Poetry Writing as Transgressive Ethnography

Abstract

Poetry writing can be a useful and effective tool in managing the challenging experiences of fieldwork, performing, writing, and teaching. As an act of creation, writing poetry transgresses the sense that legitimate ethnographic work must be rendered as prose. Instead, poetry serves as a powerful way to understand the self and one's experiences in context, particularly as part of the exploratory liminal stage between experience and publication. Poetry writing also complicates the idea that one's fieldwork (or teaching) is linear, objective, sequential, and falls neatly into a specific format when we try to render it in writing. In this article, examples of memory, fieldwork, and teaching all connect to moments of creation and, in turn, closer understanding.