This article is a manuscript accepted for publication in Art/Research International: A Transdisciplinary Journal, published twice-yearly out of the University of Alberta. This article expects to release in June, 2021.
New Vox in Poetic Inquiry: Rhizomatic Runners in a Fruiting Field
I am, each day,
typing out the God
my typewriter believes in.
–Anne Sexton, Frenzy
Introduction: Positionality, and Charting the Landscape
Indigenous research methods speak to how our personal story is interwoven with/in our broader research stories (Wilson, 2008). Honoring that circularity within my own life, I position myself and my artistic, research, and teaching practices, before addressing poetic/performative approaches to inquiry. Thus, first and foremost, I acknowledge with gratitude and respect my presence living, working, and writing on the traditional territories of the Lekungwen, WSÁNEĆ, Songhees, and Esquimalt people, whose traditional relationships with the land continue to this day. HÍ SW KE! (Thank you.)
I come from immigrant/settler ancestry in the United States: my father emigrated from Iran in the mid-1950s, while my mother’s family of Irish and Swiss-German farmers immigrated in the mid-1800s. I feel an ancestral connection to poetry, particularly through these Persian, Irish, and German lineages, cultures where poetry has been revered for thousands of years.
A lifelong writer, I have only more recently embraced my role as “researcher” (Author, 2013). However, as such, I prefer the term inquirer to researcher, denoting more open-ended, less rigid, processes, and something to be drawn forth, as in educaré; something emergent, birthing; a more phenomenological, lived experience of things.
I am, at heart, a storyteller, with a gift for gab and a love of script in all forms. In my writing, I seek to weave disparate (yet interconnected) life stories into a nuanced, nurturing whole, offering sustenance: food for thought, learning, and growth. I am also a poet in the academy, embracing poetic and performative methodologies, including a/r/tography (DeCosson & Irwin, 2004), where onto-epistemological overlaps acknowledge and make room for the sometimes messy, blurred, mutually informing processes inherent in the roles of artist, researcher and teacher. Similarly, through poetic inquiry (Prendergast, 2009, 2015) and autobiographical life writing (2013), I engage lived experiences through artistic, critical, and performative inquiry modes and methods.
Poetry is performative; thus, poetic inquiry is also “performative in nature in that poetry is originally an oral art form that is deeply rooted in the sense of voice. Creating research poetry is a performative act” (Prendergast, 2006, p. 370-371). This performativity also implies embodiment: the researcher engages all the senses (fingertips, ears, eyes, nose, taste buds) to sift through data (scruffy fur, eagle’s strident cry, ancient comet streaking past the big dipper, lilacs greeting you on a spring night before you round the corner to see them, bite of salt on lips in the sea) in crafting a poem. Through voice welling up within the body to speak or sing a poem, through the rhythm of breath, poem-making is embodied craft; likewise, through the corporeal act of writing—hand and fingertips to pen, page, and keyboard—embodied, we create. Furthering this aspect of embodiment, poetic inquiry “connect[s] writing as embodiment to ethnographic practice” (Faulkner, 2018, p. 18), wherein creating poetry in/as research occurs in relation to some facet of community: we write the stories of others, as well as our own, extending poetry’s ancient role as communal, oral tradition; the poet as human radio, minstrel, and storyteller.
The magic of a talking burning bush.
–Krista Franklin, Manifesto, or Ars Poetica 2
Poetic inquiry, as qualitative research methodology, flourishes in a multitude of creative locations ranging from education, to health care, kinesiology, psychology, and sociology (Owton, 2017; Prendergast, 2009, 2015; Vincent, 2018), and through diverse methods such as poetic transcription (Richardson, 1992; Glesne, 1997; Carroll, Dew, & Howden-Chapman, 2011), found poems (Prendergast, 2004, 2006, 2015; Faulkner, 2010), cluster poems (Butler-Kisbe, 2002), autobiographical research poetry (Leggo, 2005, 2007, 2010, 2011, 2018a, 2018b; Rajabali, 2017; MacKenzie-Dawson, 2018), and poetic-performative styles of expression (Schoone, 2015; Saldaña, 2006; Deegan & O’Connell, 2018). The title of this piece draws inspiration from this clearly rhizomatic (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) array of poetically inquiring runners and side-shoots populating the world of qualitative inquiry (Vincent, 2018); may we long be nourished by their delicious roots and berries.
