Poetry is a Form of Research:

Interview with Dr. Melisa Misha Cahnmann-Taylor

According to Dr. Melisa (Misha) Cahnmann-Taylor, poetry “can wiggle its way into so many lives and minds because of its unmarked visibility. Poems are small tastes of revolution that can pass.”  Here, she talks about how poetry can be used as a research tool, particularly in ethnography, and the creative value of bridging arts and sciences—where can quantitative research miss out or benefit from poetry? How can this cross-disciplinary mindset be incorporated into classrooms?

First off, what got you interested in using poetry as a research tool and bridging the gap between arts and sciences more generally? How would you describe your research interests?

When I graduated from college with a Spanish major and Latin American Studies minor, what I wanted to do was continue work in guerrilla theatre. I had been in numerous plays and had followed a Spanish department professor Dr. Claudia Kaiser-Lenoir who taught us the importance of using the arts as tools of inquiry and education. The summer after graduation, I performed summer stock theatre in the Northeast—Little Shop of Horrors, Woody Allen plays—light, fun, entertaining work. I wrote a play about U.S. involvement in Nicaragua and got permission from the theatre company to direct the new play with ensemble actors and offer it for free to local audiences, including numerous senior citizens. After the play ended, we had a discussion that connected elder Americans’ economic concerns to interventions in the economies and republics of other nations. It was the first time as a maker of art that I felt literary arts’ power as catalysts for inquiry and potential action for social change.

I brought those arts practices to my first job as a bilingual elementary school teacher in South Central Los Angeles, just after the officers accused of excessive use of force against Rodney King were acquitted in 1992. The city was on fire and I was a new professional with immigrant third and fourth graders experiencing great uncertainty in their young lives—poverty, racism, domestic abuse, drugs, criminal activity, language erasure and censure. I had a recurring nightmare: finding my students’ bodies on freeways; feeling helpless and part of the problem. I turned to the arts to process the trauma of working as an educator for communities in crisis while living myself in a part of the city known for criminal activity and police surveillance. I wanted to be part of the solution for all our safety and well-being, and I knew the work included but went beyond Spanish-English biliteracy instruction. Engagement in arts activity began to help me interrogate my own linguistic, racial, and cultural (mis) understandings.

My research interests have all arisen from those early professional experiences—trying to understand colleagues who’d advised me to use coloring sheets and reprimand students in “English only” who colored too quickly—all diminishing the teacher’s role and potential. I wanted to influence those colleagues, and become a better teacher myself. My third year as an educator, I was asked to become the “bilingual coordinator” and gave workshops for colleagues. I started the workshop in Spanish with monolingual English teachers and then we discussed what they did or did not understand. I’ll never forget one teacher who realized that when her immigrant student, Maira, held a baby chick in her class and wouldn’t put it down after repeated reprimands and yelling—that maybe that student didn’t understand what she was being asked! That was it—I knew my role was to impact larger numbers of educators whose care for a student like Maira was in their hands, fragile baby chicks who could be nourished or squashed depending on their actions during the eight-hour school day.

In your article “Poetic anthropology and the lyric continua between science and art,” you discuss ethnopoetics—using poetry in anthropological field work. I would love to hear more about your field work in schools and how poetry has played a role.

The earliest discovery I made was in connection to taking poetry workshops while conducting my dissertation fieldwork in a bilingual school and community in North Philadelphia. Every day, I drove from West Philly to North Philly, from one neighborhood devastated by poverty to another, to collect interviews and fieldnotes to document biliteracy education for Latino youth, mostly Puerto Rican and Dominican. I always turned left onto a street that was decorated by numerous shoes thrown over an electric wire. I wrote the last lines of what would become an important early poem for me in my fieldnotes: “I wish I could understand what this joy is, what it’s like to throw something up in the air that’s important, that weighs something, that takes you places, and not wait for it to come down.”

