Can Concrete Poems Fly? Setting Data Free in a Performance of Visual Enactment

Abstract

In researching the tutors working in alternative education centers in New Zealand, I sought ways to bring voice to their lived experiences through, initially, creating found poetry from interview transcripts. The poems helped bring their vital voices to the page. Even so, I found the emotion of tutors’ lived experiences buckled under the pressure of their compression into lines of poetry. Thus, I set the found words free to form nonlinear configurations in two and three dimensions. In the tradition of concrete poetry noted by Khlebnikov, I “loosed the shackles of syntax . . . to attach meaning to words according to their graphic and phonic characteristics.” In this article, I present concrete poetry deriving from my poetic inquiry and reflect on the value concrete poetry provides arts-based researchers.

Alternative education in Aotearoa New Zealand

“…Poetic inquiry has been particularly effective in bringing the voices of the vulnerable to the fore and as Faulkner (2020) suggests, "can be an active response to social issues, a political commentary, and a call to action" (p. xi). My use of concrete poetry, through the inclusion of cutups and erasure, is emerging as a poetic inquiry method (Schoone, 2021). With erasure and cut-ups, a new reading of existing text is created by the poet who either erases or blacks out selected words and phrases or cuts up and rearranges text.…”

Incorporating Arts-Based Pedagogy: Moving Beyond Traditional Approaches to Teaching Qualitative Research

“…Guiney Yallop (2016), for example, intermixed poetry and storytelling to explore and communicate the life history of their Indigenous grandmother. Other scholars have engaged in various types of poetic methods including, but not limited to, poetic autoethnography (Zhang 2021), erasure poetry (Hare 2021), and concrete poetry (Schoone 2021).…”