In my own explorations with poetic and performative approaches to inquiry, I have enriched my repertoire of research methods and deepened theoretical understanding by considering the role of Vox (Prendergast, 2009, 2015), writing Ars Poetica (Faulkner, 2007, 2017a), experimenting with various forms of Slow writing (Hurren, 2014; Ulmer, 2017), and considering possibilities for performance (auto)ethnography (Ault, 2014; Denzin, 2003; Spry, 2006) and applications of applied theatre research in education (Bryon, 2018; Foster, Mäkelä, & Martuseqicz (Eds.), 2019; Schoone, 2015). The possibilities for continuing to engage these methodologies in ongoing research are plentiful, richly overlapping, and promising.
In this paper, I offer several new Vox for consideration within the field of poetic inquiry, to aid our understandings of the myriad ways in which to approach poetry as research, and to enhance our personal artistic praxis. I hope the addition of new Vox to our theoretical musings will provide a winnowing of greater specificity within already existing Vox, and place imaginative fodder on our creative fires, encouraging us to wonder about new ways to play with Vox in research and writing. Experimenting with Vox helps me lean into various cultural, social, and personal phenomena that arise in the course of inquiry, which in turn informs a holistic embracement of poetry as personal, pedagogical, and political praxis. I write; therefore, I am; I embrace the body politic; the body politic—the personal, the political—speaks through me. Poetry is the medium.
In addition to discussion of Vox, this article includes original and found poems, the latter gleaned from multiple sources and contexts. Found poems help to “reflect on, play against, and perform with the central topic” (Prendergast, 2006, p. 369), whether the literature itself that inspires the poems, or themes of inquiry within those sources. Not all found poetry surfaces as part of a final poetic or research “product;” nonetheless, as a tool of inquiry alone, this method remains invaluable. (Note: In crafting found poetry, I use endnotes rather than standard APA citations to identify source texts within the poems.)
Weaving this métissage of texts (Chambers et al., 2008), I intersperse poems among theoretical and methodological considerations of poetic/performative inquiry. Working with métissage commits me “to interdisciplinarity and the blurring of genres, text, and identities” (Chambers et al., 2008, p. 142). Allowing me to blend and play with theory and praxis, métissage performs as a political, personal, contingent, coexistent method(ology) where we “create plural selves and communities that thrive on ambiguity and multiplicity” (Chamber et al., 2008, p. 142); that is, there are multiple ways to carve an idea, string a haiku, weave a curriculum, write a poem, or reckon with agency and care in our local, more-than and other-than-human lives and interactions.
New Vox in Poetic Inquiry
I say I want to save the world but really
I want to write poems all day
I want to rise, write poems, go to sleep,
Write poems in my sleep
Make my dreams poems
Make my body a poem with beautiful clothes
I want my face to be a poem
I have just learned how to apply
–Dorothea Lasky, Ars Poetica
Like Lasky’s well made-up face, poetry expresses the voice of its maker, and the persona put forth in the poem (be that a person, fictitious or real, or another being or thing). The interplay between what the poem has to say, and how it says it, becomes the poem’s voice. Sometimes, the author’s voice is almost indistinguishable within the voice of the poem, while at other times, the poet’s voice sings prominently.
In her initial survey across social science disciplines, Prendergast (2009) found three main categories that defined poetic inquiry according to voice, or Latin Vox: Vox Theoria (theory/philosophy, drawing on literature), Vox Autobiographia/Autoethnographia (personal reflective), and Vox Participare (participant voices). In subsequent work, Prendergast (2015) identified five additional Vox that reflect expanded understandings and applications of poetic inquiry in (post)qualitative research: Vox Theoria/Vox Poetica (poems about self, poetry, and/or writing as method), Vox Justitia (poems about social justice, equality, equity, and freedom), Vox Identitatis (poems on identity, self and participants’, specifically, race, gender, class, sexuality), Vox Custodia (poems on caregiving, from patient and caregivers’ perspectives), and Vox Procreator (poems about family, parenting, religion). Most recently, Prendergast (2020) has identified two more Vox, emerging from Carl Leggo’s work: “Vox Veritas and Vox Cupio . . . are the voices of truth telling (veritas) and of wishing/dreaming (cupio)” (p. 31). These various definitions of Vox are potentially fluid and permeable, overlapping, and interchanging discursive meanings with one another, in critical conversation and poetic dialogue.
