Learning by Heart: A Poetics of Research

Abstract

All the questions I need to ask; the stories I have yet to hear. The heart's two chambers--everything I most desire, everything I most fear. (Keefer 291) What touched the human heart and intellect a thousand years ago, a decade ago, will touch them again. What is current is ancient. There is nothing new in thought. The charisma of poetry is that it finds fresh resonances in the same old human heart and mind, the same old experiences of men and women, the same world. (Friesen 122) I want a scholarship that fosters connections, opens spaces for dialogue, heals. I want to rein in power like one might a runaway horse. I need to write from the heart. (Pelias 2) 1 I live in a poetic part of the world, in Steveston, British Columbia, on the shore of the Fraser River, near the Gulf of Georgia, on the rim of the Pacific Ocean. I am daily aware of the privilege of living in a place surrounded by mountains and ocean and sky. In this place I focus on sensual living. In this place I devote a part of each day to poetry, and I learn again and again a lesson I have often learned in the past: poetry invites me to breathe, to attend, to slow down, to embrace the healing and enlivening of body, heart, spirit, and imagination. In the privileged positions of my daily experience, I am to autumn light and winter light, moonlight and fog-light, and the play of shadows in alders written by herons and ducks and geese. I am listening to the wind, and noting the ways that eagles, gulls, and crows play in the wind, sometimes hang still and suspended in a boisterous windstorm. And I am to language, too. 2 on the edge of morning a heron stands still in the slough near the dyke where I walk daily. gulls hang in the sky. a sea lion rests with the river. an eagle watches from the tallest alder. the whole world lingers. I too wait and watch, my image upside down in the smooth river, all the world topsy turvy but still in balance, learning to be still, even in a vertiginous world. 3 The human heart beats anywhere from fifty to one hundred times per minute. On average, the human heart beats seventy-two times in a minute. Therefore, this rumination on research comprises seventy-two short sections for generating a lively and heartful connection with the earth. Like the poet Dennis Lee understands, a meditation involves--certainly the mind, but also the heart, the body, the spirit. It's a quest, a quest of attending (30). This is the kind of writing that I want to pursue--a meditation that involves the wholeness of my attending. This meditation is polyphonic, a concatenation of languages, a convention of voices that sing out, sometimes in choral collaboration and sometimes in cacophonous contestation. This essay is not about argument or proof or conclusion. My goal is to help generate a conversation. I am not trying to convince anyone about anything. I am the host of a gathering who invites others. This meditation is about breathing and poetry, and comprises seventy-two short sections like koans or heart beats. There is lots of space on the page for the reader to scribble in the text. I am not promoting a research method in this meditation. Instead I am promoting connections between poetic knowing and research in the social sciences. I am promoting a poetics of research by promoting poetic ways of knowing. As Lee confesses in his essay Poetry and Unknowing, if you knew what a given poem was, you could just write it down. But you're responding to something you feel claimed by, but can't yet articulate, or maybe even identify (31). I feel called or convened by the writers, ideas, experiences, and poetry that I have gathered here on this day in this place, and I extend an invitation to readers to listen for the call, to hear their hearts, to hear the hearts of others beating with poetic rhythms. …

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