Metropoems: Poetic Method andEthnographic Experience
Qualitative Inquiry
16(1) 66–77
© 2010 SAGE Publications
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DOI: 10.1177/1077800409349757
http://qi.sagepub.com
Garance Maréchal1
and Stephen Linstead2
Abstract
Discussions of the use and significance of poetry as a research tool have raised the question of poetic technique and
craftsmanship in ethnographic poetic outputs. In this article, the authors look explicitly at a contemporary poetic form, the
“metropoem” originated by French Oulipian poet Jacques Jouet,1 arguing that it presents a potentially valuable new tool
for qualitative research for four reasons. First, the “metropoetic” form enables the taking of a position that neither turns
inward toward the ethnographer’s self nor outward toward an empathic relation with the ethnographic other, but is
focused in the moment, in place, and in motion—which resists the temptations of nostalgia and Romanticism that have
attracted criticism of “research poetry.” Second, it imposes a discipline that is derived from a specific activity, which embodies
the rhythms, time, and space of that activity, distinguishing metropoems from poetry that recollects or represents. Third, it
demands attention to technique, to poetry as a craft, which underscores calls made by recent critical work in this area. Finally,
despite being practically, empirically, and metaphorically enformed by the mobility of contemporary urban social experience,
it offers a method that can usefully be adapted to encapsulate other forms of social life.
Keywords
research poetry, poststructuralism, ethnography, poetic form, creative constraints
In this article we consider the potential of a recently developed form of poetry—the metropoem, developed in Paris in
the 1990s—to make a contribution to the variety of poetic
styles that have been advocated as relevant forms of social
“research poetry.” In doing this, however, our claims are not
to be overstated. Metropoetry is a microtechnique, developed specifically for an urban context, intended to capture
some of the differences between the modern urban and
the postmodern metropolitan. It cannot be applied to a wide
variety of situations without modification. However, the
underlying principles on which it is developed do offer,
we think, possibilities for other forms to be generated with a
similar sort of relation to the microfeatures of their context.
Context and method in metropoetry function to place usable
constraints on experience, but in a tension that should enable
creativity. Because the constraints of form are derived from
the constraints of the environment in focus (research environment), the relation of the poetry to this environment
ought, therefore, to emerge as a specifically creative one.
Recent work on the sociology of modernity, metropolization, and super and hypermodernity suggests that motion is
the defining characteristic of postmodern social experience, if
such experience could ever be said to have a defining characteristic (Featherstone & Lash, 1999; Lash, 1999; Urry, 2000).
There are some provocative views on this and the destabilizing effect of this condition for identity. For example, Marc
Augé (1995, 2002) argued that the networking that typifies
supermodern city and intercity lives, where metropolization
replaces urbanization, leads to the creation of nonplaces,
which rather than bestowing identity, are places through
which mobile identities pass and connect, and from which
they may change direction.2 Paul Virilio (1986) contended
that city dwellers circulate at speed as though in a drome (as
in velodrome) taking little from that which surrounds them,
the very speed of change able to change the nature of its
object. John Urry went even further in theorizing that social
studies (in advanced societies at least) needs to extend its
capabilities to become what he calls postsocietal, studying
mobilities—physical, imaginative, and virtual movements—
that reconstitute social life in uneven and complex ways.3
While we may not accept the full breadth of Urry’s arguments, we agree that there is a need to address appropriate
methods for confronting and questioning these mobile realities, relating to the dislocations and realignments of such
1
University of Liverpool Management School
The York Management School
2
Corresponding Author:
Garance Maréchal, PhD, University of Liverpool Management School,
Chatham Street, Liverpool L69 7ZH, Merseyside, United Kingdom
Email: g.marechal@liv.ac.uk
Maréchal and Linstead
contemporary experiences that research poetry does not at
present fully address but has the potential to elucidate. While
we should also not deny the coexistence of change and continuity, and the different levels on which change can occur,
ethnographic techniques have a history of dealing with the
former, with change as change of state rather than continuous, fragmented, and relational process (Denzin, 1997).
Metropoems can be seen as one small, but significant, attempt
to engage with part of this process where continuity and
change intersect, which has potential for application in other
arenas.4 In the following sections, before we discuss the features of metropoetry in greater detail, we will explore key
debates on the possibilities and viability of research poetry
and locate it relative to them.
Poetry and Ethnographic Experience
The use of poetry in ethnography has had a long and occasionally distinguished history since the early attempts of
Ruth Benedict and Edward Sapir to find an alternative
means to standard ethnographic description for capturing
the more elusive qualities of the ethnographic encounter.
Ivan Brady (2000) captured the broad distinctions that this
practice began to motivate—between ethnopoetics (a study
of the vocal-auditory channels of communication of other
cultures to analyze, interpret, and make them accessible as
works of art), literary anthropology (which recognizes the
poetic nature of language use in anthropology, within nonpropositional acts of writing that may not themselves be
poetry; Linstead, 2000), and anthropological poetry (which
begins with the attempt to portray the circumstances of
cross-cultural fieldwork but can move from there in several
directions). This latter category may be further subdivided
into narrative or lyric (sometimes referred to as interpretive) poetry (Faulkner, 2007; Richardson, 1997). Narrative
poetry often tries to capture the participant’s exact words in
selective and compressed form without reflexive reference
to the researcher; at the very least it tries to put across “the
story” that reflects “a particular social order or culture”
(Richardson, 1997, p. 180). Lyric poetry, on the other hand,
represents actual experiences, including those of the
researcher, in a way that blurs the boundaries between self,
other, and audience, recreating experience as event, thus
enabling others to feel those experiences for themselves
(Richardson, 1997). Readers of this type of poetic account
respond to it by participating with feeling as much as intellect (Faulkner, 2007). There has been no shortage of
critically informed and sophisticated discussion of these
developments (e.g., Brady, 2004, and his extensively referenced and footnoted reviews in 2000 and 2006; Bauman,
2006; Clough, 1992, 2000; Denzin, 1997; Faulkner, 2007;
Glesne, 1997; Hartnett & Engels, 2005; Jacobsen &
Marshman, 2008; Linstead, 2000; Richardson, 1997, 2000,
67
2002; Stewart, 2006). Faulkner gave a crisp yet nuanced
outline of the differences between the various appropriations of poetry into research practice and the dimensions
with which they complement and challenge normative
ethnographic writing. Nevertheless, such arguments for the
relevance of poetry for research practice have provoked
some provocative counterarguments.