In thinking about Vox, I have often wondered about further expanding Vox’ categorical distinctions to embrace additional forms of poetic inquiry yet forming on imagination’s horizons, and to accommodate subtle variations among already existing categories. Part of my wonderment stems from a sense, shared by Vincent (2018), that “the poetry created through Poetic Inquiry may be of the same textual genre, but the context – that is what feeds the poetry – differs and is as important as the products themselves” (p. 52). It is precisely for this reason that I believe it is possible we may never have too many Vox, depending on how poet-scholars keep re-defining poetic inquiry in their own unique signatures. For example, Prendergast refers to Vox Theoria for poems that “are overtly political and critical in their content” (2009, xxii), such as those written just after 9/11; Vox Justitia also implies poems of this nature, addressing social justice, equality, and equity—all “political” concerns.
Yet I wonder if we might consider distinct categories of Vox that house specifically political poems: Vox Politica, and Vox Protestatia, for overtly protest-oriented poems. A recent volume of refereed work from the 6th International Symposium on Poetic Inquiry (ISPI) and the 17th annual Winter Wheat: The Mid-American Review Festival of Writing, held in 2017 at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, is devoted to “poetic inquiry as a way to reflect on power inequities, to make . . . personal experience part of the critique, and to realize the potential power in poetry as political discourse” (Faulkner, 2019, xiii). Literary poets have long led the way in articulating poetry’s political voice in this manner: Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Carolyn Forché, Etheridge Knight, Muriel Rukeyser, Robert Bly, Mahmoud Darwish, and so many others; poets writing on the front lines of political, social, racial, and eco-systemic oppression. Poetry lends itself well to protest, too: intensified political speech combined with physical action, where the personal, in the (communal) political, garners push back with/in solidarity, often embodied through the unifying power of rhythm and song. Think of protest and anti-war songs of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, and the ongoing prevalence of politically responsive music today, in genres spanning folk, rock, rap, metal, and punk (from Dylan to Marley, Tupac, Kendrick Lamar; John Trudell, Buffy Saint Marie, Ani deFranco, Pussy Riot—again, to name but a few). Spoken Word, likewise, engages oral poetics to challenge oppression, state-sanctioned violence, racial erasure, pipelines.
As poetic inquirers continue to take up political and protest-oriented concerns in their work (Author, 2013; Faulkner, 2017b; Faulkner & Squillante, 2019; Hall, 2013), our work as agents of social change comes alive: theory and action unite, as we hone critically-reflexive and artistic-research sensibilities, and our leadership presence as artists, teachers, and researchers, modeling these qualities for our children, our students, colleagues, and each other. Work, home, personal, and political, all combine, and we are needed to tell the stories, write the poems, that document, question, and contest this changing world, that speak back to power. Storytelling poet and sociologist Kimberly Dark (2017) challenges hegemonic patriarchal conditioning in her provocative, intersectional performance pieces addressing gender, beauty standards, and power. African American poet-activist-educator Mary Weems (2002) empowers the “imagination-intellect” through acts of resistance and healing in her poetic storytelling performances. Courageously, these individuals embody a “core mandate for critical poetic inquirers whose work is in support of equity, human rights, and justice worldwide . . . [one that] never flinches from catching and voicing hard and shining truths about the way things are, and surrendering to songs about the way they might become” (Prendergast, 2015, p. 683). Weems and Dark embody the voices of Vox Politica and Vox Protestatia.
Laurel Richardson’s recent essay, “So, Why Poetry?” (2017), makes a direct link between Vox Politica and the ongoing need for poetry in our lives. The poem embedded in the essay, with its quiet, ordered voice, is actually a strangled scream of protest. Richardson explains the poem’s genesis:
Ideological bias put blinders on my eyes and cotton in my ears preventing me from taking an authentic ethnographic stance toward working-class women during the 2016 American presidential elections. The poem, Deplorables, recognizes that bias and tries to right it through concrete examples. In so doing, the poem is about any powerless woman who has been treated deplorably. And that’s why poetry. (p. 1)
Richardson frames her discussion of “why poetry” in recognition of the way poetry can speak to those marginalized, left behind, forgotten or mistreated—in this case, the “basket of deplorables” Hillary Clinton stereotyped in her 2016 campaign rhetoric. In daring to witness and speak (back) to her own bias, and the bias of others, including friends and colleagues, Richardson bravely uncovers an urgent political reality, acknowledging her own complicity in perpetuating stereotypical bias. She is not (just) speaking about overt political events during an election cycle; rather, in daring to speak, she faces and names what needs to change. And poetry helps her to do so. This is the voice of Vox Politica, speaking up and speaking out.
