Arthro-Coda: Poetic Notes (Re)forming Patti Lather’s “Top Ten+ List: (Re)thinking Ontology in (post) Qualitative Research”

Abstract

This poem forms a diffraction of Patti Lather’s article listing ten learnings from the ontological turn. This work is intended to be read alongside Lather’s original article, so the reader can appreciate how poetry and prose form and entangle reciprocally. Ostensibly coalescing as notes from a face-to-face, simultaneously video-conferenced meeting to discuss Lather’s list, this poem pulls together fragments from multiple intra-actions and pushes meaning apart, as do the human and other speakers it calls into being. It avoids dramatic claims to making a difference, but suggests an infinitesimal, insect antennae shift via the ways it may brush against the reader’s skin and increase awareness of the more-than-human. This may even activate a tiny wriggle-release from a stuck place. Lather’s list emerges through the narrows of poetic inquiry as changed, alternatively accessible, more intensely affective, yet still resonant with her advice and spiky with further, many-legged, tangential questions.