Transforming Data into Poems: Poetic Inquiry Practices for Social and Human Sciences

This article argues that poetry is an act of meditation, improvisation and exploration, and urgency is what guides the writer into (and through) the poetic journey. In the light of this, this article illustrates the features of a workshop that was designed to guide social and human scientists in the delicate process of turning raw data into poems. One of the chief objectives of the decolonial project is to bridge the gap between Westernised academia (“The Ivory Tower”) and communities where research is conducted, and this article aims to show how poetic inquiry is a fitting research methodology that can serve this purpose. Through a description of the workshop process and specific poems that emerged from it, it suggests that poetic inquiry is an innovative and effective research methodology for social and human scientists engaged in the transformation of conventional knowledge production.


Introduction
Arts-based research blends the arts and humanities with scientific inquiry to craft more embodied ways of understanding the social and physical world (McNiff 2017). This approach has gained traction in the past two decades in response to concerns about truth and representation and the ways in which voices of participants were too often appropriated, overpowered, fragmented, over-summarised or even silenced in qualitative research in the social and human sciences (Denzin and Lincoln 1994). Traditional qualitative methods, such as in-depth interviews or ethnographic reports, often produce narratives that are impersonal or dense, which leave readers overwhelmed or unmoved (Furman, Lietz, and Langer 2006). Arts-based approaches call for new methods of qualitative enquiry that can articulate the rich contextual and affective realities of participants' lives in meaningful, emotive and creative ways (Glesne 1997;Richardson 2002) and facilitate dissemination of research in much more easily consumable formats (Furman et al. 2006).
Poetic inquiry, or the use of poetry in research, is an arts-based approach that emerged in response to the above critiques of much traditional qualitative research (Furman et al. 2006;Glesne 1997;Prendergast 2004;Richardson 2002). Research poems creatively combine the basic premise of qualitative research with the craft of poetry (Leavy 2015). Poetic inquiry uses poetry "as a method of data reduction that re-represents data for the purposes of research" and poems are created "less for expressive and literary means, and more for the purposes of generating or presenting data" (Furman et al. 2006, 3). Literary and research poems differ in one important respect: whereas research poems might borrow methods from literary poems, they are written with the primary purpose of remaining faithful to the essence of the text, experience, or phenomena being represented (Furman et al. 2006). Literary poems have greater freedom to incorporate alternative perspectives such as fantasy and to alter the original experience in fundamental ways.
Research poems honour the lived experience of the research participant, and this is similar to other qualitative methods. However, engaging with poetic inquiry encourages scholars to embrace the craft of poetry and incorporate rhythm, form, metaphor and other poetic techniques to enhance their teaching, education and research (Cahnmann-Taylor 2003). These ways of working with traditional data forms challenge Western epistemic traditions that claim the knower is detached from the known and can be objective. In this way, poetic inquiry suggests a way to decolonise knowledge production (Mbembe 2015). As researchers draw from poetic qualities of being, metaphorical wondering, and pay a different kind of attention to the data, not only is the knowledge that emerges transformed (Butler-Kisber 2010; Butler-Kisber and Stewart 2009), but there is every possibility that the researcher/poet is transformed too. By producing meaningful, emotive and creative texts, research poetry is able to engage wider and more varied audiences than those typically reached by conventional academic outputs.
The aim of this article is to describe the features of a workshop that was designed to guide human and social scientists in the process of turning raw data into poems. By bridging the gap between creative and formal academic writing, this article discusses how poetic inquiry can decolonise and transform traditional research spaces, which are often hostile to more arts-based ways of knowing and being, such as poetry. Analysing observations recorded during three workshops conducted in 2019, this article probes poetic inquiry as both a medium for representing data and for attending to lived experiences. As qualitative researchers continue to grapple with the complexities of representation, poetic inquiry advances an increasingly holistic way of knowing and being in the world, one that does not exclusively privilege cerebral understanding, allowing for the visceral stirrings that comprise human phenomena.

