Reading Poetry Now: A Short Methodological Overview

This chapter offers a brief overview of the qualitative research project 'Reading Poetry Now', data from which is considered in the remainder of the study. This project explored the responses to a series of contemporary Scottish poems on the part of various groups of readers in largely working-class neighbourhoods in and around the city of Glasgow, Scotland. Qualitative studies of readerly responses to poetry are few and far between, and many of those which do exist take as their focus readers who are, already, interested in poetry. By contrast, the present study sought to make space for, and to take seriously, the experiences and engagements of readers who were not necessarily familiar with, or were not especially interested in, poetry. The chapter describes the ways in which the project was undertaken, and discusses some of the key choices which that work involved, including those relating to the recruitment of participants, the selection of the poems to be discussed, and the analysis of the resulting data. It offers, moreover, a brief reflection on a number of relevant ethical and political questions, including those relating to the politics of language as implicated in this study itself.