This article explores an experience of “pulping,” a rejected poetry inquiry; that is, the author describes revisiting and rewriting a micro poetry cluster about rape culture and teaching trauma texts nixed by reviewers for being too “upsetting.” This project aims to (a) demonstrate the potential of poetic inquiry for “pulping” refused art, (b) resist silencing of sexual violence, and to (c) call for creative “upcycling” of upset. The author returns to her rejected poems and engages in a new poetic inquiry which she conceptualizes as a kind of feminist “pulping” process where she “upcycles” her troubling writing in search of newfound fecundity. As such, by reworking the refusal, reckoning with unpublished refuse, and staying with the trouble in re/fusing new art, she engages in poetic inquiry as a pulping process to (re)make meaning from an experience of academic silencing of art that addresses sexual assault and rape culture.
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