The use of poetry to convey emotions in Masters and Doctoral work

Tomorrow's Emotions Series Seminar, The use of poetry to convey emotions in Masters and Doctoral work, will be delivered by Ruth Aird and Kath MacDonald. Ruth and Kath met when Ruth was a Masters student at Queen Margaret University, where Kath is a senior lecturer. They both share an interest in poetry as a means of dissemination of research and as a basis for teaching. Together they have developed Ruth‘s work on Impostership, which will form part the seminar; the other part will showcase Kath’s Doctoral work around the expert patient and living with a long term condition. Here, Ruth and Kath each present one of their poems for us.

Ruth:

Emotions and perception vary depending on the place where you are standing to view the world. If I was standing on a wet, cold and windy mountain with the clouds swirling around me, clawing at my damp clothes, I would be fairly miserable. But if I was looking up at that mountain from the warm shelter of a cottage, with a crackling fire spitting in the hearth and the smell of soft baked bread infusing the wooden beams, I would feel safe and protected with a warm sense of well being. Unless I go and stand on that mountain I cannot understand or enter into the feelings and emotions of that other person, neither have I earned the right to comment.

This poem is the mind story of a girl on the shore watching a seal in the sea watching her. 

 

Perception and my world

I saw her standing on the shore
I was safe, she was not.
She stood on hard unyielding granite
But I could feel the tremors
Which moved the land beneath her feet.
There was no support to shield her
From the buffeting of the unrelenting wind
While I was held on every side
Safe and secure in a liquid cushion.

She shivered slightly, shoulders hunched
Against the next wave of wind
Gathering behind the high stone wall
Waiting to pounce when she least expected.
Dry white grass clutched her feet
As she turned away, one last envious look
At my emerald empire, I saw her trudge
Towards a box of stone, locking herself in
Against a world of uncertain destiny.

 

I saw him watching me
I was safe, he was not.
Head above the angry waves
A curious eye upon my green utopia.
The surface of the sea shifted
With continual uncertainty, lashing the rocks
At the perimeter of his prison.

The blubber on his back was fixed
No impression from the seething cauldron
Could be seen from my perspective.
A storm gathered on the dipping horizon
His neck was too thick to turn and see danger.
As he slid beneath a corkscrew wave
I saw him flapping a sad goodbye
Sinking to slimy depths amongst
The forest kelp, his vision sadly dull.

Papa Westray, Orkney, October 2008

 

Kath:

I have found that using poetry as narrative can help to illustrate emergent meanings and streams of consciousness in a more powerful way than prose. 

My experiences of experimenting with this form of media have taken me in new directions which I am excited about and will share in the forthcoming seminar on 9th December. I am really keen to develop this work and want to know if there are other like-minded people out there who are already part of a group or who would like to form a poetry group to develop similar work - please contact me on kmacdonald@qmu.ac.uk

Here is an extract from a piece of work, which relates to the theme of normalcy as a coping mechanism in chronic illness.

What’s in a norm?

 

In a socially constructed world there is no such thing as normal
So says Thorne (1993)
But as for me
CF is all I’ve known so it’s normal you see; for me
People ask: what’s it like living with cf?
It’s just the way it is I say- not always ok
embedded, routine
Just part of my day
And my biography
So I don’t see it as extra
The way others may
So when you ask me – what’s it like?
I don’t report it that way
Its just part of my day

To hear more of Ruth and Kath's poetry, book a place at their seminar:

Wednesday 9 December, 12-2pm at CRFR, 23 Buccleuch Place, Edinburgh
The seminar is free, but booking is essential via crfr.events@ed.ac.uk or 0131 651 1832
 

Ruth E. Aird, NES National Coordinator for General Practice Nursing Scotland (Job share) RGN* ONC MSc (Ed). Ruth is a General Practice Nurse who has been working in practice for 18 years and is now working for National Health Education Scotland.

Kath MacDonald D.H&SSc, MSc, PGCE, RGN, is a senior lecturer at Queen Margaret University.

A Pocketful of Feelings

We have been delighted to host the Emotions Seminar Series. Jessica MacLaren, the most recent speaker, provides those who weren't able to attend with an insight into her research on mental health nurses experiences of managing work-related emotions.

Emotions are an essential part of nursing. Nurses look after people in conditions of great suffering. They must both respond to the emotions of their patients, and also manage their own emotions so that their patients feel safe and cared for. But how do nurses actually achieve this?

My research examined how mental health nurses manage their feelings through supervision. In supervision a nurse meets with his/her supervisor to reflect on his/her work and get advice and support from the supervisor. The mental health nurses who I interviewed told me that supervision helped them to express and process difficult emotions which were brought up by their clinical practice. In this regard supervision was a very different experience to other parts of the nurses’ work in the health service.

In day-to-day work nurses described a “macho” culture, in which they were expected to cope with whatever situations they might encounter. As one nurse said, there is an attitude of “just get on with it, no-one’s died”. This means that it is difficult for nurses to even admit that they might need support. Another nurse told me that she felt unable to ask for supervision to help her process her work experiences, because colleagues would regard this as an admission of failure.

In contrast to this macho coping culture, good supervision works on the basis of encouraging emotional openness. If the nurse has difficult emotions brought up through working with a client it is important that s/he be able to acknowledge and process them so that s/he can work more productively with his/her client. Being able to reflect on emotions in this way may also help nurses to avoid burn-out. The nurses I interviewed told me that even just knowing they would be having supervision in a few weeks’ time helped them to cope better. One nurse explained that supervision was “like a pocket” she could put difficult emotions into, until she could explore them with support from her supervisor.

My research suggests that when it is done well, supervision can be enormously helpful for nurses, who balance the competing demands of working in an emotionally sensitive way with their clients, against maintaining their own wellbeing in emotionally suppressive working culture.

Contact Jessica by email.