When Poetry Became Ethnography and Other Flying Pig

Tales in Honor of Dell Hymes aeq_1146 393..396

MELISA CAHNMANN-TAYLOR
University of Georgia

Cahnmann-Taylor remembers her first encounter with Dell Hymes at an open mic event at the
annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association. She puzzles his complex stance on
the role ethnographic poems might play in one’s ethnographic project. In Dell Hymes’s honor, she
shares a poetic rendering of a speech event from her bilingual education study in urban Philadel-
phia. [Dell Hymes, ethnography, poetry, arts-based research]

When I found a small slip of paper at the AAA Chicago conference hotel in 1999 announc-
ing an evening “open mic” session for poetry and other creative renderings of data, I made
sure to attend. As I breezed down the carpeted corridor past scholars removing name
badges, I was filled with hope. My tribe awaited me. I could hardly still myself in the
cushioned metal chair. I recall a woman who read from a play she’d written based on
fieldwork with Salvadoran refugees in California that moved me to tears; I resonated with
another scholar’s poems that wrestled with her outsider status in an indigenous commu-
nity. I shared my own poem, which had recently been published by the city paper where
I did my fieldwork (Cahnmann 1999, 2000) and felt it captured the essence of my experi-
ences in bilingual Philadelphia schools more so than the scholarly paper I’d presented
through the Council for Anthropology and Education earlier that day. The truth was as a
new graduate student I often felt stuck in an imitative mode when writing in scholarly
prose, adopting whole sentence structures and multisyllabic words from other language
scholars, often unsure of what I was trying to say and how. In contrast, when I processed
what I was recording in field notes through poetry, I relaxed into plain language, personal
rhythms, and, most importantly, surprise (Hirshfield 2007). I had permission to be sur-
prised by emergent understanding, and, as Emily Dickinson wrote, to “Tell all the Truth
but tell it slant.”
When the readings concluded, the event moderator announced this session was part of
the annual business meeting for the Society for Humanistic Anthropology (SHA), an
organization that awarded ethnographies for their creative writing style as well as their
scholarly content and held an annual contest for ethnographic poetry. So refreshed by
what I’d heard, I asked those present if anyone thought it possible that those poems,
stories, and plays might someday be the center of our ethnographic work, rather than
peripheral representations.
I remember a much older man toward the front of the room who immediately stood up
and stated he was Dell Hymes. My heartbeat raced: the Dell Hymes? The father of my
doctoral program in Educational Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, the man
who began the “ethnography of communication” (Hymes 1972)? The Dell Hymes faced me
and answered: no. The father of my field communicated with certainty that poems (as well
as short stories and plays) would replace ethnography “when pigs fly” as the Duchess in
Lewis Carol’s Alice in Wonderland is noted for saying. In more serious terms, Hymes
asserted we should remain prose ethnographers and settle for poetry on the side. He
spoke with authority; he’d already had these conversations a decade earlier (Hymes 1981,
1985); it was time to keep our ham hocks on the ground and go to bed.

Anthropology & Education Quarterly, Vol. 42, Issue 4, pp. 393–396, ISSN 0161-7761, online ISSN 1548-1492.
© 2011 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.
DOI:10.1111/j.1548-1492.2011.01146.x.

