‘But it makes me uncomfortable’: The challenges and opportunities of research poetry

Along with all the arts, poetry offers creative and expressive possibilities to writers and to audience members. But perhaps poetry, more than any art form, also triggers more uncomfortableness in how to “read” it, more uncertainty about what a poem “means”, and stirs up long-ago unpleasant memories of school experiences writing, memorising, reciting and analysing classroom creations. Poetry suffers, claims Roach (Citation2016), from not being taught well, but also suffers from overly detailed analysis that can reward complex and arcane interpretation, leading to a sense of alienation among those trying to understand what a poem means. When the terms “poetic inquiry” or “research poetry” are added, eyes might gloss over and (many) researchers might run to “safer” art forms and methodologies. And for those who want a definitive interpretation of a poem (e.g. Ferber, Citation2019), or a stanza or even a line, poetry will cause you problems. The argument being that for some a poem can only be interpreted knowing what the writer intended and as readers “we do our best to imagine … what the writer intended” (Ferber, Citation2019, p. 142). For others, however, poetry “contains a multiplicity of meanings” and there is no, singularly correct, unambiguous interpretation (Lotter, Citationn.d..). Bringing our own subjective experiences to reading and listening to poetry, I would argue, is part of the strength and challenge of poetry for arts and health researchers.

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