Background
About three years ago, Heidi van Rooyen stumbled across the emerging field of poetic inquiry. During this period, she used poetic inquiry to explore the lives of transwomen in Namibia (van Rooyen et al. 2020) and the issues of "race" and identity in South Africa (van Rooyen 2019).
Two factors prompted Heidi's enthusiasm for poetic inquiry: the first stemmed from a place of weariness with the ways that traditional qualitative data had become overly summarised and seemed to have lost the essence of the people whose stories we were trying to tell through research. The second was the realisation that much of her writing had become impersonal and dense, and subsequently left both her readers and herself bored and unmoved. Poetry, with its ability to synthesise experience with musicality, rhythm, and poignancy, stirred something. It breathed new life into her scholarship and brought the person and scholar into closer communion. Heidi introduced Raphael to poetic inquiry. As a spoken-word poetry scholar, a published poet and a member of the ZAPP 1 research group engaged in a project titled "Reconceptualising Poetry Education for South African Classrooms through Infusing Indigenous Poetry Texts and Practices", he was looking for innovative ways of utilising poetry in research and education. His encounter with poetic inquiry, in which the rigour of research and the creativity of poetry operate symbiotically, took place in 2017, when he attended a seminar in which Heidi was discussing the methods, process and outcomes of her work. The authors came together through a joint appreciation and use of poetic inquiry in their respective fields. Raphael later became a research associate in the research programme Heidi was leading at the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC), and the idea to take poetic inquiry into the organisation was born.
Poetic inquiry workshops took place from April to July 2019 at the HSRC offices in Pretoria, Durban and Cape Town. The following section describes the workshop process and offers a template for scholars who may be interested in exploring poetic inquiry in other contexts. All participants voluntarily participated in the workshop and were 1 ZAPP stands for the South African Poetry Project.
van Rooyen and d'Abdon 4 informed that working with data and turning these into poems can be an emotional process, and that they may choose to withdraw at any stage of the process for this or any other reason. While the workshop was largely for their own creative enrichment, permission was requested for the use of the workshop process and poems for academic dissemination purposes such as conferences, articles or book chapters. All participants verbally consented to this.

The Invitation and Participants
Through an open call, staff at each of the HSRC offices were invited to attend the workshop. Those who stood to gain the most from the workshop were social and human scientists who had research data to work from-interviews, draft articles or chapters, fieldnotes, and so on-which they were eager to improve, and/or they were looking for a new approach to look at data that had lain dormant for a while. Two additional requests were made to the participants. First, any research data that was being used for the workshop had to have received consent from participants for the data to be used for academic purposes; and second, the original study had to have been subject to formal ethical review. Because poetry is often seen as obscure and detached from the conventional academic practices of social and human scientists, participants were asked in advance to attend the workshop with an open mind and a willingness to surprise themselves.
Thirty social sciences and humanities researchers, including Master's trainees, research directors, project managers and a spoken-word poet working in finance in the organisation attended the workshops. The participants' disciplines included demography, sociology, psychology, education, public health and social work, and they were conducting research on genders and sexualities, gentrification, migration, colonisation and youth. The groups were mixed with respect to gender, "race" and age.

