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This book describes the practice of poetic inquiry and takes the reader through the process of translating lived experience into poetry that attends to the lives of others. Using her own writing-from early drafts to published poems-Apol demonstrates elements of poetic inquiry that both give it strength and make it complicated: the importance of craft (the aesthetic); the imperative of accuracy and reliability (the investigative); the significance of ethical responsibility that leads to action (witness); and the centrality of relational connectedness and accountability (withness). Apol raises questions about what it means for poems to function as both research and art, and illustrates what happens when there are irresolvable conflicts between the demands of the poem and a commitment to relationship. Throughout, Apol addresses her white privilege, as well as the dominant white/colonial narrative that often seeps into arts-based work unless it is overtly and critically addressed.
The book goes beyond arts-based research, speaking as well to other forms of cross-national, cross-cultural research. It is a call for relational scholarship that moves toward action, a heart-rending teaching, a post-traumatic aesthetic map laid down with clear and poignant theory and praxis to extend, serve and guide.
List of contents
1 Going to Rwanda.- 2 Turning Research into Art: The process.- 3 Attending to Aesthetics: The art of revision.- 4 Attending to Accuracy: Investigative poetry.- 5 Self, Audience and Activism: Poetry of witness.- 6 Relational Responsibility: Poetry of witness.- 7 Public/Action.- 8 Poetic Respect; Poetic Letting Go.- 9 Conclusion: Engaging with the Lives of Others.
About the author
Dr. Laura Apol is an associate professor in Teacher Education at Michigan State University, where she specializes in issues of diversity in children's and YA literature, global children's literature, poetic inquiry, gender studies, and creative writing. Apol's scholarship in the areas of literacy education, children's and YA literature, and arts-based research methodologies has been published widely. She is the author of several prize-winning collections of poetry:
Falling into Grace;
Crossing the Ladder of Sun;
Requiem, Rwanda (drawn from her work using writing to facilitate healing among survivors of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi and translated into Kinyarwanda under the title
Emwe N'imvura Irabyibuka-Even the Rain Remembers); and
Nothing but the Blood. Her most recent work focuses on the therapeutic uses of writing and literature in response to trauma, and she currently serves as poet laureate for the Lansing area in mid-Michigan.
