Poetic Existential: A Lyrical Autoethnography of Self, Others, and World

Abstract

“Poetic Existential” is a collection of lyrical autoethnography. This body of work explores existential themes relating to globalization and the immigration/refugee humanitarian crisis, “freedom” as personal/political/geographical ideology, and my own experiences of being a situated self alongside others. Lyrical poetry coaxes a person to embody and present experience through restrained (Faulkner 52), yet evocative descriptions – without the neat folds and contextual blanketing common to many narrative approaches. The challenge of autoethnographic poetry is to perform a focused crystallization of experience via lyrical aesthetics (arrangement, word choice, rhythm, rhyme, phrase and line structure, etc.). In the accompanying artist statement, I theorize my poetic engagement with attention paid to what the lyric facilitates in my scholarly work. In this exploratory fusion of lyrical expression, autoethnography, and existentialism, I hope to summon the aesthetic powers of poetry in the service of self-reflexivity, and in relation to the plight of millions of disenfranchised others.

Keywords

• poetic inquiry, existentialism, autoethnography, freedom, immigration, refugees