An example of such argumentation is offered by David
Silverman (2007, p. 132); after effectively dismissing performance ethnography and ethnodrama for their opacity,
Silverman turns to research poetry, whose recent promotion he finds emphatically inappropriate, suggesting that
“we all think we know what poetry is and might wonder
why it is now appearing at conferences concerned with
qualitative research.” But the commonsense assumption,
that we already know what poetry is, is one that anyone but
a poet would hold:
Poetry isn’t natural, doesn’t have green fingers, in fact, it
has
no fingers at all.
Poetry is artificial to an extent that nothing else in the
world
is artificial
Poetry is so artificial that it’s hard to credit quite how far
it’s gone.
With long strides, poetry flees from what’s natural.
(Jouet, 2001b, p. 66, poem 3)
As Faulkner (2007) argued, it is the continuing, systematic
effort to develop an ars poetica—a set of normative
principles for one’s own poetic practice—which can offer a
means of generating criteria for the evaluation of poetry
developed in and through research practice. Poetry develops
its own form of rigor, different from that of science but no
less demanding (Linstead, 2000). Objectors to the use of
poetry in research do not concede this, but ironically many
advocates of research poetry equally fail to recognize it and
defend poetry as a legitimate tool in the service of science
rather than having a Truth character of its own. Overall,
criticisms of the use of poetry in social research can be
identified at ontological, epistemological, and methodological
levels; we will discuss these and their consequences for the
status of metropoetry in the next sections.
Poetry and the Postmodern: Ontological
Objections
The first, ontological, criticism is that research poetry lays
its credibility on its ability to represent some essential qualities of human experience. Silverman considers this to be
spurious, but he misidentifies the causes of his concern and
hence sees it as without remedy. The situation isn’t helped
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by the fact that some advocates of research poetry do it a
disservice by defining it retrogressively, recycling old-fashioned assumptions about its nature. For example, in
considering work by Furman, Lietz, and Langer (2006),
which he treats as emblematic (although labeling it symptomatic), Silverman quotes:
Postmodern researchers have recognised the value of
studying the lived, subjective experience of individuals
and groups. Less concerned with statistical generalizability, such authors instead are interested in
“metaphoric generalizability,” the degree to which
qualitative data penetrate the essence of human experience and reveal themselves fully to an engaged
audience. The goal of such generating and presenting
of this type of data is to inspire an empathic, emotional
reaction, so the consumer of research can develop a
deep, personal understanding of the “subject” of the
data (Furman et al., 2006, p. 1, cited in Silverman,
2007, p. 132).
Silverman apoplectically labels Furman et al.’s (2006)
passage a “marvellous blend of postmodern verbiage,”
rhetorically asking, “What on earth is metaphoric
generalizability?” and going on to attack them for resorting
to a “whole gamut of Romantic concepts.” He takes for
granted that Romanticism is a “bad thing,” as presumably is
postmodernism, but it isn’t our purpose to contest these
ideas here. The problem that is overlooked by Silverman is
that in this passage Furman et. al. argued their case clumsily,
and confusedly—but he takes them at their word.
This doesn’t mean that the case cannot be argued, however. They themselves associate their work with that of
“postmodern researchers,” but the qualities they ascribe to
such work, like “studying the lived experiences of individuals and groups,” have been typical of qualitative
research in both anthropology and sociology throughout
the 20th century. What postmodernism, or poststructuralism, distinctively contributes to their work here is not
apparent (and references given in the article, though not in
the quote above, do not in our view typify a postmodern
approach). Statements about “the essence of human experience” and a “deep, personal understanding of the ‘subject’
of the data” are emphatically not postmodern, an approach
in which the concept of an “essence” is thoroughly contested by exploring how the qualities of the “essential”
come to be ascribed in the active production of the
“essence.” The concept of depth is similarly regarded as
logocentric and contested by poststructuralism, and the
idea of “personal understanding of the ‘subject’” occludes
a substantial body of both theory and fieldwork that seeks
to demonstrate how problematic addressing alterity can be,
both ontologically and strategically. Furman himself in
Qualitative Inquiry 16(1)
another paper, considers “poetry as research” and produces
more “depth” justifications, relating the use of the arts to
the “expressive research agenda” because of their ability
to “penetrate experience more deeply” (Furman, 2006b,
p. 561). Silverman takes exception to this naïve attachment
to what he regards as sentimental “Romanticism,” but
ironically, postmodern researchers would probably concur
for largely the same reasons. The linguistic (and materialist) turn in social science, insofar as it is driven by
poststructuralism, isn’t a turn toward romantic narrative or
poetics, greater depth, or more authentic expression of an
inner nature. However, contra Silverman, we don’t think
that metaphoric generalizability is such an occult conceit
either. Although Furman et. al. (2006) don’t expand on
what they mean at this point in their argument, thus rendering themselves hostages to fortune as they are using the
term generalizability itself metaphorically, Furman
(2006b, pp. 561, 565) does discuss it and cites arguments
in Stein (2003, 2004) as his support. He concludes that
arts-based research methods
uncover insights that are multisensory in nature, thus
portraying more completely many aspects of the
human condition that do not lend themselves to
numerical reduction or even portrayal through traditional narrative and naturalistic methods. (p. 565)
He argues that research such as this follows the
metaphorical “logic” of the humanities, whose
image and intuition . . . is meant to illuminate experience and can complement research paradigms,
which can subsequently test the generalizability
[Italics added] of such arts-derived insights. (p. 565)
This is a less than radical return to a Diltheyan position
where the humanities provide the emotional bedrock and
initial resources for “real” science to verify. This is a
disappointing move, failing to recognize that the fragmentary
logics of the humanities can provide a basis for a very
different postmodern form of inquiry and analysis than
science (Baudrillard, 2005; Lyotard, 1984; Pefanis, 1991;
Rella, 1994). Arts-based research seems to us to refer
better to the exploration of the processes of recognition by
which art becomes meaningful across time, space, and
culture and which have been noted to be operational in the
sense making of the social sciences, science, and philosophy
(Johnson, 1983; Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Lakoff &
Turner, 1990). Metropoems fit more readily into this sort
of ontology than that of poetry as prescience.
