A Poetic Inquiry Into Journalists’ Experiences of Covering Institutional Child Sexual Abuse

Abstract

This article introduces a spectrum of poetic approaches that have emerged in the analysis of research interviews with journalists who covered Australia’s Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse and related stories. Six poem excerpts, from two of the poets involved in the project, are presented to explore how engaging with a spectrum of approaches—from found poetry transcription to generative methods—can be used to shed light on the situated experiences of research participants. Considering the various functions of “poetry” in this context—as container or vehicle for data, as tool for analysis, or as artistic/affective expression—the article not only explores the multiple outputs and their roles for a variety of audiences but also how these poems can evoke/ provoke/ excavate alternative perspectives—both expected and surprising—on the data.

Introduction

There has been an “emotional turn” in Journalism Studies scholarship recently (Wahl-Jorgensen, 2019) that has capsized the idea that news reports are created by detached professionals and received by indifferent audiences as simple sets of facts. In their research on emotional labor in journalism, Pantti and Wahl-Jorgensen (2021, p. 1567) observe news workers are “expected to witness and give expression to emotions experienced by others, while subduing their own.” Furthermore, even though journalists’ experiences and management of emotion is a “central constitutive feature” of their profession, it has been largely under-researched and “rendered invisible” (Pantti and Wahl-Jorgensen 2021, p. 1567). The project at the center of this article contributes to international scholarship on poetic inquiry through its exploration of how such approaches can “render visible” the emotional experiences of 16 journalists who covered Australia’s Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse (2013-17) (RCIRCSA, 2017). In the sections that follow, we present some of the poems and reflections that have resulted using poetry as a method for approaching and analyzing in-depth interviews with the journalists. The Royal Commission was a massive undertaking that documented the extent of Child Sexual Abuse in institutional contexts and the experiences of people affected by abuse. It also put forward recommendations for healing and for creating a safer future for children (see RCIRCSA, 2017). The 16 interviews captured the journalists’ experiences of the difficult work of bearing witness to the inquiry, and the trauma and/or uplifting aspects of that experience. They were conducted by one of the authors (Waller) as part of a large, federally funded research project that investigated the role of the media in the Royal Commission more broadly (see McCallum, 2023). The decision to leave behind orthodox approaches to theorizing journalism opened the door to a poetic inquiry that could privilege the ways in which the 16 journalists articulated their experiences, generating new understandings through distillation and juxtaposition, and inviting readers to participate in the meaning-making process.

The authors of this article work in the adjacent fields of Creative Writing and Journalism and are colleagues at the same institution. In 2022, we had a conversation about how poetry might enter this research space, to provide new and perhaps unexpected perspectives on journalists’ experiences in covering such difficult subject matter. Through Wilkinson’s work with documentary poetry—and specifically biographical poetry—we thought that some experimentation with data in this way might also extend the possibilities for qualitative research and data analysis.

In the poem “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower,” poet William Carlos Williams (n.d.) writes: “It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.” We might understand Williams to mean that poetry trains and provokes imagination, our imaginative capacities, in part because it requires active reader participation to “realise” it. Exercising that muscle builds our ability to imagine better futures, may be what he is suggesting. We were drawn to Williams’ quote as a starting point for our collaboration in part because of the interview participants’ long-term experiences with shaping “the news” as journalists. We were not, however, suggesting that these journalists ought to start crafting journalistic poems (the quote, in this sense, has functioned more as a happy coincidence); rather, we were interested to see how poetry might address a “lack” in our understanding of “newsmakers” experiences; how poetry might “turn over” interview data with journalists in new ways, and help us to see between and past their relationship to conveying factual information. The poems that are presented and analyzed in the sections that follow illuminate emotions and experiences that news audiences and journalism scholars might have misunderstood or not considered in relation to media coverage of the Royal Commission. These include the personal and performance pressures of being an outsider and rookie reporter tasked with breaking complex stories of clerical sexual abuse and large-scale church cover-up in a hard Catholic town. And for the most senior and accomplished of journalists, there is the palpable struggle to not only find the right way to say the “unsayable” for a general audience, but to recount their experience of covering the issue years later, which speaks to the profound experience of performing and reflecting upon the work.

Our interest extends beyond how poems can be tools for condensed reportage and a fast-track to emotion (Richardson, 1992), to explore how they can be invitations to readers to participate in meaning-making. On this point, we were keen to investigate how poetry, to use the words of American poet and scholar Cole Swensen (2011), “acknowledges and interrogates the limitations of language” (p. 58) and might make room “for those aspects of truth that can’t be articulated” (p. 58). ¹ Swensen (2011) notes that poetry can bring the reader into relation with a more “fully complex version” of truth by encouraging the reader to move “beyond simply absorbing facts and into a responsive engagement with them because that engagement is a crucial part of truth” (p. 58).