I spent the next few years writing the lines that would come before that ending in a poem that was later published in the Philadelphia Inquirer and selected by Dell Hymes for the ethnographic poetry prize. Hymes had founded my program and was the author of an important framework, the ethnography of communication. Attending the annual anthropology meetings, I met Dr. Hymes and several of his contemporaries—I tell this story in a 2011 piece I wrote for Anthropology and Education Quarterly. There was an “open mic” at the conference and Dell was in the audience. I boldly asked why we didn’t see more of this alternative, arts-based scholarship as recognized aspects of ethnography. Dell, from his position, said that poetry, dance, theatre—these were not to be confused with legitimate social scientific study. I found my purpose. I knew why he said what he did and I also knew that he might be wrong. I saw my task as trying to find ways to justify poetry as a rigorous, possible tool in social science inquiry but I also knew I would have to first convince myself before I could convince others. The work began with an early publication in 2003, in Educational Researcher entitled “The Craft, Practice, and Possibility of Poetry in Educational Research.” It struck a chord with many others and I found myself in dialogue with scholars around the world.

What inspired you towards initiatives such as ScholARTistry and FUND (Finding Unity in Diversity)?

I love crush words that help us see new mergers we didn’t think possible. On my second 2010 book Teachers Act Up, Johnny Saldaña wrote a forward calling the work an act of “Edu-Tainment.” I love what that helped me understand, and likewise with scholartistry—I’ve written this by capitalizing ART or italicizing and now I just use this new word with no markers. F.U.N.D. was one of my first grant funded projects to help me take fieldtrips with elementary school teachers working with Latino students. We all travelled together to Xalapa, Veracruz in Mexico where they studied Spanish over the summer. When we returned, we kept travelling in our U.S. towns—I took the teachers to the local Chicken plant where some of their students’ parents worked and to other locations to help them see the full human lives their students and families were living during work, play, and prayer. The project was inspired by Luis Moll’s “Funds of Knowledge” work, seeking universal truths of care and education through experiencing the diversity of our lives firsthand.

You’ve mentioned US poet Laureate Billy Collins’s comment on how students are taught to “tie the poem to a chair with rope / and torture a confession out of it...beat it with a hose / to find out what it really means.” Along the lines of this statement, how have you seen attitudes towards poetry changing in education? 

There are so many wonderful opportunities for teachers and K-12 students with poetry. The Poetry Slam movement helped bring embodied performance connected to poetry and make it current with hip hop, jazz, and stand-up comedy. I competed in the National Poetry Slam in 1994 and met the great slam poets like Patricia Smith who captured wide audiences into poetry’s embrace. The Poetry Outloud movement, Poetry Foundation, and Dodge Poetry Festival—so many public opportunities to make poetry engaging, personal, accessible, and wide-reaching. There are poet laureates in many small towns and cities engaging in public poetry pedagogies. There are poets in schools and poets in prisons and poets in libraries and poetry in bars. Many educators don’t fear poetry like they once did as they can search online and find incredible resources from www.poets.org, the national endowment for the arts, PBS, and many other places to help direct meaningful, educative experiences through the act of reading, writing, discussing and researching poetry.

Just recently after the latest police violence and murder of Black Americans, I was struck again by grief and wordlessness. I turned to the wisdom of poets like Wanda Coleman and Lucille Clifton who spent their lives testifying to Black experience through verse. This summer 2020 a student in my language and culture course shared that her school district would not allow teachers to use The Hate U Give  in the classroom. While books may still be banned or eliminated, fewer people notice a poem. It’s a humble, underappreciated art that can wiggle its way into so many lives and minds because of its unmarked visibility. Poems are small tastes of revolution that can pass. I like the treachery and possibility of that!*

*Note: Since this interview, Misha adds, “a new controversy has taken place at Poetry magazine regarding the publication of a poem that included racist language and centered whiteness. Though poems aren’t often noticed, there is more vigilance in the world of letters regarding the extent to which poets and their poetry can dangerously reinforce status quo oppression.”

How do you teach students to develop their own voices?

I believe we each have our own voices—we eat breakfast, we get dressed, we look out the window at the weather. When we turn on youtube, Netflix, CNN or Fox news or read a newspaper or Facebook post, our experiences merge with others and we begin to ventriloquize languages of understanding. This can warp and affect what we are seeing from whether a rainy day is “bad” or “good” to how a person of color can be constructed as human or criminal. Language and image have the power to construct our thinking. Poets and writers can positively impact those constructions. I teach teachers to learn to sharpen their attention, to notice what is in front of them and puzzle out how to describe the color of day-old cereal milk or a student’s eyes at the end of recess or the beginning of a test.