Let us be more specific. The terms postmodern and
poststructuralism should not used as an excuse for the
Maréchal and Linstead
recycling of 19th-century ideas. Jacques Derrida (1974,
1978), in a body of writings that are seminal to poststructuralism and are familiarly cited in much qualitative
research, demonstrated that concepts of depth and surface, structure and dynamics, signifier and signified, and
nature and essence are themselves an outcome of the
representational practices of structuralism, and by extension modernism, although the terms are not homonyms
(Linstead, 2004). Changes in representative practice may
or may not reveal what was “already there,” but they do
not generate access to a deeper truth or an “essence.”
Indeed, the conscious subject, the very phenomenological
self that is capable of reflection is just as much a product
of representational practices as is the world on which it
reflects—and just as capable of resisting or eluding representation. By widening the scope of representational
forms in play, engaging with negativity and fantasy, it
may be possible to shine a light on a different part of the
surface of representational topography, from a different
angle, but it cannot legitimately be claimed that this offers
a penetrating vision of “enlightenment” that illuminates a
deeper, more inward, “essence.”
So the first and ontological criticism, of a spurious essentialism, is not one that is caused by postmodern predilections,
but this essentialism is misidentified with postmodernism
by both Furman et al. (2006) and Silverman (2007). In
rejecting the identification, however, we need both to accept
the pertinence of Silverman’s criticism and recognize the
value of Furman et al.’s approach. Whatever the “research
poem” might be and whatever the nature of its possible contribution, it cannot be justified in terms of nostalgic access
to and expression of an essential self or the essence of experiences: experiences of which a sense of self is itself an
effect.
Poetic Research Practice: Epistemological
Objections
The second, epistemological, objection to research poetry
relates to its claims to be able to condense the realities of
experience, particularly the experience of the other, into
rich but accessible chunks that offer an equivalent of science’s parsimony and reductionism, with a complementary
and similarly economic virtue. Furman et al. (2006) identified existing approaches to the use of poetry that offer a
means of exploring the researcher’s self-identity as it
emerges in the field. This can form a thread of poetic practice tracing the shifting emergences of researcher identities
across time as in the work of Eisenberg (1998). They also
note that Furman (2004a, 2004b, 2006a) has also used his
own poetry about his own nonfield experiences as a form of
autoethnographic data for research analysis, which is a more
69
controversial move. However, their main focus and that of
Furman (2006b) is on the ability of poetry to capture and
condense the experience of the other to what they regard as
its “essence.”
This is not mere methodological fetishism. In these
cases, they are concerned with voicing the experiences of
oppressed or disadvantaged groups in relation to health care
issues or orienting international fieldworkers to salient
aspects of the experiences of these groups. But quite what is
happening when these experiences are represented and
treated as knowledge is problematic.
The second, epistemological, criticism, then, follows
from what is in fact a confusion of two different types of
condensation. That is to say, the type of knowledge that science creates in looking for generalizable conditions is
reductive in that it reduces the dimensionality of its object in
order to be extensive, to be recognized in as wide a number
of cases as possible. The knowledge produced in poetry is
specifically evocative, as Furman (2006b, p. 561) seems to
be aware, in order to be intensive, to stimulate a richness of
response or set resonant significations in chain, in the individual reader. While poets make decisions in order to
decide what to include and leave out, this is not so much a
matter of capturing the essential qualities of an experience in
a realistic way as finding ways to combine images to
create a precise effect arising from thought or experience.
This precision may parallel the precision of science, as
Ricoeur (1971) might express it, but as Gadamer (1975)
would amplify, it is of a different type—and just as rigorous in its own way (Ulin, 2005). As French anthropologist
Dan Sperber (1975) put it, science operates according to the
conceptual mechanism of human understanding, where
poetry follows the symbolic mechanism—a matter of mastery versus mystery (Alvesson & Karreman, 2007). Anything
can start this mechanism in process, and nothing seems to
stop it. This is not to say that scientists can’t use symbols or
poets concepts, as they do and must, but the character of the
medium is given by the general predominance of one or the
other. Poems that don’t work very well often struggle too
hard to convey a conceptual argument in images, rather than
using images from direct experience for their evocative
potential and allowing conceptualization to follow. This is
the paradox of the research poem—that in order to be useful
for research, it must first be a poem. Furman recognizes this
but fails to follow it through epistemologically to the recognition that research poetry cannot, therefore, justify itself
in terms of a romanticized turning toward, and encapsulation of, the essential other, just as it cannot claim access to
an essential self. It remains always in motion.
