Poetry, the political moment, and the poet as witness

Abstract

In this autoethnographic reflection on my experiments with poetry as form and its value as method, I propose that poetry is perhaps well suited to address and be faithful to the political moment: the moment when the taken for granted no longer holds. Poetry seems able to escape the linearity often found in narrative writing and to replace any search for certainty with openness or ambiguity. As method it can reveal what may be hidden. Looking at both political poetry and the poetry of witness, I explore representation and point of view while insisting on the impossibility of individuality. Examples of my own writing are included to show how these questions arise in my first attempts to write the tears of the world into poems.

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