As many of you know, I’m about to fly off for a month on the east coast visiting family, friends and former classmates. Traveling, though, does something to my creativity, something unpleasant. I still write, can’t do without that, but I don’t often come up with much worth continuing. So–I heard about I-Search and assigned myself to do one while I’m on a break from creative writing. It will be a lot of “left-brain” work and I think I can maintain that. It might even feel good after a long seclusion in the creative cabinet where I live.

Google I-Search Report and you’ll find a handful of instructions, most from an academic point of view. The basics, however, are to choose a topic that interests you, formulate questions, write down what you already know, research the topic, keeping a search narrative going as you do, and evaluate your findings and your ideas about it. All of this is very first-person, much less formal than what we all learned about research papers.

My topic came to me, as do many of my ideas, serendipitously. I went for my weekly library fix and found a book edited by Carolyn Forché and Duncan Wu, Poetry of Witness: The Tradition in English 1500-2001. Reading through it I found that I wanted to know more. So I’ve ordered Czeslaw Milosz’s book, The Witness of Poetry. I set up a notebook to keep all this information in, a small one that will fit easily into my travel bag. And I went to Trident Booksellers in Boulder and bought two books of Milosz’s poetry. I’ll decide after I read his work where to look next. Given the scope of this topic, I plan to concentrate on contemporary poems. The big question for me is the relationship between political poetry and poetry of witness.  Another one is the variety of events that trigger such poems. I’ll let you know around the end of August what I’ve discovered.