Having your Cake and Eating it: an Experiment to Test if Poetry can Open the Unknown, and Over- Consumption as an Ontological Boundaries Issue

Researcher: Diane Tingley
Supervised by: Jonathan Skinner
Home department: Centre for Life Long Learning
Project department:English
Expected start date: 01/06/2014
Expected end date: 08/09/2014

I am an English and Cultural studies graduate of the Centre for Life Long Learning. I am interested in the poetential of eco-poetics to raise energy awareness through sustainable research design in the humanities.

Poetry delves the means of our consciousness through word play, to open the energies of the unknown. It is the nothing of space which can accomodate the everything of nature; is able to exceed the limits of the instituion, whilst engaging with its ethics. As formal language (for example, a letter), poetry has potential to open the unknown of encounter with matter in space: most obviously with the reader as the random factor, but also because poetry exists as bulk on the space time continuum, interacting with the stuff of gravity matter, and - as such, is always new. This project draws on the ideas of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets active in response to the Vietnam war in the seventies. In her essay "The Rejection of Closure", a poet of that tradition, Lyn Hejinian, wrties that poetry is ethical the extent to which it is opens space in form, because that makes it scrutinisable; the writer's choices of what is important are down in black and white. This gives poetry the potential to be a prejudice-free space from which to build bridges between audience and reader, teller and writer, the local and the global.

My method to test the unknown is writing collaborative poetry on the food choices of a local community in the form of recipe poems, in the form of Shakespeare Sonnets. Different voices in the poems are distinguished by formatting and punctuation.

My project design is modeled on a cycle of knowledge which borrows methodology from art and science: a hypothesis takes us to the unknown for "knowing" in the context of nature (that it is our power), not to recognise that being conceptualised as the beginning of inter human prejudice. From there we nave a need to make sense, for understanding made possible by human creativity, art. Since matter is always in flux, from here, sense becomes non sense, and we arrive back at conjecture, as the cycle begins a fresh. The artistic or scientific process alone are flawed: art can lack direction, science be blinkered. Science draws a line between the known hypothesis, and the unknown, enabling us to focus on best suited form (method) for our explorations into space. Creativity can be thought of as a way to acknowledge collective agency (as an expression of humaness of social animals), querying the prejudice of isolated individual, or the hierarchical, top-down knowing, described by Franklin in Understanding Research, Coping with the Quanative-Qualitative Divide, as a weakness of science:

"It is a misconception to proceed as if academic research is immune from social, cultural, and legal concerns, as if a reaearcher can go anywhere, do anything in the name of... scientific knowledge (76)".

This cycle blends method from science, and the sense making in the unknown of art, to illuminate why the quantitative qualitative divide is artificial: both the scientific method, and sense of arts are important to understanding.

I compared food choices in the area of Coventry inside the ring road (CV1), in the form of favourite vegetarian recipes, which I wrote into Shakespeare Sonnets. I acknowledge the agency of the researchers, and those being researched, in collecting cultural data in a non-privilledged post code (home to the Coventry food bank). I wanted to honour the local as expert there, informing the "experts," and credit the community: hand them back their own knowledge in the form of a book of community inspired recipe poems.

The project also takes place in a space of poetry, a site fulfilling self- reflexive ethical requirements of ethnographic research. The poetic dialogue takes place between voices of Coventry, and me, the researcher, a mature student of The University of Warwick, also ten years home-owner resident of the post code in which the research takes place.

Out of resepect for local knowledge (Shakespeare is part of cultural heritage of Warwickshire, to which the phrase "it's dark over Bill's Mum's testifies), I chose a known form (method), also relevant globally: The Shakespeare Sonnet (14 lines of interlaced rhyme in three stanzas, followed by a rhyming couplet). I adapted it to make recipes, and prejudices, "known" or opened, each to each. Its linguistic conventions, for example, the iambic pentameter would help record the exact syntax of the voices I encountered (spoken word is thought to be delivered in five stress lines). Its aural qualities would make the the form suitable for performance - especially the end couplet, which suggests leaving the audience with a dramatic turn of events, or memorable commentary on what has gone before.

Franklin M.I. Understanding Research Coping with the Quantitative- Qualitative Divide. London: Routledge 2012. Print.