To recap our ontological and epistemological discussions then, a romantic approach to research poetry, whether
turning inward to the self or outward to the idealized other,
70
displaces itself from the recognition of the importance of
place and moment, which are key aspects of concern for
the researcher. A further concern, that of mobility, emerges
more fully with the consideration of method.
Changing the Form: Methodological
Objections
The third criticism is methodological and relates to form
and structure—particularly to the fact that preexisting
poetic forms can offer a vehicle for a “quick-fix” access to
an aspect of another culture. This is partly a reaction to the
lack of any explicit reflection on artifice in many existing
presentations of research poetry. Poems produced using the
exact words of the subjects tend, quite naturally, to adopt
blank verse as their metier, almost without reflection. Some
haunt the boundary between poetry and prose as poetic
transcriptions rather than poems themselves (Glesne, 1997).
With some notable exceptions such as Ivan Brady, little
attention is paid to line and rhythmic patterns, even less to
rhyme, and consequently almost none to the use of existing
poetic forms and patterns (such as the sonnet, for example).
The objective is more to capture the metaphorical highlights
and rhythmic cadences of the subjects’ speech, rather than
use form to bring out different aspects, which might require
changing the words used. The combination of conformance
to form and general conformance to the principle of not
changing the subject’s words in practice would, therefore,
privilege shorter verse forms. Furthermore, the assumption
drawn from traditional ethnography is that the research setting and elements of either the “culture” or the “event” being
depicted are relatively stable. Changing the form of poetic
expression is intended to draw out different aspects of a continuing state of affairs or a typical event.
For Furman (2006b) and Furman et al. (2006), this is
exactly what it does. Taking two verse forms, the tanka, a
Japanese precursor to the haiku transplanted to the United
States, and the pantoum, a French-Malaysian short and repetitious form, they literally experiment to find the shortest
and most powerful way of expressing what they consider
to be the core aspects of the experience of the other—
especially in order to convey them to newcomers who need
to intervene in systems of care. These short forms can work
almost as mantras. The method is to write a fairly short
poem dealing with personal aspects of the ethnographic
experience, then apply the discipline of the foreign form to
achieve further condensation. While the poems themselves
are emotionally powerful examples, the results of the
experiments are at best inconclusive, and the discussion
offered tends to confirm this while continuing to argue for
the potential of the forms.
Despite the foregoing ontological, epistemological,
and methodological criticisms of research poetry, none of
Qualitative Inquiry 16(1)
the criticisms is either fatal or insurmountable, given that
appropriate claims are made in the first place. Let us summarize: First, drawing on both the ontological and
epistemological critiques, it seems important that research
poems develop the ability to take a position that neither
turns exclusively inward toward the ethnographer’s self nor
exclusively outward toward an empathic relation with the
ethnographic other, but is focused in the moment, in place,
and in motion—which resists the temptations of nostalgia
and Romanticism that have attracted criticism. Second,
drawing on the epistemological and methodological critiques, such a poetry in the moment could perhaps deploy a
discipline that is very much derived from a specific activity
and seeks to embody the rhythms, time, and space of that
activity, which would contrast with poetry that recollects or
represents. Third, following from and underscoring both
Faulkner and Furman’s arguments about artistic quality, this
poetry would demand attention to and mastery of technique,
to poetry as a craft. Finally, building from the methodological
criticism, and returning to our introduction, a poetry that
responds to postmodernity—whatever form that may appear
to take, rather than simply deploying it as a discursive
category—would work practically and empirically with
metaphors of mobility that have been identified as charac
teristic of contemporary social experience, potentially
generating a method that could be adapted to encapsulate
other forms of social life. It would take the minutiae of what
is shared in these forms of life and turn them into critical
flashes of human insight against the vacuous and numbing
forces of indifference, consumerism, or the free-market, for
example.
There seems to be room, then, for an approach to ethnographic poetry that utilizes the idea that form can draw
attention to otherwise neglected features of the experience—
that is to say that knowledge is not preexisting, with
experimentation with form merely finding the best way of
expressing it, but that rules of form can themselves provide
a basis for constituting that knowledge. Rules can be drawn,
not simply arbitrarily, as with the application of the tanka or
the pantoum, but from the general features of the experience
(although the rules of their combination will inevitably have
an arbitrary element). The poet’s immersion in the experience, rather than reflection on it at a distance, could,
therefore, become a significant element; one of the rules, for
example, could be that the poem is actually written during
the experience and cannot be altered or revised later. It
would not simply discuss but would literally embody the
experience of the poet, which gives a different kind of
access to the changing world of the other from either participant observation or autoethnography while remaining
closely related. We find an instructive example of this radical approach to form in the work of Jacques Jouet and his
metropoems.
71
Maréchal and Linstead
Jacques Jouet’s Oulipian approach to
Poetry
A métro poem is a poem composed in the métro, during
the duration of a trip.
A métro poem has as many verses as your trip has stations, minus one.
The first verse is composed in your head between the
two first stations of your trip (counting the stations
from which you departed).
It is transcribed onto paper when the train stops at the
second station.
The second verse is composed in your head between the
second and third stations of your trip.
It is transcribed onto paper when the train stops at the
third station. And so forth.
One must not transcribe when the train is in motion.
One must not compose when the train is stopped.
The last verse of the poem is transcribed on the platform
of your last station.
If your trip involves one or more changes of subway
lines, the poem will have two or more stanzas
If by chance the train stops between two stations, you
will encounter a delicate moment in métro poem writing. (Jouet, 2001a, pp. 10-11; translated by Motte,
2001, pp. 60-61)
As a creative writer, Jacques Jouet critically experiments
with a broad variety of forms of poetry (lyric, narrative,
dramatic, occasional, free verse, or fixed form) and in the
process invented a new genre: the metro poem (Jouet,
2000). In 1983 he joined L’Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle
(OuLiPo), roughly translated as the Workshop for Potential
Literature, a collaborative transdisciplinary intellectual
project founded by Raymond Queneau and Francois Le
Lionnais in 1960 with the aim to explore how highly
restrictive methods may be used in literary creation.
