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42 Poetic Representation of Interviews

Laurel Richardson

How we write has consequences for ourselves, our disciplines, and the publics we serve. How we are expected to write affects what we can write about; the form in which we write shapes the content. Prose is the form in which social researchers are expected to represent interview material. Prose, however, is simply a literary technique, a convention, and not the sole legitimate carrier of knowledge. For the past 15 years, I have been exploring alternative forms of presenting research texts (see Richardson 1990, 1997). My purposes have been several: to examine how knowledge claims are constituted in scientific writing, to write more engaged sociology, and to reach diverse audiences. In this chapter, after briefly addressing some poststructuralist writing issues, I discuss one alternative way of conveying interview material: by means of poetic representation. I consider both the long narrative poem and the short poem (formerly called the lyric poem). ...

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