Intimate Selves: A Poetic Inquiry into Self-Knowledge

Abstract

This article uses poetic inquiry to explore the author’s experiences of the global COVID-19 pandemic, which brought about a State of Disaster in South Africa from 26 March 2020 to 5 April 2022. The author had, before the pandemic, been used to going to an office and interacting with colleagues every day, and was not used to spending long periods of time alone. The poetry presented in this article was written during, and about, time the author spent alone during the pandemic and afterwards. The methodology of poetic inquiry, which was introduced as a scholarly approach in the 1970s (Davis, 2023), is used to reflect on the poems. Poetic inquiry typically fashions a poem from research data, instead of presenting the data according to the conventional schema for reporting (for example, with separate sections for ‘Findings’, ‘Data Analysis’, and ‘Conclusions’). Advocates of poetic inquiry find it an apt method for reducing data to a much more manageable corpus. In addition, it enables researchers to include affect, and to use evocative figurative language. The article uses the author’s subjective experiences as research data, presents the poems crafted from them, and comments on the poetry.

Keywords

• COVID-19 pandemic
• South Africa
• self-knowledge
• poetry
• poetic inquiry