To the badlands and back: a researcher-poet’s journey through loss and grief

ABSTRACT

Qualitative researchers employ poetry to construct meaning out of painful life circumstances, including the grieving process surrounding death. A motive for utilizing poetic inquiry, i.e. the use of poetry in research, is its ability to express emotion and convey complexity. As grieving is a decidedly emotional and complex experience, poetry seems well-suited to represent data in this situation. In this article, I deliberate on grieving, including the identity shifts and struggle for meaning that can occur, and on how it can interact with writing poetry and the research process. Further, I describe my own grieving surrounding the death of my mother and how this process interacted with my ability to write poetry and my identity as a researcher-poet. I explore my search for meaning that led to recontextualizing my grief poetry into a research framework. This article features excerpts of autoethnographic poems and offers further deliberations on poetry and grief.

KEYWORDS:

• Grieving process
• autoethnography
• meaning
• identity
• poet
• researcher-poet

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The definition of meaning used here is equivalent to making sense of something, or of something having significance (see https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/meaning)

2 Researcher-poet indicates that the individual identifies both as a poet and a researcher, and is concerned, for example, with both the evocative and aesthetic quality of the research poems and their accurate portrayal of the participants’ experience (Sjollema & Yuen, 2017)

3 Grief is defined as the subjective and highly personal response to loss (Harris, 2010).

4 Poetic inquiry can be described as an overarching research methodology, i.e., using poetry in research, while autoethnography is a research method, i.e., a specific way of gathering and representing data (see Fitzpatrick & Fitzpatrick, 2020).

5 This poem was originally published in Life Times Two (2021) by Cactus Press. I am the author and hold copyright over the poem.