Before setting out a sketch of what poetic research may be this paper describes briefly two polar philosophical attitudes to research- one that grounds in methodological rigour and the other that is in the main anti-methodological. The paper then sets aside the notion of these polar attitudes to consider two impulses in work (research/practice)- the centripetal and the centrifugal (drawing on Bakhtin) and sets out the poetic as a co-efficient that conditions the relationship between the two. A metaphorical image, the Reservoir, is then introduced that allows one to map these forces and organise a (re)search in which the active imagination is foregrounded. The reservoir may be used at various points of a programme of creative practice and for different ends- to generate, to build and to analyse.