ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on ethnographic materials, visual experimentation and oral histories from children, men and women living in different contexts and spaces. Ethnopoetry is a representational method that is different from traditional social science, which most often relies on theoretical exorcisms peppered with grey columns of interviewees' transcribed quotes. Johnson Debeljak's melancholic style is emblematic of one of his major poetic influences, Slovenian Srecko Kosovel who was 22 when he died in 1926; 'it is a style that is founded in the poetic and philosophic articulation of the unspoken, which gradually expands the focus of the lyrical subject'. Jerome Rothenberg's definition of ethnopoetics moves against Heda Jason's classificatory linguistics. Poetics, he goes on to argue, is the clincher for something different. Rothenberg's ideas resonate with the later work of Michel de Certeau and his colleagues, which favors orality as a foundation for community. Orality is an essential link between passion, meaning and the body.
