The shadow is stuck in front of the mirror One of the many poems I wrote during this time is The Shadow. During years of having abusive management when I felt rotten I would just start writing on an empty blog post page, and until I would have written the poem I would not have been able to express what it was exactly that made me feel down. I have been writing poetry since I was a teenager, and often I do not know, or are able to express what is on my mind until I have written a poem. To me writing poetry is a lateral thinking process. So while the presenter was speaking I had a brainwave-what if I use blackout poetry on my bilinugal semi-translations to highlight the things that are important. I think this is probably because about one quarter of the words in these books have no equivalent in English-even if I would find a kind of translation the meaning would entirely change-Wissenskritik anyone, or Bildung?-anyhow, I try to distil the meaning rather than translate the texts, but this is sometimes really difficult. I have some serious issues translating German academic texts, unfortunately some of the current books and texts which have a significant influence on my work, my own thinking and scholarship are in German only. I am definitely giving this a try with some of my experimental autoethnographic writing.Ģ) The other element this can help with are translations.

Using blackout poetry has so much potential to take this step back, to explore what jumps out, what words, phrases, formulations appear significant.

Being able to take that step back from one‘s Self and analyse the stories. So, one of the problems with autoethnographic text is analysing it. So, today the fabulous Aimee Merrydew was introducing Blackout Poetry as a creative teaching method to encourage students to engage more deeply with core texts they have to read.Īnd while I was listening to the webinar during my morning walk, I had two thoughts:ġ) This is not just for analysing texts but actually this approach has a lot of potential for sense-making as a research analysis tool. If you have not yet joined Pedagogy and Pancakes run by Chris Headland come on in, these morning sessions are fab.

Black out poetry