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A meditation on the poetics of doctoral

writing
a
James Burford
a
University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand
Published online: 17 Nov 2014.

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To cite this article: James Burford (2014) A meditation on the poetics of doctoral writing, Higher
Education Research & Development, 33:6, 1232-1235, DOI: 10.1080/07294360.2014.932040

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 Higher Education Research & Development, 2014
Vol. 33, No. 6, 1232–1235, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2014.932040

POINTS FOR DEBATE

A meditation on the poetics of doctoral writing

James Burford*

University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand

Foreword: what has poetry got to do with higher education studies?

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At the beginning of the (southern hemisphere) summer break of 2012–2013, I tidied

my papers into piles, stacked books into the shelf and washed a large collection of
coffee mugs that seemed to have arranged themselves like toadstools around my com-
puter. My partner and I decided to take a break this time, rather than chipping away at
the routine writing tasks that had structured our previous months together. He had
been in the final months of his PhD – with only a couple of chapters left to complete,
and I was just through the provisional year of my own. As we planned our summer, I
made sure there were loopholes in our agreement not to write. For I have done as
countless doctoral writing advice texts advise and cultivated a daily writing practice.
Each day I am called to write, as morning joggers are called to jog, or perhaps as
coffee drinkers are called to coffee. It is not just that I love to write – indeed, my feel-
ings about writing are often far from warmhearted. But for better or worse, writing is a
practice that brings structure and meaning to my day. With this reality in mind I
decided that for my holiday break I would maintain a writing routine, but alter its
focus.
I had read Richardson’s (2012) recent piece on writing and therapy and decided to
revisit her important archive of work. Richardson (1996, 1997) has not only contributed
to the field of higher education but has published thought-provoking pieces on alterna-
tive forms of (re)presenting academic knowledge. Of the four ‘evocative genres’ for
writing in the social sciences that Richardson (1994b) identified, I selected poetic rep-
resentation (p. 521) for my holiday project. I wanted to take up poetry as a ‘way of
knowing’ to learn something new about my research, which examines the politics of
emotion in the context of doctoral writing.
My selection of poetry came at the intersection of a number of different concerns. In
the first case, I wanted to develop my existing poetry writing practice (Burford, 2012,
2013). I also chose poetry for more practical reasons, hoping that taking to pen and
paper might allow my neck and shoulders some time to recover from too much desk
work. But these motivations were coupled with an intellectual curiosity about the socio-
logical promises of poetry. I had participated in a recent collection of poems by New
Zealand sociologists (Curtis & Meager, 2013). The curators of this collection framed
it as ‘socio-poetic’, contending that the craft of poetry and the science of sociology
might be seen as ‘different dimensions of sociological storytelling’ (Curtis &
Meager, 2013, p. 117). My interest in the possibilities of poetry was also stirred by

*Current address: Faculty of Learning Sciences and Education, Thammasat University,