393
394 Anthropology & Education Quarterly Volume 42, 2011

To say I was at first disappointed is an understatement. Maybe he was tired from the
long conference day; maybe he was tired of this conversation; or maybe he was just playing
devil’s advocate as good scholars are so wont to do, but as a new scholar bubbling with
excitement I was deflated and then puzzled—at the end of the meeting Dell solicited
poems for the annual ethnographic poetry contest for which he was judge. I later learned
that Dell had started the field of ethnopoetics (Hymes 2003) studying indigenous poetic
forms and was a central figure along with Paul Friedrich (2006), Stanley Diamond (1982),
Ivan Brady (1991), among others in the literary (poetic) turn in ethnography. Later still
when he was a featured colloquia speaker at the University of Pennsylvania, I was shocked
when, having seen “Driving through North Philly,” he asked me to submit to the annual
ethnographic poetry contest and in 2003 honored me with a first prize. Why would the
same man who nurtured a place for poetry and ethnography to coexist, who wrote poetic
scholarship and poems himself, refuse to support the possibility that poems might con-
stitute legitimate and central forms to represent ethnographic understanding?
Many years later when Dell retired from his post as SHA contest judge, I was asked to
follow him as chair. I proceeded to write arguments for the increased presence of the arts,
particularly poetry, in all phases of empirical (e.g., Maynard and Cahnmann-Taylor 2010)
and pedagogical processes (e.g., Cahnmann-Taylor and Preston 2008). Arguing against the
father’s admonitions, I commanded more poems, not fewer. However, as the novice
ethnographic poems started to arrive from students and colleagues, I began to have my own
reservations. Some of the hopeful ethnographic poets hurried their poems with easy cliché
and tired metaphors; often the poems’ content seemed overly personal or the language
failed to plait the poem with surprise and associative logic; line breaks appeared haphazard
or the music felt stilted or missing, as if the ethnographer merely broke a series of sentences
into what appeared to be poetic form. Having formally and informally studied poetic craft
for many years, I wanted ethnographic poems to be good (finely crafted, evocative, full of
fresh language and music) and some of them were—very good (e.g., Kusserow 2002; Stone
2008). But what of the ones that were not? Were my arguments giving license to mediocre
poetry that would undermine the ethnopoetic project (Behar 2008)?
In 2009, the year Dell Hymes passed away, I participated in a panel of ethnographic
creative writers presenting poems and short stories at AAA during a regularly slotted
session. The room was packed and Dell’s guiding presence was palpable. The readings
were given by a wide variety of established and more novice ethnographers, those who
came to creative writing later in their anthropology careers and others who were growing
up bifocal—writing ethnography in both creative and scholarly genres at once.1 I think
Dell would have been proud to have been there and as struck as I was by the high quality
and impact of the creative ethnographic work.
My initial disappointment with Dell’s first response to my query about ethnographic
poetry is now understanding and largely agreement. Had he enthusiastically embraced
the centrality of ethnographic poetry, he may have licensed a dangerous move away from
the fundamentals of the ethnographic project, systematic study, and theory to account for
linguistic and cultural diversity. Had his sole focus been on the poems themselves, we
might have missed out on his models for language in context, particularly the mnemonic
SPEAKING (Hymes 1972) where, incidentally, the taxonomy appears in the form of an
acrostic poem. Hymes’s prose scholarship illuminates the poetic importance of eliciting
universals from particulars, always illustrating theoretical components of speech with
concrete descriptions of particulars.
Like Hymes, I believe aspiring ethnographic poets should all study and practice the art
of traditional ethnography. Adding to that study, ethnographic poets should apprentice in
the craft of poetry as well as they begin to experiment and create new genres “at the edge
of words” (Maynard and Cahnmann-Taylor 2010). Ironically, I sometimes find myself now
Cahnmann-Taylor When Poetry Became Ethnography 395

in a conservative role with students who boldly want to begin their scholarly journeys with
experimentation—why not fly, they argue: it’s time to add more poetry into lines that end
at the right-most margins of the page. Having many fine ethnopoetic models they take
permission to study poetry from the get go, they break lines and rules, they attune
themselves to image and music.
Through Dell’s teaching and writing I understand that my students and I stand with
him at different points on a continua of social science scholarship, one that lies between
methodologies alternatively considered “scientific” and “artistic.” Just as I felt the initial
rush of flight at my first face-to-face meeting with Dell Hymes in 1999, I fully expect to see
pigs fly at future AAA meetings, in Anthropology and Education Quarterly (AEQ) and in
other social science and education journals as more scholars soar through artful and
scholarly renderings of diversity.
To honor Dell’s pioneering spirit in ethnographic poetry, and in debt to his work in
SHA, CAE, and AEQ, I republish the poem I read at AAA in 1999. “Driving through North
Philly” (Cahnmann 1999, 2000; see also Cahnmann 2003) is a poetic rendering of a speech
event from my dissertation about bilingual education in urban Philadelphia (Cahnmann
2001). Although the details may not all be factually accurate, the poem “Tells all the Truth”
as I understood the intersections of language, race, and, class on that street corner.

Driving through North Philly

I see them. The shoes

on Eighth Street—there must be
thirty pair perched upside down.
An uneven silhouette of sneakers
slung over electric wire;
the lightness soaked out of them,
except for the eager cleats,
less familiar with the whims of weather.

Here a boy doesn’t give up shoes

unless they give up on him;
a face bruised with September
and measured kicks through corn chip bags
crushed in the side-pockets of this city.

I think of other reasons for these pairs in flight:

maybe a test of gravity, feet got too big,
or a protest against restrictions
on tilted chairs, names gouged on desktops,
on-time, straight lines in the yard.

For weeks I wonder until I stop

to ask a kid from the neighborhood.
We study each other: a black boy,
backpack over left shoulder, pants big enough
for two of him, and a white woman dressed like a teacher
with notepad and loopy earrings. “Because it’s fun, Miss,”
he says, as if the answer were scrawled on the wall
behind me in oversized bubble letters.
And then, “So they remember you when you’re gone.”

I think of the thirteen apartments I’ve lived in

over the last nine years and how I’ve never left anything behind.
I look at the newest pair, think how impractical
to let color fade, perfectly good and out of reach,
an empty walk on sky.
396 Anthropology & Education Quarterly Volume 42, 2011

“I done it lots a’times, Miss,” he says with a grin.

I consider how little I know about joy.
What it’s like to throw something up in the air
that’s important, that weighs something, that takes you places—
and not wait for it to come down.

Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor is Associate Professor at University of Georgia (cahnmann@

uga.edu).

Note
1. Panelists on the 2009 “Coming Close—Literary Readings in Ethnography” at AAA (Philadel-
phia) included Adrie Kusserow, Kent Maynard, Nomi Stone, Ruth Behar, Renato Rosaldo, Billie Jean
Isbell, Paul Stoller, Kim Gutschow, Barbara and Dennis Tedlock, and Elizabeth Krause.

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