Becoming a poet-Scientist

Interview with Dr. Sandra Faulkner

What does it mean to be a “poet-scientist”? How can we exercise poetic inquiry to come closer to life’s essence? Sandra Faulkner, a leading scholar, creator, and professor of arts-based relationship research, gives us insight into these questions based on her experience in the field. “A poet-scientist is someone who is interested in facts and opinion, someone who is passionate about how science and art are vital to our emotional, physical, and interpersonal health,” she tells us. As she describes how she uses poetry for projects from footnotes to family portraits, she teaches us how poetry can be a force for understanding, resistance and change.

Your work as a feminist scholar and poetic inquirer has furthered the transdisciplinary dialogues between the humanities and the social sciences, and we’re so excited to learn more from you today. In the second edition of your book Poetic Inquiry: Craft, Method and Practice, you write “I am a full-on-qualitative researcher. I am a full-on Poetic Inquirer. I am a full-on-qualitative partner. I live a full-on-qualitative life,” and we love this idea that qualitative research can take place within both personal and professional spheres. Can you tell us more about how you became involved in poetic inquiry?

I was in recovery from graduate school and internalizing stifling ways of writing social science research. After leaving a tenure track job I went to do a postdoc as I was trying to figure some things out. During that time, I saw an advertisement for a community poetry workshop so I enrolled. It was wonderful to feel creative again—not that research isn’t a creative endeavor—but it took me a while to merge my poetic and social science selves and approaches to research practice and to see how my creativity was best channeled through finding my poetic voice. After that first class, I began to write poetry again and took class after class. (I have ended up doing some collaborative work with some of those early poetry teachers, a true melding of social science and humanities.)

It wasn’t until I had another tenure track job after my postdoc that I started to think about how to combine poetry and research practice. The first project in which I did this was a narrative study on LGBTQ Jewish American Identity. I wrote the method section of the research as a series of poems. I crafted poems from the interviews with LGBTQ Jewish Americans on their experiences of being gay and Jewish, and then analyzed the poems for themes and connections to identity theories using poetic analysis. I used poetry as embodied research practice to show being LGBTQ and Jewish in ways that pay attention to the senses and offer some narrative and poetic truths about the experience of multiple stigmatized identities. It was this experience that led me to finding others who were doing poetic inquiry and finding ways to articulate what it was that I wanted poetry to do in my social science work.

I’ve found that there are ways to incorporate the social science and theory within the poetic language, for example using footnotes. You know, the good thing about taking a lot of those community classes is that I'm friends with some of those poets I met there and we continue to collaborate. In particular, Sheila Squillante is somebody with whom I’ve done quite a few collaborative projects that explore how to use the tenets of creative writing—poetry, creative nonfiction—when writing qualitative research. Together, we wrote a book on writing the personal and how to use right creative forms to write these personal stories. Social scientists might call this autoethnography, whereas somebody else might call it creative nonfiction or memoir.

What I’ve also found that's been really exciting about doing poetic inquiry is that this idea of transdisciplinary work has opened me up in ways that I don't think I would have had I stayed on a certain path—my mentors, meaning well, even encouraged me not to put the poetry on my CV. But I didn’t listen, and it’s actually come to be some of the work that people read more. I became a full professor through that work and continue to do community work with poetic inquiry.

What are some considerations you take when developing the methodology for poetic inquiry as a qualitative research tool?

 The biggest consideration is how to use an art form as research. The divide between scientific language and poetic language is wide. Early on, I tried to figure out a way to make scientific language poetic, but those attempts failed miserably. However, there is a way to make poetry from social science, which is where poetic inquiry comes into the research process. What this means is that a researcher poet needs to carefully consider their goals for a particular project. Are you most interested in epistemic or aesthetic concerns? Is it possible to accomplish your research goals and create a good piece of art? You may be able to footnote the theoretical work or publish separate work that engages more directly with the social science language. In addition to aesthetic considerations, the researcher poet needs to consider the audience. How can you best present your work to engage with your intended audience(s)? This may mean considering nonacademic outlets. I have presented my research poetry in church, at parties, and on social media.

There are also more journals now that will publish this type of transdisciplinary work so it’s not as difficult as it has been. In that vein, I have some exciting news—something I never thought would happen. The Journal of Social and Personal Relationships is one of the most prestigious journals for those who are studying close relationships. I just had a piece of poetic inquiry accepted, which I never actually thought would happen because it's traditionally been a conservative journal. It's a piece on taking care of my parents during COVID that includes poetic portraits and family photos. A journal publication like this validates its legitimacy as research.

Ultimately, whether to use poetry in you research goes back to its goals. When researching, I tend to write poems that makes sense of what I'm thinking—my field notes often come out as poetry. But you might not necessarily publish these notes so in this way, poetry can also just be part of an analytic process outside the final form.

How do you think that using poetry for research might allow our studies to represent a wider range of experiences?

