Is there a place for poetry in a research report?
In centuries past, court jesters spoke truth to power using riddle and rhyme.[i] And in 1972, Johnny Cash sang a set of protest songs in the White House’s blue room in front of President Richard Nixon (who had in fact rather wondered whether Cash would perform a cover of Merle Haggard’s popular – tongue-in-cheek – anti-hippy number, ‘Okie from Muskogee’[ii])
Cash sang about losing hundreds of ‘fine young men’ a week,[iii] referencing popular protests against the raging Vietnam War while Nixon sat politely with a frozen smile on his face.[iv] Sadly, it didn’t end the war. But the songs of the court jesters may have saved the serfs a sack or two of taxed grain, who knows?
Today, communicators are rightly seeking out new ways to make their research stand out and help the right people connect with their findings. Videos, animations and comics are just some of the new media forms I have seen mobilised for research communications. Might there also be a place for the old art of poetry in the research reports that deliver truth to modern-day powers?
In his ‘Defence of Poetry’ (1840), the great Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, husband of writer Mary Shelley, famously said that ‘poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world’.[v] And this article from online magazine Bustle points out that our greatest poets have always been active in what goes on in the world, with several pertinent examples.
It’s not just the classical poets who engage with social and political issues in their work. One of my favourite poems that does this is ‘What Kind of Times are These’, by twentieth-century poet Adrienne Rich. I can’t reproduce it here for copyright reasons (and I was thwarted by W. W. Norton’s permissions form, which required information I didn’t have, not least of which a numeric zip-code), but it’s well worth a look on the Poetry Foundation site.
The poet Ben Lerner is quoted as arguing that there are ‘tremendous social stakes’ in poetry, and that it evokes a sense of possibility. I agree. Poetry is inherently something that can be shared, yet can split off into infinite possibilities of meaning, refracted through the prism of the individual reader/listener.
And poetry always seems to have something to say. It fixes the reader/listener with its gaze and demands that we pay attention. This might have something to do with poetry’s precision of language. You can’t hide from words in poetry; it cuts through euphemism and speaks truth.
Poetry also has a great facility for connection. It connects ‘private and public language’, notes the Electric Lit article. It also has an almost unique ability to spark cognitive leaps in the mind of the reader/listener, through its mastery of the forms of metaphor, simile and imagery.
All of this means poetry has the ability to convey powerful messages that speak to the heart and the mind, often in a very compact, distilled format. Like swallowing a complex message in the form of one small pill that will act on the whole body system.
So it actually sounds like poetry would be a great tool for research communication. If you can’t pull off a poetry recitation at Number 10, how about using a poem or an extract from a poem as an epigraph on a report? Choose or commission something that uses the power of words to focus the reader on the theme or just the feel behind the message. As someone who has read through endless dry research reports, I can’t emphasise enough how fresh and inspiring this would be to stumble upon.
[i] While the observation about their use of riddle and rhyme is mine, I am thankful to Lizza Bomassi (via the write up of On Think Tank’s School for Thinktankers) for the idea that think tanks are similar to court jesters in that they speak truth to power.
[ii] Okie from Muskogee lyrics – Bing
[iii] Man in Black lyrics – Bing