Waiting for Death: The Poetic Transformation of Grief An Autoethnography
type: CreativeWork
description: This project begins when I find myself writing a poem to express a sudden flow of painful feelings. My lover has cancer. He will die within two years. He asks that we do not talk about it. I see that in this first poem the dominant text is from earlier times. The cancer is subtext. His shocking news with its silencing injunction has fired dark images in my imagination. As I write more poems an autoethnography evolves where I observe and reflect on the conscious and unconscious unfolding of a grieving process. The poems comprise Volume 2 of the thesis. To carry out this study a framework is set up to use poetry in the form of autoethnography as a qualitative research method. As this thesis is based on creative practice, a poet, Geoff Page is added to my supervisory panel. The poems themselves are part of the framework, as are the synergistic works and the theoretical ideas from poetry, philosophy, anthropology and psychoanalysis. I dream, remember and discover, and write a series of relatively autonomous poems over four years. The chair of my panel responds to my ideas by proposing cross- cultural ethnographies and poems of loss to enrich my inquiry. In particular I focus on research that has been undertaken into Yolngu mortuary rituals. This dialogic process fires my creative work. I analyse the poems using psychoanalytic ideas, and anthropological writings. Building on the insights of the anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner, I look at what lies behind the veils of the metaphysical core of my poetry.* At the same time I discover a resonance with Yolngu philosophy, and the capacity of Yolngu rituals to transform death into life. This study generates knowledge of my unconscious grieving process. The poems show how my mind deals with the loss, and how I use my mind to free my spirit from the pull of death. I find much in common with grieving in other cultures. The poems show a way through the grieving process. They transform raw grief into unconscious elements of experience,…
abstract: This project begins when I find myself writing a poem to express a sudden flow of painful feelings. My lover has cancer. He will die within two years. He asks that we do not talk about it. I see that in this first poem the dominant text is from earlier times. The cancer is subtext. His shocking news with its silencing injunction has fired dark images in my imagination. As I write more poems an autoethnography evolves where I observe and reflect on the conscious and unconscious unfolding of a grieving process. The poems comprise Volume 2 of the thesis. To carry out this study a framework is set up to use poetry in the form of autoethnography as a qualitative research method. As this thesis is based on creative practice, a poet, Geoff Page is added to my supervisory panel. The poems themselves are part of the framework, as are the synergistic works and the theoretical ideas from poetry, philosophy, anthropology and psychoanalysis. I dream, remember and discover, and write a series of relatively autonomous poems over four years. The chair of my panel responds to my ideas by proposing cross- cultural ethnographies and poems of loss to enrich my inquiry. In particular I focus on research that has been undertaken into Yolngu mortuary rituals. This dialogic process fires my creative work. I analyse the poems using psychoanalytic ideas, and anthropological writings. Building on the insights of the anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner, I look at what lies behind the veils of the metaphysical core of my poetry.* At the same time I discover a resonance with Yolngu philosophy, and the capacity of Yolngu rituals to transform death into life. This study generates knowledge of my unconscious grieving process. The poems show how my mind deals with the loss, and how I use my mind to free my spirit from the pull of death. I find much in common with grieving in other cultures. The poems show a way through the grieving process. They transform raw grief into unconscious elements of experience,…
author: La Ganza, Susan Ann
language: en_AU
keywords: autoethnography, poems, self-reflect conscious and conscious, grieving process, unconscious unfolding, poetry as framework, qualitative research method, synergistic work, philosophy, anthropology, psychoanalysis, dreams, remember, discover, autonomous poems, cross cultural ethnographies, cross cultural poems, poems of loss, Yolngu mortuary rituals, W.E.H. Stanner, Yolngu crying ceremonies, unconscious grieving process, the pull of death, free the spirit, raw grief, unconscious elements of experience, poems like daytime dreams, the woman as primary mourner, the origins of shared cultural experience, waiting for death, anticipating birth
date published: 2012
date modified: 2026-07-24T01:07:14Z
provider: Australian Catholic University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: Australian Catholic University

PropertyValue
property ID: Handle
value: http://hdl.handle.net/1885/116913