Abstract :
The poetry that is presented here is drawn from an action research project with street youths in New Orleans in the late 1990s. Poetry played an important part in both information collection and in representation of information during this research. For instance, I constructed poetry from recordings and transcripts of my conversations with street youths and then staged performances of the poems, like the one above, on Bourbon Street for a varied audience of street youths, tourists, business people - anyone who was interested to stop and listen. In these performance poems, I described the lives of homeless street youths and posed questions to research participants about their lifestyles, political beliefs, and attitudes toward life, school, and work. The performances generated continuing dialogues with the youths who were featured in the poems, and they opened up new dialogues about homelessness and street life with tourists, business people, and other observers. What developed was a cyclic process of dialogue, poetic responses to dialogic performance, and dialogue.
