"This autoethnographic poetry is born of my personal experience, witness, as well as currently chronicled and ancestral lore."
"Everybody is a poet in the sense that everyone was/is making do—and making magic—with what they had/have."
The otherness is not somewhere out there. It’s in me. Still, my search did not stop to this discovery. It took me profoundly even further. It took me to love and poetry.
I’d take the past and make it straight, Even though it’s complicated, We’ve got time to start again, I don’t know if you can hear me…
"Autoethnography and culture: Embodied inquiry is not a formula, or methodology, but a way of being, being open to the body as a source of knowledge, wonder, difficulty, fragility and utter joy."
I offer the following five poems to you. I hope that when you read/hear them you see a way into your own stories and ideas of poetic voice.
“Woken Word” was born as my inner voice was awakening and the world, ironically was becoming “woke” while simultaneously retreating into isolation.
"One can’t write poetry without love. It is the strongest and the most vital root in poetry."
"I called out the demons one by one. I named them. I gave them precise blocking and ultimately, I controlled where they stood, breathed, and bourréed. I gave them an entrance, and a stage, and then I sent them away."
Through all of the things that separate us, there is one universal experience that transcends all barriers: love.
Ulla-Maija Matikainen·
All ContentAutoethnographic EssaysAutoethnographic PoetryEducationFrom the EditorsVolume 3, Issue 2 (2023)
··4 min read A tsunami of words, images, learned and pushed feelings and thoughts go through us every day. Poetry is a way to find our own voice.
The poem driving this experimental film about television considers the insomniacs who wake at the same time each night in rhythm.