Research–as much as we hate to admit it–starts with an educated guess. The fancier word for this is hypothesis, but I don’t want to follow the scientific method metaphor too far in a field where outcomes are far less objective. I believed when I started my research that I would find answers, and from those answers I would develop poems.
What’s actually happening? I’m at a crossroads. I can focus on one of two directions. Down the first road is the continued, obsessive search for information. Down the second road is the acknowledgment that I already have a ton of information but no answers. The scholar in me wants to keep digging, hoping against hope that somewhere there’s documentation to fill in the events of lost decades or centuries. I get engrossed in finding clues and seeking sources. In grad school, as I researched a relatively obscure author, I went to the British Library to look at manuscripts in person, in a gloriously analog process I hope you can all experience someday. It was delightful. But there is no massive library keeping track of poor kids in the 1920s and 1930s, few records from the crowded immigrant neighborhoods of manufacturing towns in the Midwest, nothing explaining why a relative of mine ended up here or there.
So now I have to lean in to the questions. For my students, this is often overwhelming. Guess what? It’s overwhelming for me, even after degrees and decades. What will the manuscript look like if the hypothesis needs retooling? I can’t find all the answers I want. I can’t just “change topics.” Instead, I have to fall forward into the uncertainty.
Next time I write I’ll talk through a poem that does exactly that.