Influenced by the Lettrism and Situationism of the 1950s
(Marcus, 1990), Oulipo is a long-lived collaboration unique
in the history of French literature, whose experimental
practices regroups writers (and even mathematicians)
who seek to experiment with new structures, patterns, and
constraints as a source of ideas and inspiration. As Jouet
(2001, p. 4) himself put it: “The Oulipo is faber, it fabricates
tools. The Oulipo’s work is first of all this fundamental
research: conception and exercise.”
Exemplary of the group’s experimental practices, Jacques
Jouet’s poetics can be considered to be “exhaustive” (Motte,
2001). The idea of literary exhaustion—especially of conventional modes of writing—was first formulated by American
novelist John Barth (1967), when he argued that the novel
had advanced little beyond its 19th-century achievements and
was coming to the end of its possibilities as a literary form.
The various works of the Oulipo group simultaneously
recognize exhaustion in and inject exhaustiveness into the life
of different literary forms. Oulipo’s members follow a variant
of situationist practice, which imposes constraints on creativity in order to provoke new and unexpected directions of
inspiration. They play with the possibilities of language,
using formal constraints and creative as well as reflexive
styles of writing. They are not writing “literature under constraints . . . but seek out usable constraints so that literature is
written” (Jouet, 2001a, p. 4). Oulipian constraints are distinctively formal, typically collaborative and systematic: “An
explicit procedure must be used—a formal axiom whose
implications, whose deductive chain of events—will create
the text. The constraint is the problem; the text is the solution,” singular or multiple (Jouet, 2001a, pp. 4). A constraint
may exhaust its potential in one text or may spark a multiplicity of texts that still leave much to be said.
Jouet (2001a, pp. 5-6) considered the positive-affirmative
effects of formal constraints on writing to be threefold:
1. the “affirmation of continuity” (the form as the
expression of a common capital which contributes
to original production);
2. a generative “tonic” or “stimulant” with a “positive, multiplying and structuring power” and
3. a formal affirmation of the arbitrary and generative power of meaning.
He also observes a latent negative power, which seeks
maximal conceptual proliferation (the production of
difference) and guards against the vanity of an obsession
with productivity or performativity. As Motte (2001, p. 46)
observed,
just as a given series of permutations may be said to
“exhaust” the possibilities of a combinatory system,
so too it may be claimed that a given set of texts (a
collection of poems, a series of novels, even an
oeuvre) labours toward the exhaustion of literary
possibility.
But constraints also risk constraining language itself to
a mere exercise to the point of loss of meaning. Again Jouet
notes this with a sense of adventure:
All of the Oulipian users of constraints are caught in
the snare of the two extremes of its imaginary world:
the much and the little, the all and the nothing. Before
making something (or while doing it), one must consider nothingness. . . . the death of a constraint (or its
inappropriateness) are part of the Oulipian imagination. (Jouet, 2001a, p. 7)
Jouet’s metropoems are urban experiments that affirm
the significance of poetry as a whole by establishing it as a
72
metaphor for “seeing and framing the experience of
everyday life” (Motte, 2001, p. 59). They are experientially
situated and performative. They act as a vital act bound up
with everyday life: The poet has a journey to make and a
train to catch and must move and write within the realworld constraints of everyday urban existence. Metropoems,
therefore, have the potential to be deployed in ethnography,
the outcome of the application of a set of “usable constraints”
that the poet finds in the ethnographic setting—just as the
everyday members of and participants in that setting
themselves find them.
The Metropoem: A Personal Experience
With Constraints
To write in the métro (people write very little in the
métro . . . they read a lot but write little) presupposes
overcoming material discomfort and distractions. . . . I
practiced writing poems in the métro, until the day
when I invented the poème de métro. I groped along
for six months before arriving at my guidelines and at
the definitional poem cited above. . . . Once it was
established, over the space of two years I composed
nearly 250 poèmes de métro. (Jouet, 2001a, p. 11)
The distinctiveness of the metropoem as a form comes
from its constitutive constraints: “Each verse must be
composed between the various stations of a trip on the
Parisian subway” (Motte, 2001, p. 59). The line itself
can only be written in the station, between trains, at
correspondances. The strict alternation of stops, moves, and
time intervals at and between stations also tends to conflate
poetic rhythm and time as “a subterranean rhythm” is both
imposed upon and animates these poems (Motte, 2001,
p. 61). Constraints are accordingly experienced as and in
motion, and this writing practice becomes a “trajectography,”
giving direction and velocity to the poem as it unfolds. The
technical constraints of the poem become part of the poet’s
experience and are immediately reflexively available as
poetic material:
The opening line will immediately reveal an opening
conviction:
if subway poems are good at speaking knowledgeably
about experience, or about poetry,
then the external tick-tock, against which discourse
buckles down,
is quite exactly mimicked by the time it takes to go
between two stations. . . .
. . . . I always have in mind the fact that the number of
lines in the poem has been predetermined by the place
where I’ve decided to go:
Qualitative Inquiry 16(1)
the concluding line wasn’t forecast, but turns out well,
being written down on the platform of La Muette station. (Jouet, 2001b, pp. 64-65, poem 1)
The opening conviction will drive the poem’s journey,
and this can and frequently does give a priority to the
conceptual over the affective or figurative, which shapes
the poem’s aesthetic. The vocabulary of metropoems as
a consequence frequently deploys self-referential terms
driven by the conceptual concerns of the poet qua poet with
language and writing, but a poet writing this type of poem
need not deploy this sort of interest or conceptualization—
except that the problematic nature of the form of the poem,
and the fact that the poet is constructing the poem as its
subject matter unfolds, might on occasion lead their attention
to concentrate on aspects of the creative process, rather than
the setting itself. Here the poem would be successful to the
extent that these processes can stand metonymically or
metaphorically for processes in everyday social life. This
connection is never too strained, however, as the immediacy
of the journey itself is the fleeting grounds for reflection of
the poem, which is clear evidence of the compositional
form acting as constraint. Each line, we recall, must be
composed between stations (the distance is relatively short in
Paris, around 500 meters and taking between 1 and 2
minutes) and written down while the train is standing in the
station (an even shorter stop). The scope for experimentation
once the sequence is underway is extremely limited.