We imagined that the results of the project would include documentary poetry—that is, poetry for which poets have drawn upon and/or incorporated documents and other materials into the poems themselves. In our case, the interview data (consisting of both AI-generated transcripts edited by a research assistant, as well as the original audio recordings and, in some cases, videos of Waller and the participant in conversation over Microsoft Teams) was the major “document” source for us, but we also turned to other source material, chiefly writings by the respective journalists (newspaper articles, essays, books). Yet this project moves outside the bounds of documentary poetry, for we were also interested in exploring what poetry can do as a tool for researchers, to assist with qualitative data analysis—by which we mean poetry as both means, or method of analysis, and as ends (in the “final” poems).

In the sections that follow, we begin with an overview of the literature on poetic inquiry, research poetry and documentary poetry, to demonstrate how our project adds new dimensions and directions to the field. We then reflect on our intentions, our initial processes, and how the “spectrum” of poetic approaches—from found poetry transcription to generative methods—can be used to shed light on the situated experiences of research participants. Considering the various functions of “poetry” in this context—as container or vehicle for data, as tool for analysis, or as artistic/affective expression—the analysis not only explores the multiple outputs and their roles for a variety of audiences, but also how these poems can evoke/provoke/excavate alternative perspectives—both expected and surprising—on the data. We conclude by considering how poetry might expand journalism studies and how journalistic principles might, too, help establish stronger foundations for “nonfiction poetry.”

Literature Review

The field of poetic inquiry has burgeoned over the decades since poetry was first seriously proposed as a research method by scholars such as Laurel Richardson (who became a leader in the field of research poetry/poetic representation) in the early 1990s. ² One of Richardson’s earliest endeavors in this area involved her transforming interview responses from “Louisa May,” a participant in Richardson’s broader research project on unmarried mothers, into a poem to get closer to Louisa’s voice and story. Richardson (1992) discusses the “consequences to [herself as researcher] of breaching qualitative norms” and notes that, through the “feminist mission” of her work, she has endeavored to find “forms in which sociology can be an effective and affecting discourse, a nonalienating practice” (p. 136).

Many subsequent researchers who incorporate poetry into an aspect, or aspects, of their research process cite Richardson’s influence, yet expand applications in qualitative inquiry across wide-ranging disciplines, from market research (e.g., Canniford, 2012), journalism studies (e.g., Archetti, 2017), gerontology (e.g., Holland-Batt & Miller, 2023; Miller et al., 2015), health professions education (e.g., Atherley et al, 2023; Brown et al., 2021), education more broadly (e.g., Butler-Kisber, 2002; Leggo, 2018; Smart & Loads, 2017), social work (e.g., Mazza, 2012), and more.

From the decades of work that has been done in this field, scholars have used an array of terms to describe their activities using poetry in research, from “research poetry” (Richardson, 1992), “poetic field notes” (Flores, 1982), “poetic rendering” (Glesne, 1997), “poetic transcription” (Glesne, 1997; Richardson, 2001) “poetic rumination” (Leggo, 1999), “poetic representation” (Butler-Kisber, 2002), “lyric enquiry” (Leggo, 2007), and “poetic inquiry” (Faulkner, 2019). Prendergast (2009) provides a comprehensive list of 40 terms for research poetry, and the researchers who use those terms to describe what they are doing with poetry in research. Scholars have also put forward definitions of research poetry/ poetic inquiry (see, for example, Faulkner, 2019; Galvin & Prendergast, 2016). Vincent acknowledges that “there is no singular, bounded, theoretical underpinning related to poetic inquiry studies” (p. 163) and he offers a simple definition of poetic inquiry: “there must be an inquiry made and poetry must be used as at least one element of the research process” (p. 166). We adopt the term “poetic inquiry,” which has become the most used term, and appreciate the capaciousness of Vincent’s definition.

There are many reasons researchers are drawn to poetic representations. Richardson (2001) herself draws attention to the fact that prose itself is merely “a literary technique, a convention, and not the sole legitimate carrier of knowledge” (p. 877). She advocates for using poetry not only for its offering “alternative representations of research material” but also for its presenting such representations as constructions rather than truths. She says,

because the poetic form plays with connotative structures and literary devices to convey meaning, poetic representations have a greater likelihood of engaging readers in reflexive analyses of their own interpretive labor, as well as the researcher’s interpretive labor in relation to the speaker’s interpretive labor. The construction of text is thus positioned as joint, prismatic, open, and partial.

