Research is the Poetry: Poetic Inquiry for Writing Studies Researchers

New this month, Research is the Poetry: Poetic Inquiry for Writing Studies Researchers by Sandra L. Tarabochia demonstrates the promise of poetic inquiry, the arts-based method of creating poems with, as, and in relation to qualitative research data. is available through the WAC Clearinghouse (https://wacclearinghouse.org). The open-access book appears in the book series, Practices & Possibilities, co-edited by Michael Palmquist, Aimee McClure, Aleashia Walton, and Jagadish Paudel.

Informed by studies from a range of disciplines, each chapter introduces a particular poetic research practice and features dynamic examples from Tarabochia’s eight-year longitudinal study of faculty writing lives. Thorough discussion of the affordances and challenges of each approach and guiding questions for reflection prompt readers to imagine when, why, and how they might practice poetic inquiry in their own research contexts.

Candidly sharing her own process of discovering and learning the method, Tarabochia makes a compelling case for poetic inquiry as a form of methodological surrender, a way of loosening our grip on certainty and what we think we know about scholarly meaning making. Research is the Poetry shows writing researchers how to tap into the human dimensions of our work and begin to know, be, and do differently.

This book, like other books published by the WAC Clearinghouse, will be available in a print edition from University Press of Colorado in the coming months. Thanks to Sandra for her work on the book and for her decision to share it with us as an open-access publication. Thanks as well to the anonymous peer reviewers who contributed to its development.