60: Poetry as Research: Development of Poetic Craft and the Relations of Craft and Utility

I sometimes fear that thousands upon thousands of reams (or megabytes) of research lie and lean against each other in literal and virtual space, unused. I fear that much of what is produced in the education and social research realm circulates, if it circulates at all, within a relatively closed world of researchers. Knowledge piles up without application, and we are all familiar with the concept of a gap between research and practice.

Part of the promise of arts-based research in general and poetic representation of data in particular is that it has the potential to compress and render accessible the results of some kinds of research. This has value within the research community as well as beyond. Within the research community, for example, consider the challenge of communicating one’s complex research within the 20-minute span of the usual conference format. A data poem that compresses 20 pages of data (Burg, 2004; also, this volume; Commeyras & Montsi, 2000) into a single page can be very useful in a context like this.