Other scholars have expressed similar sentiments toward poetry and its capabilities for expanding qualitative research processes and outcomes. Canniford (2012) writes that “far from undermining claims to validity, poetry can improve qualitative inquiry by acknowledging and illuminating the presences and experiences of researchers in the production of knowledge” (p. 392). Leggo (2007) notes that

Poetry does not invite readers to consume the text as if it were a husk that contains a pithy truth. Poetry is not a window on the world. Poetry invites us to listen. Poetry is a site for dwelling, for holding up, for stopping. Poetry prevails against hermeneutic exhaustion, hermeneutic consumption, hermeneutic closure, hermeneutic certainty. Poetry is not hermetic. A poem is a textual event, an “act of literature,” an experience of spelling and spells. (pp. 166–167)

And Neilsen (2007) writes that the “inquirer brings the artistic work of writing to light not as proof, as with our conventional practices in social science, but as illumination and connection” (p. 96). These researchers and many more draw attention to the possibilities opened by drawing qualitative data into the orbit of poetic energies and how this can bring new insights to the analysis—insights that might be arrived at in part through a reader’s additional interpretive input. The impacts of poetic inquiry, writes Neilsen, “can be achieved with resonance as much as with report” (p. 94).

We can see similarities between the work of poetic inquiry and that of documentary poetry—indeed, some of the most well-known works of documentary poetry, draw heavily from transcripts of testimonies, as in Charles Reznikoff’s Holocaust (1975) or Testimony (1965) or from the poet’s interviews with subjects, as in Carolyn Forché’s The Country Between Us (1981). Such work, as Mark Nowak (2010) points out, is frequently activist and left-wing in inclination, intended to incite activity through the readership and draw attention to significant world issues, either past or current. Documentary poetry may be more likely to make use of pre-existing documents, using poetry to enliven the documents’ contents and what that represents; poetic inquiry is more likely to make use of more recent data, often collected by the researcher-poet themselves. Forché’s work, mentioned above, might be viewed as straddling documentary and poetic inquiry, though we might also consider poetic inquiry to be a subset or extension of documentary poetry, whereby researchers—who may be experienced or lay poets—use poetry not necessarily for public outcomes, but for a range of reasons.

Researchers note that they have turned to poetry in their research in an effort to achieve certain aims or generate specific or general impacts, whether that be for social justice (poems lending more focus and potential distribution to that cause), to give voice to a certain subject or community demographic or to better represent the subject/s (through engaging directly with quotation / personae in the construction of poetic artifacts), or to find new ways (and new languages with which) to respond to, analyze, and/or interpret “data.” Subsidiary effects have also been noted—for example, exposing the construction of the analysis/interpretation, which is often unaddressed in more traditional qualitative analysis.

Poindexter (1998), for example, wrote poems from interviews with HIV-affected caregivers to deepen understanding and give voice to their underrepresented experiences. Neilsen (2004) used poetry to listen and respond to their small community’s grief at the tragic loss of young life within that community. Canniford (2012) uses “poetic witness” to expand market research; he states that poetry can “acknowledg[e] and illuminat[e] the presences and experiences of researchers in the production of knowledge” (p. 392) while also diversifying the languages that are used to understand and “know” about marketplace cultures (p. 393). Sjollema et al. (2012) use found poems to interpret and represent data relating to the experiences and causes of homelessness among immigrant women in Montreal. They offer these results with the goal of finding new ways to inform the public, policy-makers, and people who offer services to immigrant women. Archetti (2017), in journalism studies, discusses how poetic inquiry allowed her to include material (via poem) that would not “fit” in an academic article, namely about her study on how “urban space and infrastructure affected the newsgathering routines and practices of foreign journalists” (p. 1114). Atherley et al. (2023) created research poems to explore and analyze the narratives of medical students transitioning from pre-clinical to clinical training in a different way to standard interview analysis and report-writing methods. And in the field of gerontology, Miller et al. (2015) interviewed aged care residents to glean their insights on their experiences living in aged care; the authors then used poetic inquiry to transform the interview material into research poems that would help the researchers “to think with rather than about the participant’s experience” (p. 416).

The above researcher scholars (and many more) have deployed poetic inquiry as a pedagogical tool, as a reflective/reflexive tool, as an analytical tool, as an exploratory tool, and as a means to bear witness to and/or highlight community voices. Outcomes and realizations that practitioners have noted include an expansion of practice (how one writes up research or conducts research—for example, Archetti, 2017); understanding how poetic approaches can expand the “languages” we use to present, interpret, and understand data (e.g., Canniford); and greater accessibility to consumers of research (e.g., Sjollema et al., 2012).