Identifying a similar evolution in personal and communal awareness sparked by a political event, Faulkner and Squillante (2019) engage Vox Politica and Vox Protestatia to reflect on critiques of national Women’s Marches™ that were “too centered on White women’s experiences, ignoring trans women and women of color with a singular focus on reproductive justice” (p. 178), at the expense of a more inclusive, intersectional feminism. Joining a different march, organized by “black women and femmes,” Faulkner and Squillante strove to “listen to their history and help them move toward real equality. They asked us to think about the commodification of feminism and social justice. To prioritize intersectionality. To question our motives and our complicity” (2019, p. 180). Examining our own complicity can be deeply challenging work. But what choice do we have? Poetry helps bridge gaps between historic and emergent understandings, framing other(ed) perspectives and new (old) ways of being that might help lead us out of the morass.
If Vox Politica pulls back the veil, calls out the problem, Vox Protestatia turns up the volume, takes to the streets, marches, sings, and shouts about it. Together they light the spark of peaceful protest, more intertwined than separate, two peas in the same pod. Vox Protestatia is always political, and Vox Politica invariably implies protest. This unity, sown from separation, roots and flowers against all odds in verse, song, and action, seeding hope, and planting peace.
Grab your child by the hand and keep going.
Throw your fist in the air knowing it’s just another
word for watch what happens when I open my palm.
(Faulkner & Squillante, 2019, p. 186).
I love this image—can it be the image for this moment in history? A fist thrown up in the air, with force, gusto, opening: a mic-drop to the sky, releasing a bevy of doves . . . they fly free . . . Watch what happens.
I constructed this found poem, verbatim, from the transcript of a 9-1-1 call in Georgia, U.S.A. (exact location omitted to protect the innocent). The caller’s words provide an unintentionally ironic frame for Vox Politica to highlight one aspect of racial bias and profiling in America today.
9-1-1, What’s Your Emergency?
Hi there
I’m in the Walmart parking lot
and I just got my nails done
and I see this black
gentleman
with these two little
white kids,
and I . . .
And, so I just had a funny feeling
and so I rode around and I just came back
And I saw the girl get in
and the little boy
and I said, Do these kids . . .
Are these kids okay?
Do you know these kids?
And he goes,
Why wouldn’t I?
So I said,
Let me see the little girl,
and he said No,
and I said,
Well, let me just see the little girl
and see if she knows you . . .
And it could be nothing,
but I’m not sure
and I figured, well,
let me call up.
And if I didn’t do this
I would be up all night
Did you want to meet with a police officer?
Well, I’d like someone to come
and look at this guy
to make sure that he knows these kids
He just got gas and now he’s pulling away.
Should I follow him?
No, I’d recommend not following him.
I think he knows I’m watching him.
I’m right behind him.
And if I’m wrong, that’s great,
I’m thrilled
But if I’m not,
you know,
then these kids are okay.
And maybe he knows their mom
I don’t know
But I don’t know that he knows them . . .
These are but a few examples of Vox Politica and Vox Protestatia, as I imagine them flourishing within intersectional, politically-oriented poetic inquiries and direct-action contexts, substantiating this call for further sub-categorizations of Vox within poetic inquiry.
Vox Politica
They say poetry is political:
pedagogical
epistemological
ontological
mythological
axiological.
Which of these -ologies
curls up with poetry at night,
sleek bodies entwined
red fur and warmed earth
tails twitching in a shared dream.
How is the dream of a fox political?
I close this section with brief mention of four more proposed Vox: Vox Feminista, Vox Litteratura, Vox Pedagogia, and Vox Gaea. Although previously existing categories of Vox already encompass poetic inquiries of this nature, I believe there is, nonetheless, a need for more distinct consideration to thoroughly and specifically address these topical areas. I provide only brief mention of these Vox here—although they are deserving of much more detailed exploration—simply in the interests of space.
Vox Feminista is the voice of poetic inquiry that specifically queries feminist praxis. Like the art of poetically inquiring, practicing feminism transcends the bounds of our formal “research,” expanding into and influencing our whole lives, the lives of others, our planet, and its myriad beings and ecosystems. As Sara Ahmed (2017) notes,
To bring feminist theory home is to make feminism work in the places we live, the places we work. When we think of feminist theory as homework, the universal too becomes something we work on as well at. We use our particular to challenge the universal. (p. 10)
In the spirit of that interchangeability, many of Sandra Faulkner’s (2012, 2017a, 2017b, 2018) autobiographical poems fall within Vox Feminista, along with Laurel Richardson (1992, 2017), Hauk (2017), and Ohito and Nyachae’s recent inquiry using Black feminist poetry to “poke” at language and power (2019). Vox Feminista offers opportunities for reflective poetic inquirers to address matters of import to all beings, in holistic ways that “bring feminist theory home” to kitchens and bedrooms, as well as into workplaces, the boardroom, and out into the streets, the commons, and wild, sacred places.