Although metaphor is frequent, it is often as a result
extended rather than condensed. The device of contrast is
common, and occasionally the “if . . . then” structure is used,
not unsurprisingly implying mobility and a future orientation:
The apologies pronounced by a homeless newspaper
vendor
easily outpace the narrowness of my thought.
By shrinking my head a little into my shoulders, I let that
repetitive downpour of reality pass by.
But the next line has problems shaking itself dry. (Jouet,
2001b, p. 65, poem 2, ll. 18-22)
The metropoems collected in “Subway Poems” are
strikingly similar in shape of stanza and length of line, and
thus in visual impact. This is a direct result of the method
of composition, which creates a welling-up of ideas
pressing for inscription. This pressure, as Jouet recounts,
forces itself into the poem:
For instance, one of the indisputable effects of subway
poems is to make me write lines that are far longer
than I usually do,
as though I wanted to push the cup as far away as possible from my lips,
73
Maréchal and Linstead
while wishing that time between two stations
either slows up a bit or else speeds on its arrow. (Jouet,
2001b, p. 67, poem 6, ll. 7-11)
The form of the poem, therefore, embodies the plan—it
is not so much planned as the material outcome of the plan,
the plan being enformed by the setting. The setting of the
métro is critical to the creation of the metropoem, although
it is consumed elsewhere. This is part of the problem with
which the poems themselves struggle—the problem of
poetry itself as an attempt to be active in the world, while
being artificial and abstracted from it. The poems often act
as metonyms for poetry itself, opening up the gap between
creation and consumption that is a perennial problem for
poetic composition. But although they are and can only be
created on a métro journey, other than that their subject
matter is not limited. Rhythm is often taken from the setting
itself and gives a directness to the experience of the poem,
such as in poem 6 (ll. 1-6) where Jouet announces his
preoccupation with the sound of the train accelerating from
the station and does this in lines that are rhythmically
mimetic of the movement of an accelerating train:
This evening, I’m beginning the poem incapable of concentrating on anything except the noise of the train as
it accelerates.
The rhythm of days has now superimposed itself on the
rhythm of stations:
a subway poem a day, for the past few days, and for a
few more days to come,
surprise displaying the true permanence of inspiration,
which is the sole means of truly annihilating the concept
of inspiration. (Jouet, 2001b, p. 67, poem 6, ll. 1-6)
The broad purpose of metropoems as a genre is to
contribute to a range of poetic experiments that seek to
run counter to the idea of linguistic exhaustion,
demonstrating the vitality of language, and its flexibility
and adaptability, bridging between vivid responses to
everyday life and thoughtful, but rapidly motivated,
reflections on it. It is intended to be a tool for the revival
of a socially grounded poetic language. The main tone of
the poems—and Jouet alone produced over 250 of them—
therefore, tends to be experimental and reflexive, its selfconsciousness being humorous, critical, and often political:
I don’t like the idea of poetry being pure, clean and
innocent,
unapplied, inapplicable, or outside literature.
Poems shouldn’t be afraid of being composed on
tee-shirts,
or the poet being paid per line.
All orders accepted. (Jouet, 2001b, p. 66, poem 4, ll.
9-13)
The poetic acts of the poems involve taking a definite
starting point or “opening conviction” (see poem 1) that
acts as the motor for the poem. This conviction is reflexively
developed in the context of the journey, but how it unfolds
is unpredictable due to the constraints of the journey, which
dictates the length of the poem and its stanzas. The
conclusion will be motivated differently and is not likely
to bring the whole together neatly as there is not time for
such recollection: Sometimes it can be almost an apology
for not being a conclusion (Jouet, 2001b, p. 65, poem 1).
Metropoems can be presented and combined in different
ways. They are emic in production, in that they speak of
immediate experience, although they are reproduced at
some distance from that experience, even when performed:
I’m writing with a sort of exaltation,
more than any other I’ve experienced when writing
subway poems,
caused by the risk of having to read out the poem aloud
in public
and conscious of the advantages of distancing and correction which here, largely speaking, are impossible
and undesirable
and which will find their precise counterbalance in the
energy generated by the restriction of this situation.
(Jouet, 2001b, p. 65, poem 1, ll. 13-20)
There is, however, the possibility that such poems
could be read and performed at any time after journey
ends, and they would stay intact as they are not allowed to
be revised, which is radically different from other poetry. As
a result, the poems are in effect both ethnographic field
notes and ethnographic account.
The Metropoem as a Genre
One of the critical features of metropoetry is its attempt to
enact reflection in the midst of the speed and hurrying of
everyday urban transport, while conforming to the dictates
and demands of that transport. As a result, it asks philosophical questions about urgency and emptiness, whether
one can be the still point of a turning world or whether one
has to find stillness within the very motion of that world. It
is very concerned with poetry as emblematic of uses of language that rhetorically claim a substance that is at least
questionable (see, for example, poem 2, extract):
Between each of the lines, the poem’s superposable
elements,
there is a void occupied by the surrounding air,
the air and all the other words that aren’t poetry
because they are part of the chaos of journeys crossing
randomly.
74
Disciplinary poetry. (Jouet, 2001b, p. 65, poem 2, ll.
