So,Why Poetry?

I

After recovering from a car accident and coma, I could, if I concentrated hard, still do my multiplication tables up to 6 × 6. Perhaps my penchant for poetry filled-up the space that my mathematical ability had once held. No longer could I do the statistics that had won me academic appointments and grants.

But I could find words if I waited a bit for them to come to me. Writing became my method of recovery. I wrote so I could have a life.

My first post-coma article (Walum, 1975) was an analysis of power in John Milton’s epic poem, Paradise Lost, a poem I had read (and not understood) as an undergraduate. But it re-arrived in my brain’s memory box and settled-in right next to my understanding of social power. Writing this strangely double-focused article peaked my fears that I would never again be accepted as a sociologist, not to mention ever be tenured. But I was and was.

Now, I like telling myself that my “poetic sensibility” is just as good, if not better, than the math talent I once had. I like stories with happy endings.

For this Qualitative Inquiry issue on “work/think/play,” I planned an article on how my post-coma writing depends on poetic techniques such as doubling, alliteration, assonance, metaphor, synecdoche, and parsimony; how I construct paragraphs as if they are stanzas in a poem inviting readers to write the first line of the next stanza; how I write paragraphs/stanzas as if they are sections in a poem; how I want mystery; and how I (love to) follow my own lines of flight trusting the flights will lead to intersecting discoveries and a clarity/certainty of voice that might inspire others to seek and hone theirs.

But, then something happened that had never before happened for me.

II

I was walking my dogs, admiring the autumn day, when an entire poem spoke itself into existence.

     DEPLORABLES

         Aint’ I a woman?

           Sojourner Truth

    I am the egg lady

    the roofer’s wife

    the farmer’s daughter.

    I ask you, Plastic or paper?

    Booth or table?

    Credit or debit?

    I drive your school bus

    deliver your paper

    walk your dogs

    dust your trophies

    scrub your floor

    watch your kids

     dye your hair

     fix your nails

     clean your teeth

    draw your blood.

I typed the poem up, saved it, and shuddered.

III

With great trepidation, two weeks later—two weeks after the presidential election in the United States—I brought the poem to my memoir writing group of left-leaning friends. Would my friends be angry? Disappointed in me? Understand my angst? Could I talk about it? How far out from their comfort zone had I strayed?

One member did not know about Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables.” She was disturbed thinking I denounced the women in the poem as “deplorable.” Another thought about her own marginalized heritage. A third wanted to talk about the election, not the poem. And a fourth said, “There are at least eight different ways to interpret the poem.”

I told them that when I wrote the poem, I had in mind Hillary Clinton’s derisive comment about working-class White women and men. I ranted. On and on about how I was disgusted with my academic and upper-middle class friends believing they were superior—morally, intellectually, culturally—to wide swaths of “others.” I was enraged over their self-satisfying elitism and hypocrisy. A litany of examples:

“I don’t mind paying for someone else’s medical costs,” said a childhood friend of mine. She sits on a trust fund large enough to purchase several city blocks.

“How can we guarantee diversity in our schools if we support Charter Schools? How can we support teachers unions if we allow educational vouchers?” asks another. She pays her grandson’s private school tuition. “That’s different,” she insists. “He’s my grandson.”

“Why don’t we use our adjacent commercial property to build a half-way house or low-rent housing?” I ask church members. “Not in our backyard” is the answer, the property sold to a strip-mall developer.

“Why don’t we pool all our faculty salaries—distinguished faculty and adjuncts—with all the salaries of our secretarial, custodial, and security staff and then split the pooled money evenly between us all?” I ask colleagues and friends who claim to be socialists and/or advocates of wealth redistribution. No takers on my suggestion.

I go on and on. And then, I am quiet, a listener and then a conversationalist. The space feels open. I can breathe. Our conversation deepens. We talk for an hour.

But there is something else that I don’t talk about.

IV

I missed it. I missed the outcome of the U.S. presidential election. That the media missed it didn’t surprise me. But that I missed it unmoored me.

I consider myself a highly skilled and experienced ethnographer. Little seems to escape my observation in daily life (cf. 2016). Yet, I managed to ignore the cues and conversations around me during the presidential campaign. At my hair salon, the cosmeticians talked about how they distrusted the Clintons; the staff at my chiropractor’s office and the staff at my dentist and doctor’s offices were of one accord, “not Her.” My female dog-walker, rug cleaner, and house painter expressed disgust about “Her.” Several of these women are lesbians; two have biracial children; one is married to a Latino immigrant.

I overheard conversations of sales clerks about jobs, school choices for their kids, prosperity.

I saw no political buttons on women’s lapels and few political signs in yards.