The teacher-poet who I am in my class trains people to notice, through their own languages of attention. I provide daily or weekly “invitations” to guide that noticing and connect it to the catalog of lived experiences they’ve had, sifting this through literature. I ask students to model new poems on published strategies from around the world, trying out the sonnet, the villanelle, the ghazal, the jeju and tanka—forms that constrain diction and syllable counts, compress what we write and how into new meanings we couldn’t have foretold. It’s so thrilling to see an adult new to poetry have a moment of understanding wash over them and their readers in a truth that feels both familiar and completely surprising. This is what I hope educators can gift one another through poetry and with their students as well.

Collins also states that his approach to poetry education would be to be “to take a poem/ and hold it up to the light / like a color slide.” This reminds me of your discussions of poetry and research, and I wonder how you see poetry’s capacity to interpret shades of meaning and confront ambiguities.

Nuance, better questions, and shades of meaning are the absolute quest of the poet, researcher, and teacher. It’s much less work to have an answer or reproduce a binary: right wing-left wing, good-evil, student-teacher—we need time and an educated mind to grapple with human-non-human complexity in between the ends.

To some people, myself included, the idea of using poetry in our research might sound strange at first—one of the most standard questions in my psychology classes would ask us to define “validity and reliability” as requisites to any good study, and it’s hard to justify how either applies to poetry. In what ways can poetry be reconciled with empiricism?

Look, when I get a vaccine for the flu (or hopefully for COVID-19), I want to know that research scientists have done numerous trials and can tell me with more certainty that this injection will do more good than harm based on sound scientific study. In human study, we must draw on the rigor of valid and reliable science, following processes and protocols that are currently accepted in the field. But we also must recognize the limits of that knowledge and the limits of what can be understood through trials, labs, and tests.

We have power, too, as trained observers of human experience. When engaging in this kind of ethnographic or qualitative science, it is often referred to as “soft” and, thus, devalued compared to the “hard” science work you implicitly refer to in psychology. Good science must include the hard and the soft—we can’t understand a patient’s illness, resistance to vaccines and masks, or a student’s learning style without understanding the full lived experience of that patient or student. To do this, we need qualitative observation, we need interview, we need empathy and connection.

What can poetry capture that quantitative research might miss?

I never argue that poems should replace the other kinds of science. Only that our scientific, rigorous knowing would be better if we had observers keenly tuned into all qualitative inquiry tools at their disposal to add to the full understanding of a phenomenon. Case studies with an “n of 1” are valid—they help us understand the particulars of lived experience. Poetry, the literary arts and all the arts for that matter, provide us with new techniques to attend to stories and share our “findings” in ways that dignify the story with beauty and complexity. To be clear—some of us may prefer to work or are more equipped to work with larger survey data or SPSS to make sense of bigger data sets. But we need all researchers to appreciate the various methods along the science-arts continue and to see them all as vital aspects of complex inquiry.

Building on Ezra Pound’s assertion that the “natural object is always the adequate symbol,” how can standard teachings of poetic craft be helpful to qualitative and perhaps even quantitative researchers?

After engaging with the California Writers’ Project professional development, I knew what could sustain me as an educator and teacher educator: poetry. I didn’t have time to audition for films or theatre while I was teaching in L.A. but I had time to process what I was experiencing through poetry. The new creative writing drafts and processes of revision helped marry my heart and mind and urged me to write the unsayable, what frightened me and what gave me hope. When I entered graduate school in education at U.C. Santa Cruz and then University of Pennsylvania for my doctorate, the poems alongside qualitative inquiry with young Latino students, their families, and educators, helped me to make sense of contradictions, listen for images and metaphors, to attend to others’ experiences and words and bear witness through poetry. I was greatly influenced by the work of Carolyn Forché at the time who had also spent time in Central America. Live it and write it down; let the arts help you sift and leap through theory, inquiry, action, and the heart—these are the mantras that guide my work in research and poetry.