School patterns: A sextet

Abstract

This sextet of poems represents my (first) experimentation with narrative or ''found'' poetry. The words for the poems were found in stories people shared for my dissertation research and a book on architecture. Images of school described by those people are juxtaposed with Alexander's (Alexander, Ishikawa, & Silverstein, 1977) ''pattern language.'' A question to ask might be: why write narrative poetry? Barone and Eisner (1997) tell us that different forms paint different pictures, engendering new understandings. Butler-Kisber (1998) encourages experimenting with different genres and modes of representation to relate differently to your material. A writing-story (Richardson, 1997) accompanies these poems. The intent of providing a writing-story was to provide context for the narrative poems. Additionally, it serves to describe the creative process I experienced in experimenting with a new genre and touches on issues enmeshed with representing qualitative data.

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