Tafoya, Gus

English

University of New Mexico

 
Research Statement 
Gus Tafoya 
The Index of the Quotidian: Folk Music and Language Poetry 
2/10/20 
 
 
My research process was complicated and oddly overwhelming. When I began discussing 
my initial ideas with my instructor Kalila Bohsali, I was completely lost as to ​what exactly ​I 
wanted to study. All I knew is that while reading the Language poets I felt they had an inherent 
“folk” quality to their form and lyrics. It was an odd intuition but one that sparked the interest of 
my instructor and was thus decided as the basis of my paper. My research was then a product of 
meticulously scanning all sorts of documents from those that were technical and abstract to those 
objective and opinionated. I soon realized however that merely researching the two groups 
objectively was not culminating in any clear connection, only making it blurrier. To counteract 
this dead end I took a step back. What was I seeing in the articles and what wasn't I seeing? What 
I realized was that the articles were painting a clear picture of the separate ​products ​of Folk 
music and Language poetry but not the ​processes. ​And that’s the key piece I wasn't seeing. It 
was only by recognizing that I already understood their objective differences that allowed me to 
pivot and begin analyzing the similarities between the creative labour specifically. So instead of 
searching for the effects of both groups' art, I began searching for information concerning the 
technical aspects of the respective mediums. This included exploring folk ownership, poetic 
politics, and statistics. This ultimately allowed me to better understand their cultural legacies and 
in turn, construct my own view of the two’s relationship. Which (at least according to the UNM 
databases) had not yet existed.  
Because of the reasons stated above, my research process was compiled with tedious 
heartbreak. Folk Music had a plethora of varying types of information while Language poetry 
had the exact opposite. I also lacked the familiarity and experience of conducting high intensity 
research in a collegiate setting and had never before used the Library system in person or online. 
I originally requested ten articles and patiently waited a week to receive them only to have them 
all declined. This was frustrating to say the least. I visited the help desk on the first floor of 
Zimmerman and was politely told I had used the wrong e-form and could have the actual articles 
within a day. But it was only after communicating with an actual person when I began to 
understand the in’s and out’s of the website and the purposes of the different services. Despite 
being glad to have resolved the issue, the week-long setback caused the rest of my research to 
take on a frantic pace. The only reason I was able to handle reading so many articles was 
implementing the knowledge of “reverse outlining” the article. A technique taught to me by 
Kalila Bohsali as a way to analyze the credibility, quality, and usefulness of a paper. This 
strategy is particularly useful for literary analysis, where arguments can often be overwrought, 
pretentious, and otherwise inaccessible.  
 
The Library’s most important contribution to my research process was the MLA 
International Bibliography. Every single work I cited in my final paper was located within the 
database, mostly due to the works being extensively peer reviewed and more complex than any 
previous source. In addition to this, I wrote the majority of my paper in the Fine Arts Library 
which provided me with a quiet and productive atmosphere. And despite beginning my collegiate 
research career on an off note with the eradication of my requests, I feel strongly in debt to the 
MLA database in particular. No other search engine, catalog or bibliography provided the same 
amount of resources for such niche topics and I never could have found the correct information 
without it. With that in mind, it made me reconsider how much one should rely on a single 
source of information and how much scrutiny should actually be applied to every argument . I 
abandoned nearly half of the materials I requested due to finding the research and overall 
argument unsatisfactory. Before being exposed to such an extensive database I often found I 
would attempt to use as many sources as I could to support my claim, rather than only use what I 
deem academically appropriate.  
 


The Index of the Quotidian: Folk Music and Language Poetry

https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?filename=0&article=1008&context=ugresearchaward_2020&type=additional

The Index of the Quotidian: Folk Music and Language Poetry

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