Bangkok, Thailand. Email: james.burford1@gmail.com

© 2014 HERDSA
 Higher Education Research & Development 1233

Elizabeth and Grant’s (2013) work in this journal about poetic transcription as an inter-
pretative stance in higher education research. Elizabeth and Grant (2013) argue that
poetic transcriptions of participant accounts might not only ‘help social scientists
analyse our social worlds differently’, they might also ‘produce a different kind of inter-
action between the writer and the reader’ (p. 130). This different relationship not only
assumes the likelihood of multiple readings of the poetic text, but offers a fresh perspec-
tive on affect. Elizabeth and Grant (2013) observe the reverberating quality of poetic
texts – the ways in which they might move the emotions and bodies of academic
readers.
Another concern that led me towards experimenting with poetry was my interest in
the quotidian practices of doctoral writing (Aitchison & Lee, 2006). I have noticed the
trend in higher education scholarship, and social science more broadly, whereby intense
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emotional phenomena are privileged over quietly unfolding ones. I hoped that using
poetry might enable me to contemplate the mundane, quotidian practices of my doctoral
writing and life – its smells, sounds, textures and embodied practices, and to view these
as data. This is a movement (or indeed, a stillness) inspired by ethnographers, such as
Stewart (2007), and is characteristic of her beautiful book Ordinary affects. Like
Stewart, I am interested in how the ordinary features of life feel, and why these feelings
matter. The hunch I am pursuing is that socio-poetic writing might helpfully connect
with ongoing calls for more ethnographic texture in higher education research. In
this regard, I am spurred on by Richardson’s work. Rather than asking whether the
poetic and ethnographic might align, Richardson (1994a) has reversed the question,
asking: ‘When is poetry not ethnographic?’ As she sees it, the task of the poem is to
‘represent actual experiences – episodes, epiphanies, misfortunes, pleasures – to
capture those experiences in such a way that others can experience and feel them
… ’ (p. 12).
I am still pondering some questions about poetry as a method of inquiry and rep-
resentation of higher education research. Might poetry be a lazier form of academic
knowledge production; an avoidance of rigorous analysis? Ought novices (like me)
turn to experimental modes before we are confident with classic forms of academic
knowledge representation? How might academic readers discern ‘quality’ socio-
poetic work? And in these times of highly metricized academic writing (Burrows,
2012), how should poems count? If they do not count, or at least do not count for
much, why would scholars (or doctoral students) even bother writing them? And,
what might the fact that we do bother teach? Some of these questions have been exam-
ined in sociology, and related fields – and they are important to contemplate if higher
education studies takes up the poetic also.
I have written this piece with the conviction that considering poetic approaches to
writing in higher education is an important project. A turn to the poetic might enable
researchers to differently attend to, represent and evoke the ethnographic textures of
university life. The particularities of poetic forms generate particular effects for
writers and readers alike. More broadly, poetic writing practices have the potential to
challenge researchers of all disciplines to unhinge ourselves from the normative
logics which reproduce academic-writing-as-usual. Poetry might assist us to prise
open other ways of knowing and doing academic writing.
In closing this reflection, I let two of the poems that I wrote during this project speak
for themselves …
 1234 J. Burford

Workaday writing
Over canapés
He asks them
How they write
The first, a woman
Past middle age
With a crisp countenance
Requires silence
Nothing less than a vacated house
Spouse, pets dispatched
Clock batteries removed.
The second, a woman
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With dark hair

Tied efficiently in a bun
Likes salsa music softly playing
White paper
And a row of sharpened pencils.
The third, a man
Jokes about the sacrifices he makes
To an altar for his Inner Critic:
Fresh mandarins and cheap incense,
But really he just writes anywhere, everyday,
Which is sort of the same thing.
The fourth, a man
Writes in cafes
Requires the proximity of others
To feel conversational.

Fat writing
He asks me to trim the fat off my writing
And advises on style
As if he were Gok Wan
Concealing a flabby tum
Within ‘flattering’ garments
Of course, low cut for those of us with cleavage
But always covering those unsightly upper arms
For me
A chunky paragraph or three, is one of life’s pleasures
It takes up space, without apology
So indulgent and ooooooozy
I want to lick my fingers afterwards
And take a nap.
I want corpulent, curvy words
Words with weight
That stand solidly against
The Lean Mean Machine.
Even sickly sweet, or cheesy words have their place at the table.
I’m certainly a fan of no-no’s
 Higher Education Research & Development 1235

Like over-embellishment (too many rings, pattern-on-pattern)

It’s as if he got dressed in the dark!
Maybe it’s a queer thing
That I like the writers who wont make it onto the cover of
Academic Vogue
The beauty school drop-outs
Whose words creep down my forearm like a sleeve tattoo.

References
Aitchison, C., & Lee, A. (2006). Research writing: Problems and pedagogies. Teaching in
Higher Education, 11(3), 265–278.
Burford, J. (2012). A queeresearch journey in nine poems. Cultural Studies ↔ Critical
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Methodologies, 12(1), 51–54.

Burford, J. (2013). Dangerous thoughts of a queer/trans awareness educator & Ms Aretha
Brown. In M. Volpert (Ed.), This assignment is so gay: LGBTQI poets on the art of teaching
(pp. 195–196). Alexander, AR: Sibling Rivalry Press.
Burrows, R. (2012). Living with the h-index? Metric assemblages in the contemporary academy.
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Curtis, B., & Meager, Z. (2013). A socio-poetic: Poems and some thoughts. New Zealand
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