would also form a subject for creative practice and critical reflection and the author offered both a critical preface and a critical article in this context. A project which involves ekphrasis, however, brings the relationship between the creative and critical components of the creative act into the sharpest possible focus and the author found himself engaged on a project which had the Academy's understanding of creative writing at its heart. This paper examines how the reading of an unusual critical text - itself a hybrid of critical prose and poetry - impacted the intellectual tensions at play among the poems being created, leading to paradoxical outcomes: the incorporation of critical prose into lyrically inflected prose-poems and a rejection of critical prose as a vehicle adequate to the documentation of practice-led creative processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Social & Cultural Geography is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The line is arguably the most defining feature of poetic structure. Discussions of prosody are prone to the limitations of convention, though the poet may strive for more freedom in the line. This paper begins by noting an example of a radical use of page space from Mallarmé and goes on to describe recent innovations and experiments with line breaks in work by Australian and New Zealand poets, and to summarise the functions of the line breaks used. These explorations of form show that the poetic line is neither static nor redundant in contemporary practice, and suggest the need for poets to reappraise the possibilities made available to them by the work of their peers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Jerome Bruner’s experiment over 30 years ago suggested that imaginative literature had greater affordances for the ‘subjunctification’ of experience by those who heard it read aloud than did transactional prose such as a news article. By ‘subjunctification’, Bruner meant the capacity to use the resource (the short story, for example) to transform one’s experience of the world, to render understanding in more complex ways and to do more than get things done as they have always been done. This paper reports on a small-scale replication of the experiment that sought to measure differences in the affordances of poetry being read aloud compared to hearing a short story or a news article. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This research uses poetry as a form of data to explore a sense of ‘belonging’ for staff working in higher education. Poetic content analysis was explored as a research method and using poetry in this way has allowed for a nuanced exploration of questions of belonging in the context of individual intersectional identities. Following an analysis of eighteen poems submitted by staff working in higher education four major categories emerged: ‘Community’, ‘Exclusion’, ‘Transformation’, and ‘Self’. These emergent narratives led to several recommendations that institutions and individuals might consider implementing to create a more positive sense of belonging for all staff working in higher education. These recommendations and emergent narratives are centred around a willingness for higher education as a sector to better recognise and nurture the deep-rooted commitment that is shared by many staff to the potential of higher education both now and in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been little research into poetry classification and the potential to access poems by form and genre. The categories listed in the Library of Congress Genre/Form Terms (LCGFT), Wikipedia, Amazon.com, and the poetry-sharing platform, PoetrySoup, were compared through a systematic mapping process. It was found that LCGFT coverage is more extensive for poetry than fiction, but all four sources' coverage is limited. Beyond a small core of well-established forms and genres, poetry is classified in many less well-known ways, with many categories based on form, as well as a wide range of other characteristics, including some very specific ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the dissonance created when Emily Brontë's striving to find language that equals her 'world within' is constrained by the 'world without'. The title quotation, the opening line of one of Brontë's early fragments, highlights the intensity of her desire to wake the song that so moved her in the past. It is Emily Brontë's struggle to wake the 'entrancing song' coupled with the pull of the 'heavenly key' that impels her poetry. In her treatment of desire to re-enter states of past bliss, Emily Brontë is an heir of Wordsworth. Reading her poems alongside Wordsworth's 'Ode: Intimations of Immortality', I explore how Wordsworth's cry of 'Whither is fled the visionary gleam' is also Brontë's. Yet, this dissonance is for both poets, to use Emily's own words, a 'darling pain'. The longing, even with the pain, is a form of fulfilment. So, I conclude by arguing that this seeming dissonance is what gives Brontë's poetry its 'peculiar music'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on my continuing engagement as a poet with the visual arts. It outlines the nature of a book of ekphrastic poetry sponsored by the Arts and Humanities Research Council of Great Britain (AHRC), how this project relates to my previous work in this field and seeks to set this practice-led project in the context of recent developments in ekphrastic theory. It is concerned especially with the concept of mimesis as this term applies in both ekphrasis and translation. I will begin by outlining briefly what I take to be the main trends in current ekphrastic theory and practice before relating them to the