ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 focuses upon poetic inquiry, the methodological strategy that structures experience into poetic form. It uncovers how lyric essays and poems might function as an artistic research act, as an act of revelation and intervention, and as a practice reliant upon image, language, and form. To demonstrate this method, the chapter calls upon the poetic to help make the case. It works with a fragmentary structure to create gaps for readers to fill. It shows how the poetic can penetrate into the heart of its subject with language that crystallizes everyday life in an evocative manner. The chapter closes by offering a series of writing prompts to develop the readers’ poetic abilities and by presenting two poetic pieces, the first, a series of poems entitled “After Orlando” and the second, a lyric essay entitled, “Archiving Father and Son.”
