Can Concrete Poems Fly? Setting Data Free in a Performance of Visual Enactment

Abstract

In researching the tutors working in alternative education centers in New Zealand, I sought ways to bring voice to their lived experiences through, initially, creating found poetry from interview transcripts. The poems helped bring their vital voices to the page. Even so, I found the emotion of tutors’ lived experiences buckled under the pressure of their compression into lines of poetry. Thus, I set the found words free to form nonlinear configurations in two and three dimensions. In the tradition of concrete poetry noted by Khlebnikov, I “loosed the shackles of syntax . . . to attach meaning to words according to their graphic and phonic characteristics.” In this article, I present concrete poetry deriving from my poetic inquiry and reflect on the value concrete poetry provides arts-based researchers.