two collections of poetry I have worked on in recent years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research investigated the use of poems for reflection. Participants (n = 16) were enrolled upon a Foundation Degree in Sports Coaching. Part modular assessment saw the students create an action plan that provided key indicators as to their ability within a range of study skills. The entire cohort failed to implement the plan. Whilst there exists a prevailing wind of poetic embrace within the social sciences, limitations are evident within the domain of sport and physical activity. The research questions whether poems may be implemented as a means to initial reflection and reorientation and as a consolidation of prior learning. Findings suggest poetry may aid initial reflection and reorientation and a consolidation of prior learning, that the writings were enjoyable, at times frustrating, developmental and that such creativity might be advocated elsewhere across the HE curriculum. Implications for the learner are discussed and I suggest a framework for practitioners (‘Reflective Facilitation’), which considers how we may assist our learners in a process of guided discovery in which their reflections may become critical and self-governed. The paper then considers the limitations of the research process and offers considerations for future practice. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Taking as a case study the marble group of Apollo and Daphne, sculpted by Giovan Lorenzo Bernini for Cardinal Scipione Borghese in the 1620s, this paper discusses the exchange between sculpture and poetry in determining how the beholder engages the sculpted object. More in particular, the question is addressed how the image's infringement on the beholder's world and body can both be activated and channelled by text and discourse, and how, at the same time, the artist seeks to relate to such a discourse with his work. To map this complicated exchange, first several contemporary poems are discussed, focusing in particular on the manner in which they thematize the beholder's encounter with sculpture. Subsequently, the Apollo and Daphne is scrutinized to gain understanding in the ways it engages with and presupposes literary discourse and the embodied beholder. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Shelley's "Letter to Maria Gisborne" is a playful improvisational verse epistle, widely praised for its urbanity and its display of the poet's invention. The verses turn on a catalogue of the collection of odd scientific and mechanical objects that Shelley found scattered around him in the place he composed the letter, the Livorno workshop of Gisborne's son, a young engineer who was building a new-model steamboat at the time (with Shelley's financial and intellectual backing). In the context of that space, the poem reads as a response to competing notions of invention. For Shelley, the engineer's workshop is an attractive alternative to the poet's tower—which was uncomfortably close to a Grub Street garret. Verbal and visual images of poets' and scientists' workshops, from Hogarth and Mary Robinson, to Joseph Wright of Derby and Frankenstein, illustrate the tensions embodied in the physical location and poetic performance of Shelley's celebrated "Letter." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the relationship between continuity and change in Central Asian domestic felt textile production. In order to set this in the context of a pastoralist perspective, the paper draws on regional practices such as oral poetry and movement through landscape, as well as human–environment relations in order to reveal the dynamic and creative improvisatory process through which local textile production can be understood. In so doing, it examines whether Euro-American anthropology's rejection of a ‘static’ notion of ‘tradition’ for one of hybridity (reflecting a critique of its own nostalgia), has inadvertently moved us away from a focus on the historical narratives of those we study, which is often at odds with their own concerns. The author argues that for ‘moving people’, it is the dynamics of orality, human–environment relations and the practice (rather than the evidence) of material culture that elucidates our understanding of the relationship between continuity and change. The power of felt is thus reflected in the apparently ephemeral, non-enduring, aspects of these practices, which are what makes them endure, continuously bringing the past into being for new cultural futures. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper discusses how major breakthroughs in generating, analysing and disseminating action research about problem-based learning were made through the medium of poetry. I used poetry in three ways: as data, as an interpretive device and as a reflective medium. Poetry helped me to disseminate my research in provocative, memorable and challenging ways. Action research is conceptualised as a triple process of doing, thinking and being that incorporates the powerful use of poetry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Trauma needs containment and recognition in order to be handled, and this project enabled the soldier to do both through the use of writing and poetry. This paper is based on the qualitative findings of an 18-month long poetry therapy group conducted in a veteran's center, and follows the progress of the veterans as they learned to use writing and poetry to focus on the present and reconnect to a broad spectrum of emotions they had been trained to suppress. The paper describes the theory behind the exercises and their impact on the veterans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our project