Despite all these White women thumping hard on the same drum, I didn’t hear them. I didn’t see that they belonged to the same social class. I avoided that fact even though I know (Sociology 101) that social class overrides every other variable in predicting—well, everything from what one eats for dinner, where one shops, what slang one uses, and how one votes.

But why didn’t I see the social class underpinnings of these women?

I missed it because I had eschewed my normal, everyday stance toward people I meet or people who host my research inquiries. That stance is Verstehen—or empathetic understanding. Verstehen requires one to cognitively step into the shoes of social actors. The goal is to understand the meaning of actions from the actors’ points of view. Doing so treats actors as human beings who can and do organize meaning in their world(s). To not step into their shoes constructs them as objects without agency, pushed about by social forces. It dehumanizes them.

So, why did I abandon my normal, everyday stance toward the world I live in?

The answer is simple and frightening to me. My consciousness was so immersed in the murky waters of mainstream media and my socio-emotional life so deeply entangled with friends and colleagues who were happily cavorting in those waters that I didn’t want to wipe the water out of my upper-middle-class eyes so that I could see—or shake the water out of my academic stuffed ears so I could hear.

A good lesson I had learned in eighth grade had been forgotten.

My two-thousand-student Chicago grade school tracked its students, ostensibly by IQ but in actuality by social class. There were three different home rooms, 8-A (upper-middle-class students from Lake Shore Drive), 8-B (middle class from Broadway area), and 8-C (kids from the wrong side of the elevated tracks, children of gypsies, Cubans, and families on social security).

As eighth-grade graduation approached, each room nominated a slate of candidates. I was 8-A’s candidate for President. I knew I would be elected. I had been elected the previous two years. I was preparing my acceptance/graduation speech.

But, then, 8-C’s teacher took ill and a male substitute teacher took her place. He taught 8-A science, telling us about atoms, telling us that the world was not stable, not what we thought it was, that our desks were in fact in motion. Who could believe that?

And then he politically organized the kids in 8-B and 8-C to vote together as a block, divvying up offices between them to defeat the pretentious (that was his word) 8-A’ers. It worked. I lost. I was angry. And, I think I was afraid because, like the physical world, I was learning that my little world of power and privilege was not stable either.

V

When you read the poem, Deplorable, what did you think I was writing about?

The poem’s aphorism—“Ain’t I a woman?” was spoken at the Ohio Women’s Rights convention (1851) by Sojourner Truth (1797-1883), an African American civil rights activist, born into slavery in New York State. Does reading it here remind you of African American women’s journey(ies) from slavery to their contemporary employment in service industries?

Or does the poem have you thinking about Latinas in the United States? Only 3% of them are in STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) jobs; over a third are in service jobs, like the ones in the poem, with most having no paid medical leave, many of them with diabetes, lupus, and human pappilonavirus (HPV).

Did First Nation women come to mind?

Or Asian or Middle-Eastern women immigrants?

Or, perhaps, you thought of the working-class White women who voted Republican on local, state, and national levels in the United States. Sixty-two percent of them did. These were the women Hillary Clinton put into what she called “the basket of deplorables—the racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic . . . ”

When I wrote the poem, as you know, I was thinking about what Hillary Clinton had said. I was angry. Mortified.

But as I write-out the poem and read it, now, I sense a much different possibility. I find myself reading it as a poem about any and all women in powerless positions by virtue of race, ethnicity, or social class. It is about all of these women who have been treated deplorably.

So, what if women from these different dissed communities read the poem at the same time and then conversed about it together? Might the poem have an impact in bringing women together that writing in that hectoring genre, prose, cannot?

So, isn’t this why poetry?

VI

I emailed the editors that they might not want to publish the article I was submitting as it had veered far from the original idea. They assured me that whatever I wrote would be fine. I countered that maybe they’d want to have commentary about the article. Not to worry, they emailed.

But I did. And I do.

So with trepidation, I submitted this article six weeks after the election. I worry because my line of flight differs from the line of flight dominating the media and the political left, where my friends and colleagues and readers of this journal live. Voices everywhere continue to bash non-Hillary voters, which include working-class women.

We, qualitative researchers, flog ourselves if we ever unintentionally write about other people’s lives as if we are their moral and intellectual superiors. Should we, researchers who bind ourselves to an ethics of understanding and respect for the people we study, abandon that perspective when we don’t like those people? The dual goals of qualitative inquiry—knowledge and social change—may not be as cozily compatible as we have written them to be.

Will I lose my academic friends and colleagues? Will they be angry that I haven’t used my voice as they would want me to? Or, maybe—just maybe—they will like what I have written. I can hope.

Maybe the world will be calmer when (if) this is published. I can hope.

I love stories with happy endings.