The Poetic Inquiry Workshops
In each centre, the authors offered two-day workshops titled "Transforming Data into Poems-a Poetic Inquiry Workshop". The aim was to introduce the poetic inquiry methodology to researchers in the HSRC. This included an overview of poetic inquiry, poetry, various perspectives on the reading, writing and revision process, and strategies for redrafting data and works-in-progress into poems.
On the first day, to break the ice and create an environment that would be conducive to conversations on poetry, the workshop started with a round of poetry readings. The participants were given 5-10 minutes to read from a selection of South African and international poetry anthologies and journals provided by Heidi and Raphael, and then invited to read the poem(s) they had chosen. This opening session established a community of poetry readers, and aimed at "training" unfamiliar ears to the rhythm, sounds and musicality of poetry. It opened people up to the felt sense of speaking and reading poetry.
After reading the poems, the workshop moved into the operational phase, in which Heidi and Raphael gave an initial introduction to poetry and the creative process. A list of definitions of the term "poetry" was provided. Participants were asked to choose one to three definitions from the list and discuss their choice with the group. Keeping in mind that most participants have hardly engaged with poetry in their adult life, this exercise invited participants' own inquiry into poetry and allowed them to reflect on how different it might be from other research methods they have used. It led to questions about what they might like to compose in the workshop and conversation about the possibilities that poetry could offer their research. This exercise was done at an early stage in the workshop to stimulate interest in the genre and to create an emotional connection between the new methodology and the participants' conventional modus operandi.
After discussing poetry in general, Heidi and Raphael offered an overview of the concept of poetic inquiry: how it started as a discipline; the areas in which it is used; the leading experts in the field, their observations and theory; the pros and cons of this research methodology; academic journals that focus on qualitative analysis and delve into poetic inquiry; and the various forms it can take (found poems, poems by researchers, participant poems and generated poems). The focus of the workshop was on research or found poems, which use transcripts, field notes, journal entries, or reflective/creative/autobiographical/auto-ethnographical writing as data sources. While the focus in this workshop was on found poems, participants were free to choose other forms. As an example, Makhosazana Xaba's found poems, drawn from Mohale Mashigo's novel, The Yearning (Mashigo 2016), and published in The Johannesburg Review of Books (Xaba 2018), were discussed. These poems are illuminating for the participants, because the author-an award-winning South African poet-offers a stepby-step illustration of the writing process that allowed her to create poems out of preexisting written material (in this case, a novel).

Developing Found Poems
The next step in the process was the writing session, where participants were guided into the destabilising process of shifting their conventional academic texts (articles, conference papers, interviews, raw data and so on) into poems. Following Butler-Kisber (2010), Glesne (1997) and Richardson (1993), the process of creating research poems began. The authors started by engaging in traditional thematic analysis, where they were encouraged to immerse themselves in reading and reviewing the data transcripts individually and noting common themes. Once these themes and codes were identified, the participants found key passages within the text that represented each theme. In reading each theme they were encouraged to highlight striking excerpts, words, phrases and expressions.
The next step involved working through each theme section by section, focusing on the technical arrangement and flow of the lines, and creating the poems (Johnson et al. 2017). Minimal changes were made to the original data to preserve the original speakers' meaning, unique rhythm, pauses, emphasis, syntax, and diction (Öhlen 2003). Although no words were altered, "poetic license" (Butler-Kisber 2010, 87) was used to rearrange the words in a different order from the original text, and in some cases, poetic devices such as repetition, pauses, line length and spacing were used to evoke and intensify the meaning of the original data (Öhlen 2003). During this phase, Heidi and Raphael supervised the composition-in-progress of the found poems. Through impromptu conversations with the participants that involved reading the poems, arranging excerpts into verses, considering line endings, and working on the flow and rhythm of the poems, the facilitators helped the writers to transition data into poetry. The first day closed with a group reflection on the exciting aspects and the challenges related to poetry writing for research purposes.
The second day started in the same way as the first day: with the participants reading poems, followed by a feedback and review conversation on the outcomes of the previous day's activities. These warm-up sessions were followed by a presentation about the importance of editing in poetry. Predictably, the editing session occupied a central place in the workshop, which had been designed to create poems out of large amounts of data. After a brief introduction to the main principles of editing, the scope, practicalities and technicalities of the editing process applied to poetry were illustrated via a video showing poet and scholar Yusef Komunyakaa (2011), and also through two examples of applied editing. The first was the editing of one of Raphael's poems by poet Safia Elhillo; the second was South African poet Jim Pascual Agustin's rearrangement of the "unpoetic" poems featured in the bestselling collection, Milk and Honey, by Rupi Kaur (Agustin 2018). These documents clarified the objective of the session, and paved the way for the next phase of the workshop.
Participants were encouraged to edit and polish their poems so that the data they had collected could take shape and be translated into poems that would simultaneously be solid accounts of academic research and imaginative literary pieces (Prendergast 2004). The facilitators worked with individuals and their emerging poems closely in this stage. The editing session can be as long as necessary, and ends when the participants are satisfied with their work. After this session, the workshop ended with a round of readings of the poems that were produced and with a final reflection on the two-day workshop.