When Prendergast (2009) speaks of “[l]iterature voiced poems . . . written from or in response to works of literature/theory in a discipline or field” (xxii), she is mainly referring to academic, scholarly, or philosophical works as source texts. What about poetic inquiries into other poems, poets, and works of literature? For these, I propose the term Vox Litteratura. I have written several poems to my poetic mentor, Robert Bly, as well as recent poems to the beloved mentor of our poetic inquiry community, Carl Leggo (Author, manuscript submitted for publication). Were I to develop these poems into a larger inquiry (such as my dissertation), I would wish to acknowledge the specifically literary lineage of these mentor relationships, and the poetry that evolved from that deep well. In my work, considering literary texts (including poetry) as research material is an organic process, concurrent with other academic endeavors. Through this symbiosis, synapses forge unforeseen connections, fueling wonder, my own poetic processes, and future directions of my research.
There is a productive use of reading literary texts, in this case poetry and literature. I engage these practices for pleasure, yes, but I am always looking for clues. This searching happens right alongside (and sometimes, in tension with) the practices that are recognized as doing qualitative research. For me, the opaqueness of academic work (constructed and enforced) is made seeable by the insight of art, literature, film, and music. While clarity is not necessarily desired, shadows and shapes emerge when research comes in contact with art. (Franklin-Phipps, 2017, p. 23)
Like Franklin-Phipps, I am always looking for “clues.” The idea of incorporating literary poems within a literature review speaks to my desire to incorporate lessons learned from mentors’ and friends’ poems, as well as to the revered idea, among poets, of expressing “gratitude to old teachers” (Bly, 1993), acknowledging those who have shown us the way and taught us our craft.
Vox Litteratura[1]
Talking all morning
The dream of a common language
This body is made of camphor and gopherwood
This tree will be here for a thousand years
The bow and the lyre
Leaping poetry
Nine gates
Morning glory
Opal
II.
Why Poetry?
Morphology of the folktale
The dark interval
Oral poetry
Writing performance
The poetics of ecstasy
A sun within a sun
The wild places
Remembered rapture
The life of poetry
Mysticism and poetry
Why poetry matters
In a brief dusting of other wonderments, I often think about Vox Paedagogia and Vox Gaea, which might currently dwell within Vox Procreator and/or Vox Justitia, as further refinements on how to think about our poetic projects. Vox Paedogogia might address poetic inquiries about pedagogy and curriculum (poetic or otherwise), and/or teacher training, or studies of other research conducted and written within these contexts. Furthermore, what about poetic inquiries that speak of—in care for—or sing a “love song to the earth” (Adrian Downey, Mi’kmaw Nation, lives in Frederickton, New Brunswick, personal communication, January 2020)? To feed this thought, I propose Vox Gaea: poems for, or about, the earth, nature, land, the elements, and related (cosmic and material) things. Although the Latin for “earth” is Tellus, I prefer the Greek Gaea, for its familiarity to many as synonymous with a name for planet Earth. Many poetic inquirers already write in the realm of Vox Gaea (Author, 2013; Fidyk, 2016; McKeon, 2019; Sullivan, 2002). Vox Gaea helps me write poetically about the earth places I know and love; to (re)story, (re)inhabit, (re)enchant, and (re)connect wor(l)ds of dwelling, being, and action, within myself and those around me.
Starlings in Flight (Ars Poetica)
I want to write poems like
starlings’ flight across
a reddened sky
wing letters scripted
free writing flight
Is a starling like a poem
a poem like a bird in flight
thought escaped
the privacy of the singular
mind upended banking low?
Starlings dart curve dive descend
one motion one arc
across the sky
one body choreographed
flight wings night uplift words
Disappearing starlings
fly into the sun
words wings
one body one mind
one pen poem flight evening
light.
Vox Orphic
Tucked in the corner of my right ventricle sprouts a Tree of Knowledge, lives a Shining Serpent & a middle finger. I’m on a quest for the Marvelous.
