Description

We propose a pop-up exhibition showcasing an exploration of poetry written through lived experience. It will explore the works of poets, particularly those who are people of colour, mainly women, who have drawn on lived experience and knowledge-cultivation through poetry to give voice to their lived realities, in response to the spaces and places that have silenced them.

The exhibition will also showcase anthropologist-poets within the University of Edinburgh and beyond to highlight poetry as an evocative and emotionally-led effective method to write, analyse, and disseminate lived experiences of people we research with.

Fusing these works in conversation together, this exhibition aims to demonstrate the ways in which poetry, as an accessible, emotive, and very-human way of being can illuminate anthropological research and ensure anthropologists disseminate in accessible and representative ways, informed by people we research with.

We hope that this exhibition may encourage visitors to begin to think through how they might explore their own lived experiences through poetry.

“Of all the art forms, poetry is the most economical. It is the one which is the most secret, which requires the least physical labor, the least material, and the one which can be done between shifts, in the hospital pantry, on the subway, and on scraps of surplus paper…poetry has been the major voice of poor, working class, and Colored women. A room of one's own may be a necessity for writing prose, but so are reams of paper, a typewriter, and plenty of time” – Audre Lorde