I think poetry is a good vehicle for showing multiple experiences and interpretations. It is good for doing embodied work. Yes, poetry has the limitations of language, but it also offers the possibilities and capaciousness of language and poetic forms. Poetry is able to position dialectics and demonstrate the fluidity of identities and identity negotiation processes. Poetry does not have to resolve tensions; it can render them in multiple hues, shades, and nuances. Poetry is the language of emotion and possibility. Poetry is the language or rage and joy. Listening to and writing poetry offers new ways of understanding, demonstrations of our limitations and limitless imaginations, and it can be an embodied experience. I believe I have become a better teacher and social scientist since using poetic inquiry in my research and pedagogical practice.

One of the biggest problems of our educational system is how it kind of beats poetry out of us through analysis and rules—before that, little kids love poetry. Now, poetry is more popular than it has been in a long time, a trend we see too when there are political crises.

Scientists and Poets #Resist, a brilliant collection of creative nonfiction, personal narrative, and poetry that you co-edited with Andrea England, shows us how the collaboration between scientists and poets can be a powerful political force. What, to you, is a “poet-scientist”?

A poet-scientist is someone who is interested in facts and opinion, someone who is passionate about how science and art are vital to our emotional, physical, and interpersonal health. A poet-scientist does not see a divide between our physical and emotional and political worlds. They understand that answers to our most pressing social problems include science and art.

How can combining these disciplines foster conversations around resistance and change?

You can take a both/and approach. We need facts and statistics about pressing social problems like sexism, xenophobia, ableism, racism, but we also need the stories and the poetry about the way these feel, the concrete details about how it feels to fight against oppressive systems. Art is always a call to action. Art gives the emotional voice to the facts, the individual stories behind the aggregate, the face and name to the theory, the emotional appeal or ethos to the logical findings. And we know that policy is often created from these emotional appeals.

Poetry is able to reflect nuances—it's both angry and joyful. And as human beings, we are capable of holding contradictory ideas and thoughts. Although most research practices are trying to get rid of some of those contradictions, or try to somehow resolve these tensions. And that's what's so exciting for me about poetry, is that it can hold those tensions and that dialectic.  It is great for showing multiple viewpoints. It's great for showing multiple identities and how it is that we negotiate this. And ss someone who's really been interested in this idea of embodied research. Language certainly has some limitations, because when you hear a poem it's not the experience of having been in an interview. However, poetry is an embodied experience when you're presenting it, when you're listening to it. You know if you've ever been in the audience when someone is reciting a poem, and then sometimes there seems like an audible reaction; now people will make noises. It’s like they are inside the poem because of the rhythm, they're in it, and it is an embodied experience. And so to me that's what's also exciting about it.

What are some difficulties you have encountered when proposing poetry as a research tool or presenting your findings through poetry?

The biggest challenge has been how to argue that poetic inquiry as ABR (arts-based research) is a tool for social scientists. I have received reviews in the past that my language was too creative, the science too soft, the poetry not poetic enough, and my methods not rigorous enough. That poetry is a capacious form is both that the strength and the limitation. I've gotten critiques like “well, there's multiple interpretations of these words.” There are those who find the openness of meaning and allowance of multiple interpretations to be a major flaw, though I argue that is the biggest strength of poetic inquiry. 

How have you incorporated poetic inquiry into your teaching?

I'm teaching a relational communication class at both the graduate level and the undergraduate level. My graduate students did a project that involved poetic portraits, an idea I had adapted from previous work as well as from work by Patricia Leavy. I have a colleague in gerontology, and we co-interviewed older women over 60 about their life history. For example, we asked about their relationships across their life course while a graduate student sat in on the interview. From there, the students created a poetic transcript of the interview and then used that transcript to do a poetic portrait of each of the participants, which they then gave the participants to keep.

The results were pretty amazing—some of the students had no exposure to poetry, some of them did and we worked through the poetic inquiry book to shape their work. I had a guest poet come to class who had been doing a similar project in nursing home facilities, publishing and performing the portraits.

I think that this project also speaks to some of poetry’s power. Instead of just doing typical transcripts, poetic transcription gets more of the emotional resonance from the interviews. When we gave the finished portraits to the interviewees, one of the participants said that this was such a keepsake and how excited they were that, when they are no longer here, they have this record to give to their grandkids. For me, poetry is the language of emotion and so perhaps the participants’ predecessors will have a better understanding of who they were.

“What I believe in is the power of poetry as relationship research,” you write. For those of us who will not be using poetry in a formal research setting, how might a poetic practice improve our daily lives?

I find that poetry makes all of our lives better because of the articulation of the pain, joy, love and loss in our collective human condition. It may be difficult for someone to find themselves and their story in a traditional rendering of a research project, but in poetry people can see themselves and relate. And anyone can write a poem. How many of us have turned to verse when losing a pet, a lover, or a parent? I bet the only people who read my dissertation, which was written in a typical dissertation format, were my committee. But my poetry? Now that is something that anyone can engage with even more so than traditional research writing. I find that writing poetry helps me articulate my feelings and thoughts and this makes me a better partner, teacher, community member, and mother. Now that is the power of poetry available to all of us.