–Krista Franklin, Manifesto, or Ars Poetica 2
In one final widening of the scope, imagining what future poetic inquiries might encompass, I often contemplate the role of certain performing poet-artists, as their work informs and plays into something larger, more affective and engaged, than mere entertainment. Although these performers are not social science researchers (per se . . . or overtly), yet their work informs my own artistically, philosophically, and thematically, influencing the development of my own poetic Vox (while simultaneously informing the world, socially). Considering, specifically, poet and rock musician Patti Smith, I offer Vox Orphic to describe certain poetic/performance experiences that achieve heightened, rarified, qualities of cultural communion between artist and participant; a prayerful, spiritually infused mediation between worlds that unfolds in the course of a group event; what Jimi Hendrix might have called an “experience”: an often mystical journey, replete with reverence, reverie, reflection, and return, led by a modern-day equivalent of mythic Orpheus: musician, poet, guide to the underworld and back again.
Vox Orphic has captivated me since I was a child, when I first heard the call of Orpheus’ lyre and the rhythm and melody of his verse. In my explorations with Vox in poetic inquiry, I have come to consider Vox Orphic to be a foundational Vox, perhaps the one from which all the other Vox spring; Vox Excelsis.
Orphic derives from Orphism, “a mystic religion of Ancient Greece, originating in the 7th or 6th century BC and based on poems . . . attributed to Orpheus, emphasizing the necessity for individuals to . . . [attend to] their nature by ritual and moral purification throughout a series of reincarnations” (Lexico, 2020). (Orphism also refers to a brief art movement within Cubism, c. 1912.) According to Merriam-Webster (2020), the adjective “Orphic” is defined as “of or relating to Orpheus or the rites or doctrines ascribed to him;” documentation of such details appears scarce, ascribed “lost,” and assigned to the realm of myth. Here, we are firmly on the shifting sands and interstitial, intertidal strands between sea and shore, self and world, where the details of the story vary for each of us, ours alone to experience.
Merriam-Webster (2020) goes on to define “Orphic” as “mystic, oracular, fascinating, and entrancing.” Each of these words is key to describing qualities of Vox Orphic. Mystic is crucial to this venture: an unknown, of a spiritual nature; relating to mysteries, and awe, wonder, and “magical properties.” Oracular speaks to the power of an oracle, a person or shrine through whom the gods deign to speak, providing wise or authoritative guidance, and implying a “solemnity of delivery.” Fascinating denotes charming, but irresistibly so; captivating; a cord of magic shimmers here, too. Finally, entrancing: the definition alone is “fascinating.” Entrancing, from “entrance,” relates to the “1. power or permission to enter; admission; 2. the act of entering; 3. the means or place of entry; 4. the point at which a voice or instrument part begins in ensemble music” (Merriam-Webster, 2020, emphasis added). These aspects of “entering”—elements of power, permission, means, and placement—very much speak to a mythic, oracular experience, as well as the idea of being “entranced,” under a spell: “to put into a trance; to carry away with delight, wonder, or rapture” (Merriam-Webster, 2020). Things are out of our hands, and completely in our own hands, a journey with intention, and risk; the paranormal.
Brimming with Vox Orphic, a Patti Smith performance—experience—is all of these things: captivating, mystical, rapt, oracular: “And we – the faithful, the curious and the sceptical – are transfixed, hanging on her every word as if was a holy writ” (O’Hagan, 2003, Para 2). The audience—participants all—move together as one, a container for her performance, as she is a touchstone for our hopes, dreams, and visions; as she uplifts and feed us, we reciprocate. A mystical experience, yes, but not blind faith: She is an artist with all ten fingers on the pulse of the world, with a panoply of voices—gods, mere mortals—singing through her. We listen attentively.
There are tears in Patti Smith’s eyes. She is midway through a performance that has been, by turns, sombre and joyous, intense and ecstatic . . . On the brightly lit stage, she seems suddenly vulnerable, momentarily at sea in the midst of a song about the deranging power of love and loss. Then, as her spellbound audience wills her on, she regains her voice and, as the words and music build, leaps off into a place where . . . few other performers go these days. A place beyond words and their meanings, beyond mere critical definition, a place that the great jazz improvisers used to call ‘out there’. (O’Hagan, 2003, para. 1)
Ted Aoki (2004a) makes a similar musical comparison that resonates strongly here. He tells the story of jazz trumpeter Bobby Shew, visiting scholar at the University of Alberta, whom Aoki invited to speak in a curriculum seminar. He had two questions for Shew, which shed light on our discussion of the transformative nature of Vox Orphic: “‘When does an instrument cease to be an instrument?’ and . . . ‘What is it to improvise? What is improvisation?’” (Aoki, 2004a, p. 367). Shew’s response frames the importance of improvisation in the work of Vox Orphic poets, and amplifies what it is about Patti Smith, and artist-poet-musicians like her, that exemplify Vox Orphic: “[M]usicianship is more than a matter of skills and techniques, that music to be lived calls for transformation of instrument and music into that which is lived bodily” (Aoki, 2004a, p. 368, emphasis added); that is, the instrument and musician and the music become one. Just as audience/participants, music, and the instrument of the body (receiving, dancing) transform into something “lived bodily,” too. Vox Orphic describes the embodied experience of those ritual purifications and reincarnations (of the spirit, and the self) through the unity of music and poetry: fascinating, entrancing, mystic, and oracular: between the worlds and beyond, ever repeating, in the mystery of becoming.
