Exercising the poetic muscle: A creative practice research method

Abstract

As part of my early PhD research I began, in a fairly intuitive way, writing poetry in response to other texts. I continued to use the technique and over time started to critically reflect on what I was doing, how I might name the method, and where it was located within a broader practice of writing in response to texts. I started to see what I was doing as key to my practice-led research, in that I was learning about my own practice by the doing of it. Noticing similarities to my (also burgeoning) running practice, I identified the method as one of poetic exercise. In this paper I will trace how this method emerged and how I situated it in relation to other writing techniques including critical arts writing, ekphrasis, intertextuality and assemblage. I will provide samples of poetic texts I wrote in response to four key works: JOAN (2017), a theatre production by Melbourne independent company THE RABBLE; Charles Altieri’s theoretical text The Particulars of Rapture (2003); and the recent Australian essay collections Blueberries (2020) by Ellena Savage, and The Thinking Woman (2019) by Julienne van Loon. I will also draw on contemporary scholarship pertaining to practice-led research to demonstrate how this activity has played a key role in my own developing creative practice research. It is my hope that the tracing of this method might offer insights for other creative practice researchers.