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Having searched the poetry literature, I was developing my understanding
of its potential power as a process for reflecting on professional practice
both personally and collaboratively. I could see the use of imagery and
metaphor could evoke emotions, empathy while contextualizing
experience and inviting multiple interpretations of that experience.
However, I was still not ready to share my own poetry until 2004, more
than a year into this inquiry. Now looking back and wondering why I was
so reluctant and wary of sharing the poems, I can see that I was
prejudiced against poetry which I saw as an elitist intellectual pursuit. I
didn‘t read poems particularly, I didn‘t understand them; poems were for
‗clever‘ people. In Bourdieu‘s (1993a) terms poetry had cultural, academic
and symbolic capital.
Can Poetry be used as a Deliberate Reflective Process?
There is a growing recognition citing the value of written reflection and
creative writing as a method for developing meaningful insights about
professional practice (Bolton, 2005, Sampson 2004, Jasper 1999, Hunt &
Sampson 1998). Poetry has been linked with reflective practice as a
strategy for developing reflection in nurses (Davies, 2008, Foureur et al
2007, Bolton 2005, Taylor 2000, 2006, Johns 2000). Yet it is not a
dominant discourse in the reflective practice literature. The most common
reflective practice discourse in nursing tends to see reflection as a
cognitive problem-solving process and as learning from experience while
reflection as mindfulness features to some extent (Gustafasson et al 2007,
Duffy 2007, Johns 2006, Brookes 2001). Gustafasson et al (2007) in a
systematic review of reflective practice in nursing, using published
qualitative and philosophical papers, suggested personal learning featured
predominantly and to a lesser extent emotional learning. From my
experience of facilitating and undertaking previous research on reflective
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