Yet some contention has arisen around the question of who might deploy poetic inquiry in research, and what skill and experience are required for undertaking the activity. Piirto (2002, p. 444) argues against inferior poetry in research inquiry, to not “confuse the poetasters for the poets,” while Lahman et al. (2010) advocate for “good enough poetry” to encourage more people to turn to poetry rather than prose as a means of expanding research processes. Adam Vincent (2022), in his comprehensive doctoral study of Poetic Inquiry as a research methodology, hones his interest on how researchers and educators might turn to and use poetry as a “multimodal tool,” a way to expand their research methods and findings. As noted by Kedrick James (2022) in his foreword, “[Vincent’s] stance toward the poetry of academic inquirers leans toward the efferent as opposed to the aesthetic” (p. xv). The question of necessary poetic skill might, perhaps, revolve around the researcher’s purpose and intended outcomes for the poems (that is, where they might publicly appear, whether within the context of a scholarly article, independently within a literary journal, or merely within notes as part of the research process). But perhaps more helpful than focusing on skill and experience is Richardson’s (2001) suggestion that practitioners might approach the material from “different angles” by writing “different poems about the material” (p. 882). This is how we approached our own project: the poets experimented with different approaches to the interview material and used one approach to seed or spark the next approach. Indeed, the multiplicity of our approach points to the multiple modes in which poetic inquirers might address or respond to the data and the situation of the inquiry, whether that be through more straightforward transcript-style “found” poems (a distillation of the transcript), or poems involving a more expansive, imaginative and/or interpretive use of data.

In a recent article by award-winning poet Holland-Batt and Miller (2023), the authors compare the imaginative, emotive lyric approach (specifically, the example is from Holland-Batt’s collection The Jaguar, and the poem addresses the poet’s observations of and reflections on her father’s difficult experience in hospice care) and the found poetry approach (which restricts its textual palette to transcript content and gets close to others’ voices). Holland-Batt and Miller mention the word “spectrum” within the essay but do not specifically address the possibilities across the spectrum, beyond the two examples mentioned above. This essay picks up where Holland-Batt and Miller (2023) leave off, addressing a range of poem outcomes that arise due to a collective approach to the task of using poetry to approach interview material.

Methodology

While there is evidently an established and growing body of work documenting the importance and impact of research in the form of poetry, applying a poetic lens is rare in research on journalism. Yet this form of inquiry has the potential to investigate “the vivid details of the situated practices of journalism as they are lived in real life.” (Archetti, 2017, p. 1106). It can also have “far-reaching epistemological and ontological implications . . . about the world where journalists operate, the role of imagination, sensory perception, and materiality in everyday manifestations of journalism, as well as the place of the scholar” and highlight the benefits of transdisciplinary collaboration in the research process (Archetti, 2017, p. 1106). These higher aims have informed the research design, which was iterative, conducted across two stages, and addresses the research question:

• Research Question 1 (RQ1): How can a range of poetic approaches be used to excavate and express the lived experience of journalists who covered the Child Abuse RC?

Stage 1: The Interviews

Sixteen semi-structured in-depth interviews with journalists who covered the child abuse Royal Commission were conducted by Waller in 2021 in line with the project’s approved scholarly research ethics as part of the “Breaking Silences” project. The interviews were between 40 and 90 minutes in duration and explored each journalist’s experience of reporting or producing news about the issue of institutional responses to child sexual abuse. Some of the journalists were highly experienced and had national profiles. Others were young and relatively inexperienced when they worked on the Royal Commission. They were employed by media outlets including The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) and a range of daily newspapers. The purposive sample included journalists who worked in print, radio, television, online, and book forms. Most of the interviews were conducted online due to COVID-19 travel restrictions, but a small number were held in person. At the time of the interviews, the intention was to conduct a generic qualitative analysis to understand the themes emerging from the data and relate these findings back to research being carried out for the wider project. However, it became clear that the project’s case study approach was focused on aspects of the Royal Commission that made news headlines, patterns of news media coverage, news values and routines, the roles and identities of journalists, and media representations of victim survivors and perpetrators. ³ Through a process of critical reflexivity, Waller decided against interpreting the journalist participants’ words through the prism of news logics and routines and their attendant boundaries. More than a year after the interviews were conducted, the inspiration for an interdisciplinary and collaborative approach to analyzing the interviews emerged through a series of conversations with Wilkinson. Within 3 months of the first conversation, the authors had formed a team and developed a workshop framework to explore the value of Poetic Inquiry as a means for capturing “the underside” of news (the felt, emotional, embodied part, of the connections between the discrete facts of the interviews, rather than the facts themselves) and inciting the reader’s “responsive engagement,” so that it can also be appreciated and used as an analytical tool or test site, not necessarily geared toward public outputs.

