Engaging the Senses to Make Sense: Performing Autoethnography in Selected Poems by Two Poet/Educators

In a poem entitled “Reading Allowed,” performance poet Taylor Mali says:
once upon a time we grew up on stories
and the voices in which they were told
we need words to hold us
for the world to behold us
for us to truly know our own souls.
In a similar vein, Billy Collins, Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003, says that “it's a good thing to get poetry off the shelves and more into public life.” During the past decades, both poetry and personal narrative have found their way to previously restricted territory such as academic research and cognitive science through autoethnography and embodied cognition, respectively. “Autoethnography” is a research method that seeks to describe (graphy) personal experience (auto) within a cultural context (ethno). Eventually, it took different shapes, including “performing autoethnography,” which uses story and poetry as forms of resistance within a profession. Tami Spry calls this type “An Embodied Methodological Praxis,” that bases research on the senses, grounding it in the body. (Spry, 2001) In this respect, Spry agrees with George Lakoff’s theory of embodied cognition that defies the claim of the “disembodied mind,” blurring the line between poetic knowledge and scientific truth. Both Collins and Mali are poets and educators. In 2005, they shared the stage in an event entitled “Page Meets Stage,” embodying their resistance to the established standards in both poetry and teaching. The paper intends to study selected poems by these two authors as examples of performance autoethnograhy in the light of Lakoff’s theory of embodied cognition.