was initiated by a simple, straightforward desire: to write on water, to put a poem on a pond. In this essay, I will discuss the subsequent 'writing on water' projects undertaken in conjunction with university classes offered on visual and concrete poetry, its history and application. Here, the students and I were together presented with the challenge of imagining (and manifesting) alternative forms of text, alternative means and methods (other than upon paper or computer screen) of inscribing language onto the environment. The poetic and pedagogical repercussions from these projects proved quite illuminating, as language itself was materially and conceptually re-enlivened, re-imagined as liquid resonance, as floating form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper takes the form of a dialogue between the two authors, and is in two halves, the first half discursive and propositional, and the second half exemplifying the rhetorical, epistemological and metaphysical affordances of poetry in critically scrutinising the rhetoric, epistemology and metaphysics of educational management discourse. The authors explore, through ideas and poems, how poetry can interrupt and/or illuminate dominant values in education and in educational research methods, such as: alternatives to the military metaphors - targets, strategies and the like - that dominate the soundscape of education; the kinds and qualities of the cognitive and feeling spaces that might be opened up by the shifting of methodological boundaries; the considerable work done in ethnography on the use of the poetic: anthropologists have long used poetry as a medium for expressing their sense of empathic connection to their field and their subjects, particularly in considering the creativity and meaning-making that characterise all human societies in different ways; and the particular rhetorical affordances of poetry, as a discipline, as a practice, as an art, as patterned breath; its capacity to shift phonemic, and therewith methodological, authority; its offering of redress to linear and reductive attempts at scripting social life, as always already given and without alternative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on research on masculinities to examine poetry as a socially and culturally gendered genre. Situated in the context of the current 'crisis' around boys' underachievement in school, attention is drawn to the problematic understanding of poetry as an unsuitable genre for boys. Attention is further drawn to the way in which poetry, when offered up to boys, is often imbued with traditional and outdated definitions of masculinity. We illustrate the extent to which hegemonic versions of masculinity are implicated in discourses about poetry as an unsuitable genre for boys. This is accomplished by undertaking a critical analysis of various sources such as Odean's (1998) Great Book for Boys, and Scieszka's (2005) Guys Write for Guys Read, as well as Iggulden and Iggulden's (2006) The Dangerous Book for Boys. Historical perspectives which highlight the role of sexologists in forging an association between poetry and effeminacy are also used to illuminate the legacy associated with the treatment of poetry somehow discordant with dominant understandings about boys' developing masculinity. In this way, we provide a richer understanding of poetry and its discursive relationship to masculinity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous studies of poetry in healthcare education have investigated self-selected groups. Many have been descriptive, whilst others speculated on utility and justification. This study explores perceptions of learners, a cohort of 13 registrars in one general practice training scheme, who experienced poetry-based sessions within their curriculum. The study's design was naturalistic, consisting of two poetry-based small group sessions, facilitated by a course organiser. The first session used poems selected by the facilitator, the second, poems selected by the registrars. Poems were read and then discussed, with an emphasis on individuals sharing their personal responses to the poems. This paper reports the first stage of the study, which utilised questionnaires and a focus group to investigate the perceptions of the entire cohort. The second stage, involving individual in-depth interviews with six registrars, will be reported in another publication. Poetry sessions were considered enjoyable and effective, even by those previously sceptical. These sessions required no expert literary resource, just a facilitator with a willingness to explore the learners' responses to the poems. The registrars identified benefits that may help doctors, both personally and professionally. Potential impacts on patient care were also identified. Differences between the two types of poetry session are considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper demonstrates how drama therapy assists incarcerated women in freeing themselves from internalized oppressive beliefs. In the context of a drug and alcohol treatment program for incarcerated women, the authors assist the women in building three distinct bridges to healing: a new relationship to one's self, to other women, and to the community. Writing exercises, performance techniques, and group drama therapy empower women to express their diverse voices. As the women risk sharing their personal stories and journeys of recovery, they begin to actively envision a different future for themselves. The participants discover talents that offer them an opportunity to experience themselves in a different light, no longer bound by the stigma of being in prison. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]