The Data Poems
The workshop was an opportunity for learning and building the capacity of participants in the methods of poetic inquiry, in other words how to turn their research data into poems. This two-day process resulted in all participants producing poems at various stages of completion. Five complete poems from the workshops are shared here. Each poem starts with the author's name/s and a description of the research or project that provided the data source from which the poems emerged.

Zonke Gumede and Monde Makiwane
The poem "Home" emerged from data in a circular migration project in the Eastern Cape. The project emphasises the translocality of people in the Eastern Cape who may have migrated to other places for work but who still consider the Eastern Cape to be their home. Most of them, upon retirement, return to the rural areas for their final rest.

Molemo Ramphalile
Molemo crafted a found poem using the words from Shakespeare's play, The Tempest, which is a parable of early colonialism and its legacy. In writing the poem, the author wrestled with the representation of Sycorax (a witch mother from Africa): he focused on the words that appear in the parts of the play where Sycorax is the topic of discussion between the characters, and also where she is mentioned in the appendix as one of the dramatis personae.

I Arrived and Heard
Speak; tell me! For mischiefs manifold; and sorceries terrible forces of Nature, earthy and abhorred commands unmitigable rage not to be stopped by appeals not controlled by the spirit of man not honoured with a human shape is not this true?
Who with age and envy was grown into a hoop? An enchantress who turned men into wild beasts, playing on sensual desires that could control the moon? brought with child, her litter-demi-devil, (my) slave?
banished: for one thing she did imprisoned: within which space she dies her name: which has been found nowhere else and one so strong?
Damned witch? Was she so? Damned, which? Speak; tell me!

Mudzunga Neluheni
This found poem is based on two interview transcripts from the author's Master's thesis. The study focused on the impacts of gentrification-related displacement on existing and displaced working-class residents in Maboneng (meaning "place of light") Precinct, a regenerated parcel of Jeppestown, Johannesburg.

Finn Reygan
This found poem emerges from a study that explored the lives, experiences and challenges of older lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex people in the Western Cape and Gauteng provinces. These five poems emerged through the two-day writing workshops conducted in three locations across the country. While all of these participants had not written poetry before and are beginners in artistic concentration and the poetic craft (Faulkner 2017), the poems demonstrate that it is possible for novices to learn how to transform research data into poetry. The poet-researchers were able to use poetic language and form to evoke embodied experience, effectively communicate emotional aspects of social life, and raise critical consciousness by cultivating empathy, compassion and understanding for the situations of marginalised populations depicted in these poems (Leavy 2015;).