41-45)
Or poem 10:
The difficulty of writing a subway poem this Friday
strike day
is far greater than usual: first find a train;
I now have; the coach is packed and I have to write
standing up;
it keeps stopping anarchically. The poem is . . . how did
the
loudspeaker put it? disrupted.
It’s not a good thing for poetry to be disrupted, given that
it so likes to
disrupt.
Disruption begins at home, Dame Poetry! (Jouet, 2001b,
p. 70, poem 10, ll. 1-8)
The message in metropoetry is thus counterposed to that
of the Romantics, which so affects Furman et al. (2006) and
consists—as Wordsworth put it—of poetry as
the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it
takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility . . . . (Wordsworth, preface to Lyrical Ballads,
1802)
For the metropoet there is no tranquility in the everyday
world, but neither is that world devoid of poetry. Deploying
method in engaging language with the everyday, in an
artificial way, releases the natural poetry overlooked in
mundane existence:
To my right, Charles-de-Gaulle bridge is being built; to
my left, the morgue,
the epic construction sites which a poem is capable of
and the framing of an epitaph . . .
there is no reality a poem cannot spar with,
just as there is not a single word in any language that is
not contained in poetry,
be it an acronym, a proper noun, or some dumb fashionable tomfoolery. (Jouet, 2001b, p. 68, poem 6, ll.
19-27)
Jouet argues that anyone who wants to use the metho
dology can do it. The objective of its poetic practice was
meant to be inclusive, and its rules are supposed to be
formulated with such clarity that anyone can pick them up
and apply them. The poetic community is intended to be an
open one, as is the content. But Lapprand (2001, p. 21)
does not fully accept this argument and cautions as he
summarizes:
Qualitative Inquiry 16(1)
The métro poem requires the successful combination
of at least three ingredients:
– an accomplished poet/writer with a swift mind
and whose training is such that he never actually fails
to write a line . . .
– the Paris métro system, or one just like it. I argue
that both the density (368 different stations, including
87 connecting points, or 293 nominal stations, including 55 connecting points) and the fairly short distance
between them (543 m. on average) are key factors
– the strict respect of the rules stated in the selfdefining poem, and an acute capacity for concentration
on the part of the operator.
These three factors do not commonly occur together. We
don’t, however, think that there is no room for occasional
failures by the poet, and Factors 1 and 3 are achievable,
with effort, but the second would appear to be a fatal limit
to the form’s more general applicability. However, we also
don’t think that the system does have to be exactly like the
Paris métro, or necessarily any railway system at all. We
take our cue here from Jouet’s observation that it took
him six months to determine the appropriate constraints to
be drawn from the setting and then formalize them
into a method—a time of preparation, experimentation,
experience, observation, and reflection. This is the critical
generalizable principle from which the metropoems begin.
The need to engage closely with the system of social
activity in order to determine which of its characteristics
could and should usefully shape poetic construction brings
metropoetry closest to ethnographic poetry in its origins.
The metropoet begins by doing what ethnographers do—
conceptually driven observation and description—before
devising situated, enabling, constraints. Thus, although
the rules of Jouet’s metropoems can only be applied
strictly to very similar systems to that of Paris, there is no
reason why the constraints should not be modified to fit
changes in the situation; indeed, the experimental and
embedded nature of the activity suggests this should be
necessary. This will enable them to express the dual nature
of the city as identified by Scott Lash (1999), who argues
that modern urban systems have both routes and roots.
Attempts to understand city life are thus caught up in this
paradox of the pursuit of groundlessness in mobility and
flexibility being simultaneously a search for grounds, not
necessarily new, but historically overlooked in the hasty
growth of the modern city, in its hidden history and side
lined memories. This is not necessarily Jouet’s immediate
and direct concern, but metropoems do nevertheless
seem to connect to this agenda.
Jouet’s rule that the poem, once written, should not be
revised, is only one rule and could, if desired, be varied in
developing similar styles for different activities. But for
Maréchal and Linstead
Jouet, this rule is importantly creative as it focuses and
concentrates the poet’s mind during the period of composition. It intensifies the focus on a part of experience that
might otherwise remain diffuse, and the writing is intended
to capture that intensity of focus—not recall it, not evoke it,
but inscribe its energy in the moment. The poem is as much
performed as composed. This would be lost if revisions
were allowed. So would the documentary nature of the
poem, as a real-time artifact, part of the archive of the journey, whose life begins and ends with the journey—as we
observed before, both ethnographic field notes and ethnographic account.
Conclusion
Metropoetry is a poetic genre that is embedded in and generated by a small part of everyday social life with a clearly
outlined method. The method makes the metropoem a challenging medium, but this is consistent with the concerns laid
out by Faulkner (2007) in calling for greater attention to craft
and technique in research poetry and the fact that poetry is
itself a demanding task. It deploys the minutiae of life, its
features, movements, regularities, images, and disruptions,
including its language, within an arbitrary but disciplined
structure, to make fragments and trivia stand evocative of a
broader critique of those social forces that propel people into
the métro and impel them through it.
In the extreme, nevertheless, metropoems can become
mechanical (a “well-oiled machine”) and the poet, a sort of
“Robot-poet” (Lapprand, 2001, p. 21; referring to Vian).
Jacques Jouet even argues that “once the model has been
established and tested, [Italics added] there can be no blank,
no failure, no absence of production after each run of
the train” (Lapprand, 2001, p. 22). Their distinctiveness
acquires some fragility as a result. This is one consequence
of the method’s openness, of course, but we think that it
mainly results from the poet’s primary interest remaining
that of the poet in the sort of compositions Jouet accomplishes. As a research tool, with ethnographic objectives
resituated as its focus, incorporating more of a concern with
the other, and an active awareness of its own applicability
within a wider ethnographic project, the genre should not be
vulnerable to the risk of mechanistic reproduction. There is
also the added benefit that the process of writing the poems
draws the attention of the ethnopoet to different, and perhaps neglected, aspects of the experience, which adds value
to the research process even if the poems it produces turn
out to be less than successful artistically.