Stage 2: The Poetry

Wilkinson and Waller assembled a team of five poets (including Wilkinson) along with Waller as journalist consultant, and a research assistant to coordinate the project. The poets’ first task was to “experience” the 16 interviews. We say “experience” the interviews because most were audio-visual recordings taken from the interviews conducted via Microsoft Teams, while some were audio recordings from the face-to-face interviews. The research assistant also provided the poets with transcripts of the interviews, both the initial digital transcripts processed by AI, as well as versions checked and corrected by the research assistant. ⁴ The poets committed to watching and/or listening to the full interviews because the transcripts were unable to pick up subtle human details—the way something was said (irony, humor, sadness), body language in the video recordings, the feeling behind this verbal exchange the poets were witnessing between interviewer and interviewee.

Two full-day workshops were convened in 2023 so the research team could come together to discuss thoughts, feelings, and reflections on the interview material, and to share their developing poem drafts as experimental explorations of that data. The workshops also included discussions about influential documentary poets (Reznikoff, Nowak, Meters, Forché) and issues including fidelity to the material, and the role of the poet when it came to distilling and ordering material. In the first workshop, the poets shared some draft poems responding to the transcripts and their watching/listening of the interviews, and discussed the techniques and modes they adopted in these experiments, which generally refer back to Prendergast’s category of “vox participare”—that is, participant voiced poems—but were also more playful with the transcript material. In the second workshop, the poets presented completed poems for discussion and secondary analysis by the group. This second sample of poetry experiments included lyric poems that moved away from the transcripts, poems that encompassed themes generated by analysis across the interviews, and poems that drew on materials created by the journalists beyond the interview (books, articles and other documents). Waller and the research assistant offered tertiary analysis drawn from their disciplinary perspective and the logics of the journalism field. The poetry approach to analysis allowed the researchers to focus on some of the human condition of age and experience, doubts and emotions, and other personal factors that shaped the journalists’ reflections on covering the Royal Commission. By doing so, this sub-project expands the findings and impact of the wider project by “breaking silences” surrounding the lived experience of the journalists who participated in the study. On reading and approving this article before it was submitted to Cultural Studies—Critical Methodologies, Danny Tran told us he was profoundly grateful for being “heard” through Wilkinson’s poems. Suzanne Smith reflected that victim-survivors who had collaborated closely with journalists in lobbying for the inquiry, and throughout its life, would deeply appreciate those journalists’ experiences, emotions and contributions being made visible and honored in poetry.

In the sections that follow, a small selection of poems by Wilkinson and one of the project poets, Anders Villani, are presented for analysis. Villani’s poetic experiments center on Waller’s interview with Suzanne Smith, whose contributions and impact on Australian journalism have been acknowledged and celebrated through the nation’s highest awards for journalism. In her role as producer of the ABC’s agenda setting current affairs program 7.30 Report, she played a leading role in breaking the story of Catholic Church cover-ups of abuse that triggered the Prime Minister to call the royal commission. Smith (2020) has also written a book titled The Altar Boys, which deals with the issue of child sexual abuse within the Catholic Church. Wilkinson’s poems center on an interview with Danny Tran, who was a young and relatively inexperienced journalist with the ABC; he was based in Ballarat at the time of the Royal Commission and was tasked with covering the local angle on the issue. Ballarat is widely acknowledged as an “epicentre” of child sexual abuse and was the subject of two case studies of the Royal Commission (Waller et al., 2020). Wilkinson also wrote poems that draw on more than one interview and other related materials, and some of these are also presented and discussed below. Our responses to and reflections on these poems have developed through a combination of literary interpretation, discussions between the project participants during workshops, and consideration of the poets’ stated intentions in deploying specific poetic strategies. As such, we draw the poet-practitioner’s skills in reading poetry into the process of evaluating the potential contributions of the poems. We present this kind of (collective) literary analysis as an additional fruitful step in the processing of the interview data, but also emphasize that the poems themselves—as texts that those external to the project can engage with—encourage active and responsive readers.

Poem Examples

Anders Villani Poems—From Suzanne Smith (Journalist) Interview With Lisa Waller

Villani experimented through the writing of several poems that draw on/respond to Waller’s interview with journalist Suzanne Smith, and each poem-experiment takes a different approach to the “data.” In this excerpt from one poem below (his first experiment), Villani describes his approach as “compressed, faithful to transcripts” in a manner that takes cues from documentary poet Charles Reznikoff and “still with [a] degree of elision, focalisation” ⁵ :

I had been doing a lot of child sexual abuse stories.

And I suppose I’d built up a bit of a reputation.

