Poetic portraits of older women in the great black swamp: Making poems from stories as representation, inquiry, and community engagement

‘ Poetic portraiture is an arts-based research (ABR) method for representing an interviewee's embodied aspects of their life story in poetry and poetic forms’. Creating poetic portraits allows researchers to evocatively engage with participants’ stories by challenging dominant ideologies and stereotypes to foreground marginalized voices and perspectives. It is a powerful method for demonstrating researcher reflexivity, portraying nuanced pictures of people's lives, and for doing ethnographic community engagement research. The author discusses the use of poetic portraits as a promising qualitative ABR methodology using a community engagement project with older women's oral histories about their relationships across the lifecourse as an example. The author argues that poetic portraiture provides insight into communication and aging because the women's portraits portray their stories in ways that challenge staid assumptions about women and aging.