Poetry and Prose: Telling the Stories of Formerly Homeless Mentally Ill People

Abstract

This article discusses some of the possible advantages of a poetic representation of social experience through a selection of four poems based on the words and organized by the salience and time sequence “logic” of participants in a study of formerly homeless mentally ill men and women who are currently housed. The initial report was a qualitative evaluation of the perceptions of this sample of formerly homeless mentally ill people of the benefits of the housing currently provided. It offers a categorical analysis of personal, relationship, and resource issues across childhood, adulthood, and since supported/supportive housing. The present analysis, based on the same interviews, destabilizes the original findings and offers a different window into the lives of the study participants. It does this through prose poems that replicate the language, the central issues of the participants, and their braided logic-in-use among other things.