Actually, can I start again?

I’ve just realized that I need to go back. Sorry—

scrub all that. Sorry about that.

My executive producer at Lateline said to me, I’ve heard this story

about a woman up in Newcastle

whose son was a victim of Catholic clerical abuse.

She sounds like she’s got a good story. At the same time,

the Bishop of Maitland-Newcastle, Michael Malone, had called

on the Pope to apologise to victims

and he was the only Bishop doing it,

and it was the same time, same time

the Pope was coming to Australia for his tour. [. . .]

The poem emphasizes Smith’s desire to get the details right, to “start at the beginning,” and to convey an accurate timeline, reminding us that her professional values remain uppermost in telling the story. Villani adheres to the order of Smith’s interview—she starts with details that are “in medias res,” at a moment in her timeline when she has been covering stories of child sexual abuse and developed a “reputation” as a key journalist covering that material. Smith then zooms out and away from the self to emphasize contextual events that were happening at the “same time, same time”—there was the woman in Newcastle with a story that Smith might pursue, the Bishop’s appeal to the Pope, and the Pope’s visit to Australia, all happening in the same period. Arguably, the poem enhances this sense of triangulation of power relations, encouraging a reader to note in this list an ascending order of power, from the woman fighting for justice for her son to the powerful global Head of the Catholic Church. In a journalistic sense, the local mother’s fight for justice also provides the human-interest angle that makes the global news story proximal and therefore relatable.

As poets and readers of poetry, the second stanza in particular is unexpectedly powerful in this context: “Actually, can I start again? / I’ve just realised that I need to go back. Sorry— / scrub all that. Sorry about that.” The poem generates an opportunity for readers to diverge from Smith’s own sense of getting her account right in order to explore the relationship between the words and the subject matter; to consider how telling these stories presents its own opportunity to heal victims, to “scrub” the present trauma by accounting for the past.

In Villani’s second experiment, the poet utilized the same material, but isolated and repeated key phrases uttered by Smith. The beginning of the poem is reproduced below:

Actually, can I start again?

I’ve just realised that I need to go back. Sorry—

scrub all that. Sorry about that.

I had been doing a lot of child-sexual-abuse stories.

There’s this. There’s this.

       It’s the carnage in this thing.

At the same time

and it was the same time

same time       and what was clear

         was cover-up

and what was clear

you’ve got to remember

         and people forget this

the Church

was all-powerful.

How could you say a priest?

How could you say a bishop?

          How dare you ask these questions

       The Church had its tentacles in.

Actually, can I start again?

       There’s this. There’s this.

You can’t underestimate. You’ve got to remember [. . .]

This second poem deploys repetition ambiguously—that is, a reader may interpret that repetition in a variety of ways relevant to the context. For example, it evokes for the reader an embodied sense of the nature of remembering, how the mind (re)plays memories of trauma, how memories are not narrative driven but fragments; it also captures this sense of repeated trauma for survivors through the reportage and the Royal Commission. As Villani notes, the poem “dramatises [the] process of arriving at testimony—the retractions, repetitions, qualifications, entreaties to remember.” We also get a sense of a journalist’s perspective of going over details and facts, of meeting the demand to remember and not forget; of finding the right way to say the “unsayable” for a general audience. There is also a suggestion of the vicarious trauma experienced by journalists in covering the Royal Commission.

In spreading lines across the space of the page, the poem emphasizes the divisions between what was “clear” versus the “cover-up” in this story, and between the questioning (by reporters, by the Commission) and the Church backlash (“How dare you ask these questions”). The spacing of the poem lends greater weight to the words, as with “you’ve got to remember” and “the Church / was all powerful.”

In his third experiment, Villani notes his attempt to isolate “key aspects of personal experience” from Smith’s interview:

Most of us are lapsed Catholics. I had been

doing a lot of stories. And what was clear

from these documents was cover-up.

We didn’t stop. Every time there was a story.

Lapsed Catholics. We just pounded it.

It had already affected my mental health.

The carnage in this thing. Backlash.

White-anting. I was starting to have panic attacks.

I had a lot of therapy. I was on the edge.

It’s so stressful, that sort of journalism,

when you become a target.

That’s the tip of the iceberg—that’s the scary thing.