Discussion
In order to obtain feedback from researchers unaccustomed to poetic inquiry, group feedback was elicited at various points. The aim was twofold: on one hand, they contributed to highlight possible weaknesses and inconsistencies while the workshop was still in progress, thus giving the facilitators the opportunity to intervene and slightly modify the programme where necessary; on the other, they established the participants' thoughts and ideas about the use of poetry as a research methodology.
Participants' reflections mirrored challenges others have found in introducing poetic inquiry into academic environments. Our participants observed how poetic inquiry challenged well-established Western epistemic traditions that favour objectivity, divisions between mind and world and research methods that support these ways of knowing. They mentioned that they found it difficult to view poetry as a reliable testimony of their long-term efforts and fieldwork activity; they resisted accepting that poetry can effectively reflect the full extent of their research; they shared the impression that a large part of their research data seems to be left unused when a fully developed research paper is "shrunk" into a poem. Fernandez-Gimeneza et al. (2019) in introducing poetic inquiry to their natural science students in the United States (US) encountered similar resistances to our social science and humanities colleagues in South Africa. Their students also felt that poetry was not research and were concerned that poetic inquiry would sacrifice scientific rigour and validity.
Our colleagues also appreciated the possibilities that poetic inquiry could offer them, and their work. Participants unanimously enjoyed engaging in an unfamiliar activity, and were surprised to discover that they could write (or at least, draft) poetic texts out of arid research data. They noted that creating poems out of data allowed them to overcome the inertia and frustration of sitting on data they found hard to develop and structure into a research paper. Our participants agreed that, instead of suppressing the researcher's voice, the poetic text actually had the power to magnify it by shedding light on the central argument of their research in ways that are often not achieved through other forms of qualitative analysis. Like the students in the US, our participants observed that using poetic craft heightens rather than threatens validity; poetic analysis can express the multiple meanings, complexity, and fullness of the lived experience more effectively than participant quotations lifted from an interview transcript (Fernandez-Gimeneza et al. 2019). In the telling of these stories using this format, they got to see and experience these lived realities in a different way. In other words, poetry's succinctness and emphasis on the economy of language allowed the researcher to produce highly focused poems that challenged the verbosity and obscurity that characterises conventional academic jargon. Many of our participants concluded that they will consider using poetic inquiry as a research methodology in the future, if the opportunity arises.
An overwhelming benefit for our participants was that poetic inquiry opened them up in surprising ways. It allowed them to explore their data from a new angle that invited imagination and focused on emotion, expression, and meaning in the lives of their research participants (Fernandez-Gimeneza et al. 2019). Poetry fostered social and emotional learning: being able to write a well-crafted verse in a poem can help researchers see participant experience in entirely new ways. They can gain insight that may have evaded them about participant realities; this can give them new understanding and be invigorating for their work. The academy is a place of too much "brain only", and poetic inquiry surfaces other ways of being, other embodied modes of writing, doing research and learning. Poetry, perhaps more than any other approach or discipline, gets to the essence of qualitative methodology. Poems employed as catalysts provoke insightful responses, allowing for a more in-depth and holistic understanding of the human experience (McCulliss 2013).
Poetic inquiry is not about analysing poetry or asking others to analyse it, deconstruct it or try to make meaning of it. It is used in writing sessions to learn about where researchers come from and where they are headed, to find voice and representation, and to build community. Shared in this way, poetry motivates reluctant researchers (or most writers, for that matter), and has space for social and human scientists. Poetic inquiry works with rather than against the complexities of experience, which researchers are always mining for understanding that is not easily extrapolated. As such, poetic inquiry is a way of dwelling in nuance and intricacy.
Butler-Kisber (1998) commented on how poetic representations can provide the researcher with a different lens through which they can come to understand not only the data, but also themselves, in different and more complex ways. This observation points to an important critique of social science research. Increasingly framed through positivistic paradigms, qualitative research had started to mimic conventional science. Through the endless research summaries and data extracts they produced, qualitative researchers worked hard to remove themselves from the analysis, to be objective, to let the data "speak for themselves" (Rapport and Hartill 2012). More constructivist approaches challenged these notions, and arts-based approaches such as poetic inquiry provided researchers with a way to emerge from behind endless summarised lived realities on the qualitative page. As McCullis (2013) points out, by putting words together into new configurations through poems, the relations created through echo repetition and rhythm let us see and hear our participants and ourselves in new ways. Poetry is a practical and powerful means for reconstitution of worlds.
Increasingly researchers are challenging the voice of the omniscient academic observer and are exploring creative forms of representation that reflect richness and complexity of data, and invite new and embodied levels of engagement (Brearley 2000). Poetic inquiry may foster deeper reflection on the researcher's experience in the research process, her relationship with participants and colleagues, and issues of power in scholarly production (Fernandez-Gimeneza et al. 2019). Poetic inquiry makes an important contribution to the expanding field of arts-based research, situating both researcher and participant in fluid, dynamic, and relational terms. By challenging voice and representation, in centring the contributions of lived realities of participants, poetic inquiry decolonises traditional knowledge production that privileges the academic voice as the sole, authoritative creators of knowledge and challenges the limitations of hegemonic notions that, as academics, we can know a world without necessarily being part of that world, and that it is possible to produce knowledge that is universal and independent of context (Mbembe 2015). Poetic inquiry reminds us that subjectivities are real, and that participant voice matters: these knowledges are central to a decolonial academic project.
Poetry and poetic inquiry offer a way to humanise and transform the researcher. The scientist is engaged as a whole person and challenged to defy the implicit dualisms between scientist and artist, objective scientific process and subjective lived experience and emotion (McCullis 2013). Butler-Kisber (1998) in incorporating creative expression and representation in her teaching felt it would enable her graduate students to become stronger researchers, specifically through the practice of introspection and different ways of thinking while conducting qualitative studies. She proposes that "pedagogical discussions should include [a] 'pedagogy of proximity', one that builds the kinds of relationships that will illuminate issues of knowledge, difference, and power in educational contexts" (Butler-Kisber 1998, 13).

