Wide and Deep (Poetry Thesis)

Abstract

Through discoveries like humor (which stabs a poem like acid does a piece of meat), new aesthetics of interest, and more challenging poetic forms, this project has confirmed that writing is my way to speak at full volume. I wanted to explain my thought process a bit, in hopes that it is helpful to you as a reader. In short, I plowed deep, and I pushed wide. Sometimes, every poem I write feels like my first. In my personal life I vehemently disdain the stickiness of the past, which can be embarrassing and uncool. But as a writer I’m too entrenched in the past, the dusty Tupperware of childhood and everything that macerates inside – discovery, hope, loss, dying love, what is love, filial piety, and the little images that are my symbols of those things. Horses and food, for example, real deep cuts. In the epigraph, the Pound and Courbet quotes suggest my philosophy, that the image is energetic magic, but I can also never describe something I don’t know. The images always flow. For my first few years at Duke that was the end of it: a page of image swimming in a blob of overwhelming emotion. With this thesis, I wanted to push into a longer form; I decided I liked it and would like to stay there. Longer poems indulge in their own cadence, allowing full excavation of emotion. Of course, my “long” pales in comparison to real long, which is where I’m walking towards, hopefully... “miles to go before I sleep”, à la the Frost poem. In my long poems, I’ve been able to dig further into themes of beauty and the body, using wonder, sensuality, and even horror to bind the two. I’ve tried to push wider too, which I hope is apparent in the progression of the works in this manuscript; I’ve tried to apply my favorite personal topics in a more universal way. In doing this, I looked to T.S. Eliot, Charles Wright, and Walt Whitman for advice to expand my scope. (America on the mind, and the past.) These poets also encouraged experimenting with tone and the shape words take on the page. I honed tools like landscape, musicality, slant rhymes, and casual onomatopoeia to do this. These helped separate my style, which leans abstract, into what I like to think of as theatrical scenes. In the spirit of pushing outwards, I was captivated by haiku and similar standalone, one-line forms like Yannis Ritsos’s Monochords. I found that palm-sized units inspired by the Japanese aesthetic, of nature and intricate subtleties, were helpful building blocks for longer forms. There’s the line, and then there’s the role of the line in a larger work. In a long work, there’s so much to find in the space in between concrete objects, so much that they morph into new scenes altogether. I’ve learned expansive poems can often keep absorbing, opening helpful creative channels to inspire or place new content.