Where the first experiment, the “transcript poem,” emphasized the fact of the interview and the second experiment used repetition and fragmentation for specific affects, this third poem shifts the emphasis from a journalist’s documenting of other voices and experiences toward Smith’s own voice as a participant in the narrative. It is where the research “goes behind the scenes” and “below the surface” to explore Smith’s largely unacknowledged emotional work (Pantti & Wahl-Jorgensen, 2021) in covering the issue of historical child sexual abuse. Consistent three-line stanzas, a prevalence of short sentences/full-stops and end-stopped lines focus attention on Smith’s personal perspective, and her list of unpleasant encounters. Panti and Wahl-Jorgensen (2021) observe the most studied context of journalistic emotion management involves extreme situations such as wars, disasters and major accidents. Villani’s third poem speaks to how the professional value of detachment is perhaps the most difficult to maintain when covering an issue such as historical child sexual abuse and the impacts of such emotional labor are tangible.

Jessica L. Wilkinson Poems—From Interview With Danny Tran (Journalist) With Lisa Waller

Wilkinson’s experiments with Tran’s interview material followed a similar track to Villani’s compressed transcript poem. She began by distilling the interview in a manner that was faithful to its narrative arc, paying attention to talk and context in equal measure to create a second order narrative in the analysis (Brannen, 2013). Possibly the most interesting aspect of the poem that eventuated was the use of line breaks and stanzas as devices to stress strands of ideas or themes in segments and clusters. The following stanza presents an excerpt from the beginning of the transcript poem:

Ballarat: the history of the place

I knew

that it involved gold and Sovereign Hill

and there was some child abuse.

That was just the tip of the iceberg.

By the time I got there

stories were already coming out

in The Courier

and very suddenly you’re part of that narrative

doing follows from the paper:

 so and so says this

 this survivor says this

 they’re calling for this

suddenly you’re the one creating that narrative

adding to that public discourse.

It puts a fire in you to redefine your role.

Through isolating and then distilling Tran’s repetitions, as well as his use of similar-but-not-quite-the-same phrasing in such a way, this excerpt encourages the reader to actively participate in the “narrative-making” of the poem, just as Tran came to participate in the “narrative-making” of Ballarat’s story as a focus of the Royal Commission. Of note is the way that the poem highlights the transformation of Tran as actor in this scenario, from “outsider” to someone living in the town where the investigation is taking place, to someone who has a stake in that town’s story (as both resident and as journalist). These transitions are “sudden”—the lines and line breaks create an almost cinematic impression, moving Tran as persona from a situation of knowing not much, to then becoming part of the narrative, to then creating the narrative. In this way, the reader shares—indeed, takes part in—the very experience/ exercise/ process to which Tran is referring, which may even come to generate a sense of comradery in the reader. Tran’s repetition of “suddenly” also suggests that working on a major breaking story as a young early career reporter involved a significant element of unpredictability that might not be experienced by a seasoned journalist covering the same issue.

Another aspect of note from this excerpt is the contrast between the ice(berg) and the fire. These were Danny’s words, but the poem draws them into a close and more significant relation than within the interview transcript itself, and shifts the language from idiom to imagery that takes on new relevance in context—that is, it highlights the opposing forces of a lengthy and weighty cover-up or trauma versus an energy to reckon with that long-solidified mass.

Wilkinson’s reflections on the transcript poem, how it drew into sharp relief Tran’s use of imagery and metaphor to describe his perceptions and experiences of what was going on in the Royal Commission, had a generative impact on her engagement with that interview through poetry. In other words, it led Wilkinson to her next experiment, a poem that extracted and stitched together Tran’s use of figurative language from across the interview, and rearranging quotes to draw likenesses together. The outcome of this experiment had the effect of generating new kinds of energy. The following excerpt from this poem experiment drew together references to strands, threads, ribbons and lines:

you’re pursuing a line

not a line

but a particular angle

you pick away

find as much as you can about it

push people on it

threads that you need to pull out

ribbons were being placed on the fences

ribbons were being removed

every strand adds to the rope.

The ribbons were a small step.

These lines take on heightened meaning when we think of the Loud Fence movement, a Ballarat community-led response to local survivor testimonies that visually marks out historical abuse in the form of colorful ribbons tied to institutional sites (see www.loudfence.org.au). As McDonald (2023) argues, “the enduring persistence of this phenomenon in the years since [the Royal Commission] underscores the importance of ritual in the formation of collective memory.” The Loud Fence movement carries the rallying cry: “Every ribbon has a voice . . . just listen.” So this poem draft begins to speak to Tran’s role, as journalist, in pulling these threads, making them visible and weaving them into the narrative that the general public can hear and understand.

