Convenios realizados con Instituciones Externas al municipio

w ere very few pieces w h e re 1 didn’t feel ‘oh yesss, th a t’s it. . .

that’s Righhht . . . a little like distilled drops of my own experience

and/or my experience o f others' experience, bottled . . and hence

very p o te n t. . . small glasse s of Cointreau spring to m ind . . .

My previous exposure to poetry as a feminist political expression has undoubtedly influenced my acceptance of it within the research process. My position is akin to that adopted by with Trinh Minh-ha (1992) in relation to the politics of using poetry (in her case she is writing of poetry in anti-racist work rather than related to sexual violence). 1 agree that we need to carry this awareness of the poetic to our research work in order to acknowledge that theory can relate intimately to poetry:

Theorists tend to react strongly against poetry today because for them, poetry is nothing but a place where subjectivity is consolidated and where language is estheticized (such as building vocabulary and rhyming beautiful lines). Whereas poetry is also the place from which many people of color voice their struggle. Consider Cuban and African poetry, for example. . . So poetical language does become stale and self- indulgent when it serves an arts-for-art’s-sake purpose, but it can also be the site where language is at its most radical in its refusal to take itself for granted.

Trinh Minh-ha (1992, p. 154)

I must also stress the ways in which these poems have been generated from electronic text. In using transcripts in this way, I am following Gregory Ulmer’s (1989) injunction to make space in the development of research methods for patterning as a valid approach to processing empirical material. The following poem shows the fluidity of this process:

poems arise from transcripts arise from transcripts in electronic form arise from the placement of text on screen

words are cut, moved, lost, re-gained the on/of screen is plastic, mutable, mutating

words dance, words sway and flow fold,

and stick together.

cohere, adhere as only the screen allows cleave to the transcript

(and yet invent another way to know) moving beyond the lives of individuals

a slippage of/in text distils the embodied to the collective

Poetry acts to dissimulate singularity and individualism (Martin, 1992). Here the words o f the interview transcript become units of invention. They arrive on the screen as re-presentations of utterances from an embodied individual, yet leave with the illusion of presence unmasked:

[T]he exploration of new complex subjectivities and problematizing of the subject in contemporary theory can be best carried out through poetical language - as long as poetical language is not equated with a mere aestheticizing tool nor practised as a place to consolidate a ‘subjective’ self. In poetry, the ‘I’ can never be said to simply personify an individual.

Trinh Minh-ha ( 1992, p. 121 )

Scripting these poems as electronic hypertext requires that I attend to the patterning the role of invention, the shift from hermeneutics (interpretation and definition) to euretics (invention):

The definition and explanation o f euretics are entrusted to miniaturization, treating concepts, arguments, and descriptions as if they were composed of that material that, when immersed in water for a certain time, expands dramatically to ten times its original size. The reader of such a piece is active, then, not as a decoder, but in the manner o f playing with this toy, made in Japan, a (racket of tiny dinosaurs, except that in our case it is not so clear what the items (the scenes, the objects, the arguments) will become when they are immersed in a new medium. On the side o f making a text capable o f changing scale, and even of changing modality, the assumption is that whatever my intentions are the very act of condensation and displacement involved in writing or packing alters the value of the materials.

Gregory Ulmer (1991, p.3)

These poems are part of feminism’s drive to reorganise the boundaries of knowledge. Here ‘my feminism’ comes to be shaped in the writing as a bias in

the text. The text is cut on the bias as a piece of cloth is cut on the bias to fashion the final garment to drape in the correct manner. To script poems is to displace communication and to instead evoke understandings by means of inference. That is to say to render into text the conductive process of chorography. These poems are no simple index. They are ‘the map’ to a research space that substitutes chora for topos. The poems relate to the story of Rape Crisis training in such a way that the reader might be enticed to switch strategies ‘to stop trying to understand what the author means and decide instead to make something out of it’ (Ulmer, 1991, p.4). For indeed this ‘making something out of it’ is the very approach 1 take as 1 script the text following Hélène Cixous’ injunction to ‘write where it vibrates’.

I write where it vibrates. . . There is sending, dispatching, there is jostling together and reverberating; it echoes through our memory, through our body, through foreign memories with which we communicate through subconsciouses.

Hélène Cixous and Mireille Calle-Gruber (1997, p.68)

And this is intimately related to the reading, for poetry crafted in this way generates a need for a reflexive form of writing that turns qualitative research texts and theoretical texts back ‘onto each other’ (Denzin, 1997, p.xii):

For us to hear the vibrations, there must be silence. Poetry works with silence: it writes a verse followed by a silence, a stanza, surrounded by silence. In other words, there is time to hear all the vibrations.

Afterthought

Subj: A little light reading