Poetic Inquiry and Decoloniality
Poetic inquiry articulates a decolonial perspective in that it delinks from conformist methodologies of knowledge production and reconfigures the relations of power that shape conventional research by invigorating the (often suppressed) voice of the colonised. It is a decolonising strategy in that it encourages greater collaboration and coexistence between researchers and research subjects, in which the former have an opportunity to escape the prison of academic jargon, and the latter are allowed to speak for themselves in new, empowering ways. With poetic inquiry, poetry becomes a communal language, and the poetic text is the space in which this dialogue inter pares unfolds.
In the Indigenous Knowledge Systems of Africa poetry represents one of the highest forms of knowledge, embedded in African philosophical thinking: it is the living embodiment of an in-depth engagement with history, science, religion and language that has evolved over thousands of years. In other words, poetry is scholarship and, as such, is located at the very centre of the ceremonial cultures of the indigenous people of Africa, of their rituals, and cultural, educational and social practices (Brown 1999;Finnegan 2012;Furniss and Gunner 1995;Gunner 2001;Hofmeyer 1993;Johnson 1996;Kaschula 1993;Ricard and Veit-Wild 2005).
Poetic inquiry can be viewed as an epistemic response to the decolonial project, and this article argues that a decolonised education in Africa should put poetry back at the centre of its research, teaching and learning practices. Following Tuhiwai Smith, it maintains that "the methodologies and methods of research, the theories that inform them, the questions which they generate and the writing styles they employ … need to be considered carefully and critically before being applied. In other words, they need to be 'decolonized'" (1999,39). Poetic inquiry as method challenges hegemonic knowledge production and provides epistemic diversity by foregrounding practices and interpretive frames that are still permeated by coloniality.
Radical imagining is critical to any decolonising discourse, and poetic inquiry is a response to Tuhiwai Smith's imperative, since it reimagines knowledge production by using poetry for decolonised academic research. It is a mode of address that "speak [s] both to reason and to affect" (Mbembe 2015), and allows for generative engagements by presenting the findings of research and disseminating them back to the community in a culturally appropriate and accessible way. This nuanced and embodied methodology presents a concrete possibility of scientific expression that decentres hegemonic normativity and provides a platform for decolonial educational alternatives.

Conclusion
German Romantic poet and philosopher Novalis said that "poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason". This article offered an outlook on the process and outcomes of a workshop designed to help social and human scientists overcoming recurrent challenges of research writing such as, among others, lack of inspiration, lack of direction, lack of method and lack of incisiveness of one's findings. The authors argue that poetic inquiry is a methodology that, paraphrasing Novalis, can help bridge the gap between the "brainy" rigour of conventional academic writing and the "healing" power of poetry, with positive results in terms of increased self and interpersonal awareness, increased sense of validation in voicing one's truth, and enhanced capacity to capture and reframe significant life stories. Poetic inquiry is therefore a recommended research methodology to social and human scientists engaged in the decolonisation of research and education, who are keen to explore new, imaginative approaches to academic writing.