As a poetic inquirer, these experiences and spaces call to me because there “between representational and non-representational discourses is the site of living pedagogy” (Aoki, 2004b, p. 429). Experiencing such living pedagogy, a threshold space, my poet-activist self is inspired: the poetical, pedagogical, personal, and political combine in a synthesis of music, poetry, activism, cathartic dance, and ritual; a space recognized by Bill Doll as “the site of chaos in which dwell transformative possibilities” (Aoki, 2004b, p. 429).
A catalyst for personal and societal transformation, Smith captivates and inspires her audiences through fiery, driven performances characterized by boundless physical energy, impassioned rhetoric on current events, calls to action, poetic interludes, personal anecdotes, and jocular conversation. She croons and cajoles, cavorts and cries, like a hawk, a banshee. She is grounded and earthy, expansive yet immediate, unifying in gesture, action, and word.
This is Vox Orphic: music and poetry that enchant, invoking a reverential, participatory dynamic—an intimate shared passage. The power of voice, its lush performativity, leads the way through the underworld, our Orphic guide. We carry home a spark from the group torch, and light the fuse that fuels our poiesis, our gifts back to the world.
Van Morrison is another poet-musician who creates an Orphic space in performance, where poetry and music meld in such a way that time and space disappear, if even for a moment; we are transported. With soulful embodiment of vocal range and affect, combined with versatility on saxophone, harmonica, keyboards, percussion, and guitar, Van entrains voice, poetics, and the accompaniment of the lyre to carve a portal of “entrancing.” Kate Bush also creates such worlds, with her theatrical, multi-octave voice and lush instrumental forays threaded with lyrical, mystical poetry. Jim Morrison, of The Doors, commanded Vox Orphic, but to a tragic degree, slipping too far through veils of the underworld.
Smith’s performances are always an offering to life, often commemorating her dead comrades along the way, from poet-artist William Blake to playwright Sam Shepard, and her husband, Fred “Sonic” Smith, frontman for MC5; her companions on the road of life. Fitting acknowledgment from an oracular priestess, whose shows constitute a threshing floor where politics, song, and the social protest inherent in rock music’s origins combine, under just the right circumstances, to create what Joseph Campbell famously described as an “antidote to the atom bomb” (as cited in Meriwether, para. 9): an ecstatic, communal experience of reverence. Campbell originally made this remark referring to the Grateful Dead, whose performances—intertwining poetry, song, improvisational musical exploration, and this essential element of communal unity—also fall within Vox Orphic. Speaking of the Dead’s performances, Campbell noted,
This is more than music . . . It turns something on in here [the heart]. And what it turns on is life energy. This is Dionysus talking . . . It doesn’t matter what the name of the god is, or whether it’s a rock group or a clergy . . . hitting that chord of realization of the unity of God in you all. (As cited in Meriwether, 2015, para. 3)
The Orphic tradition is said to have evolved from earlier Dionysian rites, an extension of ecstatic worship of the holy. As such, Vox Orphic implies both: holy transformation, and the ability to slip between worlds, something akin to Gloria Anzaldúa’s “theory and praxis of imagination . . . [that] underscore her belief in art’s healing, transformative power and her shape-shifting approach to language and the body” (Keating, 2009, p. 121). Smith’s version of shapeshifting dwells, poetically, in the art of incantation. Poetry sparks through incantation. From wild notes to somber intonation, incantation is breath and prayer, rhythm and exaltation. Incantation, from the Latin, incantare, to chant or bewitch, underscores an important aspect of Vox Orphic: incantation, as enchantment, sings worlds into existence. Thus, artists like Patti Smith move beyond mere performance, into spiritual catalyst: “I am a threshold yearning to sing . . . Come on my spirit are you ready let’s go!” (Smith, 1979).
“How we go on” ~ Gary Snyder, “Axe Handles”
The purpose of poetry is to remind us
how difficult it is to remain just one person,
for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,
and invisible guests come in and out at will.
