I-POEM PROJECT
ABOUT
We want to make poetry and scholarship accessible. We invite you to listen to the voices of research participants from a variety of research endeavors. Crafting these poems helped us to understand a variety of diverse perspectives and experiences. We hope that reading the I-Poems similarly shapes your understanding of our participant’s beliefs and lives.
WHAT IS AN I-POEM?
I-Poems are a type of found poetry and a method of qualitative research analysis. Found poetry involves selecting words directly and exclusively from a piece of text to create poetry. Qualitative research analysis involves studying and examining non-numerical data. As feminist researchers, we believe that research can both highlight voices of marginalized individuals and be a tool for social justice reform. This form of poetic inquiry allows researchers to decenter themselves from inquiries. They capture how participants speak about themselves and their experiences (Bailey-Kloch, 2018; Edwards & Weller, 2012). I-Poems are an accessible and beautiful way to convey a participant’s voice.
Each line of an I-Poem begins with an I-statement. The creator of an I-Poem pulls I-statements from transcripts of interviews or focus groups, seeking to convey the essence of a long conversation or interview, or portray an individuals’ experiences with or opinions about a specific topic. Some of the poems featured here play with the I-Poem form. A participant’s words were used to craft a You-Poem, where our participant shares advice to others working in re-entry. We also experimented with a We-Poem as well, understanding that some shared experiences are fully captured when we highlight sentences using the first person plural.