Overall, recent moves in the creation and use of the
research poem have attracted, and in some cases invited,
unfair and even dismissive criticism by aligning themselves
with a proximate version of the postmodern that distracts
from their real potential to add value to qualitative research.
The concept and use of the “research” poem can be critiqued
75
at ontological, epistemological, and methodological levels,
but the criticisms do not render the position irretrievable.
What is opened up, however, is the possibility of a poetic
contribution that uses form to the full, yet grounds that form
in the experience it addresses, and a poetic voice that is
more active and less reflective, indeed, which draws, implicitly or explicitly, less on classic Romantic conceptions of the
nature of the poetic act and becomes both more performative and reflexive. Metropoems offer an example and a
resource for this by developing a specific set of rules in relation to the context studied, applying them rigorously to the
real-time construction of the poem in a way that embodies
the context in the process, and reflecting on the process at
the same time as creation takes place. These constraints
enable different perspectives on action and context to
emerge. The potential, and the challenge, is for the research
poet to identify appropriate bases for operational rules and
constraints in the setting that will prove constructively
usable in the creation of the poem and will also enable
greater understanding of the setting itself. This requires considerable precreative preparation, observation, and trial and
error.
To summarize in terms of the considerations raised in
the introduction, metropoems can enable the taking of a
position that neither turns inward toward the ethnographer’s self nor outward toward an empathic relation, and
avoids the trap of implicit Romanticism; they do impose a
discipline that is very much derived from a specific activity and which embodies the rhythms, time, and space of
that activity; they emphatically affirm calls made by recent
critical work in this area to pay greater attention to questions of poetic technique and craft; and they could offer a
method of mobility that responds to characteristics of contemporary urban social experience, but whose generic
principles are adaptable to other forms of social life. That
this method is grounded in the idea of a literature of
exhaustion might suggest a limit to its usefulness, a boundedness to its ability to energize creativity. So it might be
seen as a useful, if temporary, intervention in the research
process to enable seeing a new setting differently, rather
than as a method to be more customarily applied. However, whether the exact format of the metropoem is adapted
to other areas is for us less important than the fact that it
opens up new possibilities for form more generally. Where
recent contributions have emphasized the benefits of
adapting poetic forms from diverse settings (often with
cultural and historical roots that have no relation to the
research settings studied), metropoems signal the possibilities of developing forms that derive their structural
principles either directly from or in relation to elements of
the research setting. Not all settings will lend themselves
to this as easily as others, of course, but we think the possibilities merit exploration—perhaps by better poets than
ourselves.
76
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared that they had no conflicts of interests with
respect to their authorship or the publication of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research and/or
authorship of this article.
Notes
1. Jouet’s term in French is poèmes de métro, which is translated
literally as métro poems or subway poems. In our broader
deployment of this term, the Paris métro becomes symbolic
of other forms of movement, and so we condense the terms
and drop the accent to create the neologism metropoem, with
metropoetry indicating the genre.
2. Dumortier (2007; also Dent, 2007) argued in this regard that
there is a method of the metro itself—an acquired ability to read
behavior and character from minute signals as the world flashes
by and people emerge from and disappear into the crowd.
3. While we don’t develop this view here, pointing rather to its
metaphorical potential, eminent French anthropologist Marc
Augé, who has extensive familiarity with nontechnologically
and economically advanced cultures, argues that the study of
the Metro illustrates “how the sense of individual life is born of
the global constraints that apply to all social life. Except for a
few cultural details and a few technological adjustments every
society has its subway,[Italics added] and imposes on each
and every individual itineraries in which the person uniquely
experiences how he or she relates to others . . . [this] sense is
born of alienation . . . and this truth remains paradoxical only
because a certain idea of the individual resists it, anchored in
the sensitive evidence of the body, which, in turn and return,
defined the limits and meaning of the social” (Augé, 2002,
pp. 69-70).
4. The sometimes mythical mobility ascribed to the postmodern does not, of course, affect everyone, even in the city. As
both Bauman (1998) and Castells (1998) argued, within First,
Second, and Third World contexts there is an interior “Fourth
World” of people who cannot participate in the very society
in which they find themselves, and, they argue, that while the
numbers of the very mobile grows, so too do the numbers of
the immobile, or purposelessly mobile (itinerants, vagrants,
etc.). As these are the poorest members of their society, they
will not generally be found regularly purchasing a ticket to
ride, although they will often be found in and around stations
or points where modes of travel intersect.
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Bios
Garance Maréchal is lecturer in the School of Management,
University of Liverpool. She has a PhD from Paris-Dauphine
University, France, and has published on qualitative methodology in
French and English. Her main research interests are in autoethnography, reflexivity, philosophy of science, and sensuous methodologies.
Her recent publications include work on constructivism and constructionism, rhetoric in debates between critical realism and
relativism, and terroir as a metaphor for ethnographic context. She
has recently completed a photoethnography of the Paris métro.
Stephen Linstead is professor of critical management at the University of York, United Kingdom. He has a DLitt from the
University of Durham, United Kingdom, and PhD from Sheffield
Hallam University, United Kingdom. He has previously held
chairs at institutions including the Universities of Essex, Durham,
Wollongong (New South Wales) and has also held visiting positions at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and the
University of New Mexico. His research interests include organizational aesthetics, postmodern and postcolonial theory, and
organizational ethnography, and his diverse publications include
some of his own poems. He is an academician of the Academy of
the Social Sciences in the United Kingdom.