–Czeslaw Milosz, Ars Poetica
Embracing the idea of poetic inquiry as an embodied, feminist methodology (Faulkner, 2018), we return to core understandings of poetry as personal, the personal as political, and therefore, poetry as political (Faulkner 2017). The personal always has been, and will remain, political: embodied stories of lived experience, played out on personal, social, and communal world stages. Kathleen Ossip explains “why all poems are political” (2017):
[P]oetry is the only utterly free space for language . . . and that is what makes it indispensable . . . and also what makes writing it and reading it a political act: Any act where freedom is urgently at issue is a political act, and any space that makes us aware of our innate freedom is a radically political space. (Ossip, 2017, para. 2)
Can we engage the deep acts of empathy necessary to notice and hear other voices, including that of “matter” itself? How might we de-center the human entirely, giving voice to all else that populates this, and other, worlds; might we even de-center words themselves? For example, the poetry of Humberto Ak’abal (1952-2019) springs to mind, whole poems replete with birdcalls from his native Guatemala, as natural on his tongue as his native K’iche’ Mayan. Is there a way poetic inquiry can participate in such inquiries, in creating research that matters? These questions beg further contemplation of their intersections and inherent mysteries.
Enriched and emboldened by the many generative possibilities within poetic inquiry as feminist, political, Orphic research methodology, onwards inquiringly I go, informed by poetic-performative ways of being in the world. In the meantime, I hope that these imagined expansions on poetic inquiry’s purview offer inspirational food for thought, and new ways to consider the many voices, Vox, of our poetical works with/in myriad forms of qualitative research.
A Poem for the Social Poets Collective
The world is on fire.
Do we sit on the sidelines,
helpless,
watching it burn
Or do we
take to the streets
say no more in my name
shout and wave signs
shut down bridges in the rain
carve a constant, consistent
presence of protest
rambunctiously non-violent rally
meticulously mapped marches
stalwart walls of moms
bodies, bone, backs, brood
good trouble
between us
and the real trouble
sit back on the sidelines no more
who blows on the spark
that catches flame?
Meanwhile, neocolonial capitalism
steamrolls right along
flattens marchers, activists, grannies
mothers, fathers, children
sisters, brothers, aunties, uncles
into that thin line of text
running, running at the bottom of your screen
not even the main attraction
if it’s even (seen) or (heard) at all
certainly not
where the man behind the curtain
told you (not) to look
We’ve already pulled that veil aside,
seen the orange-tempered man in his naked
flabby truth, disheveled, desperate.
No emperor, no public servant, naught
but naked marionettes
pretending to run a show
where there is no show
(no entertainment value =
no “show”)
no truth
no country
no government,
really.
Just
people.
And the people will rise
When we take back the presses,
the night, our bodies, waterways, skies
our earth
from glad-handling, palm-greasing
swamp filling and filling and
filling, life eating
political machines
we will rise
like Shelley prophesied, as Maya Angelou sang,
still rising, on the streets, in song
sing poetry, sing beauty, sing art
sing magic of mind, music, and myth,
movement and flow
polyphonic existence,
sing everything!
Dance divine currents of circuitous desire
spell into palms the feeling
of meaning when sound and sight
fail, the touch of the world,
birthright, natal tattoo
invisible and indelible
marking us home, here,
wherever we are
roast ego in the flames
of word and deed,
eat hubris with nettles
drink courage soup
dive naked into blue pools
of night disguised as water
liquid languid healing balm
your flowing armor,
all disconnected parts of self
returned, renewed
self being the world
heal the world
dive deep, replenish
in ceremonial pools
of love and desire
sing the song of the world
dance the world’s ground
shed a skin
come, the world beckons
we reply
Acknowledgements
Deepest gratitude to Beth Phillips, Welsh scholar, for wandering and wondering with me in Vox Orphic:
“Ours is not a caravan of despair.” –Rumi
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[1] Both of these found poems were composed from book titles, gleaned from the book spines as they lay stacked atop my desk. Authors, in order of appearance of their titles, are as follows:
1st poem: Robert Bly, Adrienne Rich, Robert Bly, Robert Bly, Octavio Paz, Robert Bly, Jane Hirshfield, Robert Bly, Opal Whitely.
2nd poem: Mathhew Zapruder, Vladimir Propf, Rainer Maria Rilke, Ruth Finnegan (Ed.), Ronald J. Pelias, Willis Barnstone, Claire Chi-ah Lyu, Robert Macfarlane, bell hooks, Muriel Rukeyser, A. Allen Brockington, Jay Parini.
Living Poetically 