Abstract
The use of the personal in poetry provides an evocative tool for the critique of intimate power structures and dominant discourse by illustrating the false binary between private and public conceptions of relationships. The use of confessional poetry as autoethnography provides a method for researcher poets to critique taken-for-granted social structures that disempower and present fully embodied ways of being. I discuss how writing mother-poems about mothering and motherhood act as a form of critical autoethnography. My mother-poems are critical autoethnography; they focus attention on tensions and binaries rather than resolving them to show how the use of personal family intimacies is a way of constructing empowering family narratives that question taken-for-granted cultural discourse surrounding women’s work, mothering, and relationships.
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Notes
- 1.
Two-Hour Delay first appeared as Wiebe, S., Guiney-Yallop, J. J., Fels, L., Richardson, P., Snowber, C., Honein, N., Leggo, C., Faulkner, S. L., & Dark, K. (in press). Poetic inquiry of and on play. Canadian Journal of Education/Revue Canadienne de l’Education.
- 2.
This poem first appeared as Faulkner, S. L. (2014). How to potty train when presenting a paper on maternal poetry. Mom Egg Review, 12, p. 22.
- 3.
The interview first appeared as Faulkner, S. L. (October 28, 2015). The interview. Pine Hills Review. Available at http://pinehillsreview.strose.edu/sandrafaulkner/
- 4.
Pacifier Ode first appeared as Faulkner, S. L. (2012). Pacifier ode. Storm Cellar, II(2), p. 9. Urbana, IL: Whispered Publications.
- 5.
BF Girls first appeared in Rat’s Ass Review, 2. Available at http://ratsassreview.net/?page_id=879#Faulkner
- 6.
This poem first appeared in Faulkner, S. L. (2015). Knit four, make one: Poems (chapbook). Somerville, MA: Kattywompus Press.
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Faulkner, S.L. (2018). Mother-Poems: Using the Confessional as Critique in Autoethnographic Poetry. In: Holman Jones, S., Pruyn, M. (eds) Creative Selves / Creative Cultures. Creativity, Education and the Arts. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47527-1_7
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