As with the previous experiment, this one, too, led Wilkinson to another approach. We conclude with a poem that arose from the final research exercise, and which draws from the interviews as one data set, and also from a long essay by one of the journalists (Marr, 2013) who was interviewed by Waller. The poem extracts all references to color across the 16 interviews with the journalists. When Wilkinson shared it with the group, she called it simply “Loud Fence.” In response to the poem, Waller discussed the “color piece” in journalism. As noted in A Dictionary of Journalism (Harcup, 2014), a color piece is “A story emphasizing the color of a situation; that is, one based on description, atmosphere, and emotion rather than straightforward factual reportage.” Waller said that color stories are often the lighter, human-interest pieces in the news, giving relief from the serious, heavy stories. But the proliferation of color in this poem makes it not metaphorically “light” at all; rather, the color lights up the horror. Wilkinson renamed the poem as a result of this feedback loop, which becomes obviously ironic. It highlights an interesting contrast to how journalists might use “colour” in color pieces, versus how they seemed to be using color to talk about the darkness of the material they were dealing with during coverage of the Royal Commission. It highlights the underside of a newspaper’s “colour piece” material, the material that was for so many years left buried and hidden (McCallum et al., 2023):

Loud Fence  Colour Piece

a black line went through his name on the honour board

the black line represents this:

 all these red flags were ignored

 they totally whitewash . . .

 Ridsdale in his cheap white suit and dark glasses

  the paedophile in the white suit

Pell in clericals

 white crosses on the gables of St Alipius

  a redbrick gothic bungalow

  gold money was still washing through Ballarat

the blueprint of an organisation perfectly suited to eluding control

Pell had to pay for a cardinal’s red hat

  his red hat and a gold crook

 heavy white sculptures in St. Mary’s

a man in episcopal purple

a large figure in purple climbed out of a black stretch Ford

I was blue in the face

I was pretty green still

There’s been a film on that, Oranges and Sunshine

a red leather armchair there ensued a conversation

a spin doctor to start white-anting

what is the gold standard for dealing with this stuff?

In reflecting on this poem, Wilkinson considered the idea of poetic lines as being ribbon-like strands extending into space; they are never immoveable nor reduceable to a specific meaning, but rather “blow in the breeze” of the reader’s interpretation. The poem, as with the enduring persistence of the Loud Fence movement across the world, offers cause for observation, reflection, and remembering local survivor testimonies (McDonald, 2023). Furthermore, the poem conveys the observational power of the journalist by capturing professional reflections that are rarely shared with audiences.

Conclusion

We continue to discuss and seek ways through which we might expand this exploration of the intersections between poetry, journalism and data analysis, both in order to better understand journalist experience in covering difficult subject matter, and to think more broadly beyond that space into what poetry can offer to journalism and vice versa. In reflecting on the above experiments, we offer some concluding thoughts and queries that have arisen through this specific practice of poetic inquiry.

First, that this approach invites a poet’s skills in imaginative play and interrogation of language into the space of data analysis. Activating poetry’s devices (for instance, repetition, metaphor, use of space and line break), these works help to illuminate latent or subconscious threads in the interview data that may not be discerned through an informational scrape of that data alone. The poems help us to connect, for instance, with the respective journalist’s commitment to getting the facts straight, and their relationships with language as a factual and expressive medium. As Zapruder (2017) says, “Language waits to be released in poetry” and “Poetry enacts the possibilities and powers that lie dormant in the nature of language itself” (p. 13). In this way, the language used by the respective journalists to describe their experiences is opened to new understandings through distillation and juxtaposition. The poem, then, becomes a tool for enhanced analytical insight into uses of language beyond informational reporting. For example, repetition and fragmentation convey Smith’s anguish, while the “cinematic” approach of drawing images and metaphors together heightens the sense of Tran’s increased proximity to the unfolding news story in Ballarat.

Second, this representation of data does not elevate the researcher’s perspective as primary or self-contained; rather, the poems invite readers to participate in the meaning-making process. As poems are “events in time” that occur at the convergence of reader and text (Rosenblatt, 1964, p. 126) the experiment outputs are not fixed nor contained interpretations in themselves; they encourage us to be discerning in our assessment of those interpretations, to become active respondents to the material presented to us as a shaping of the world that we inhabit.

Yet we accompany the above rich possibilities with some questions: What does it mean to draw connections between seemingly unconnected things? While poets are attuned to generating links between aspects of the world that are not previously connected, showing new patterns, synergies and constellations, the drawing of such lines in a journalism context may shift into unsound territory. In playing with language to deal with such heavy subject matter, we are not wanting to abuse the facts. Indeed, Tran explicitly states in his interview with Waller that his first loyalty is toward facts; as a poet it is, perhaps, more toward feeling, an underlying truth that words, wielded differently, might pursue or reveal. Further, what does it mean to introduce poetic devices to embody experiences that we have perceived but not personally “felt” (e.g., as repetition might be deployed to evoke hesitation, return, memory retrieval?). We look forward to leaning further into these tensions and to investigating possible responses in our future experiments.