Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Identifier

6513

Date

2019

Document Type

Thesis (Access Restricted)

Degree Name

Master of Fine Arts

Major

Creative Writing

Concentration

Creative Writing

Committee Chair

Marcus Wicker

Committee Member

Cary Holladay

Committee Member

Stephen Tabachnick

Abstract

Wandering the Silence is a collection of poetry that strives to encapsulate the normalities and refutations of the poetic experience, to subvert the rules of craft and expectation while simultaneously providing a masterful level of craft within itself. Variation of form, diction, structural/visual appearance, and quality experimentation are present to reinforce the subject matter of mental health and an individual speaker’s changing thoughts; the ars poetica also serves as a connector between the natures of reality and fantasy promoted by the poems. This collection is meant to reveal alternatives to the conventional thoughts on poetry, how maybe we lose something by trying to define it. The collection also focuses on the idea of the mind itself, how best to convey the emotions and realities of those with mental illnesses such as depression, anxiety, and various forms of psychosis, among others. The suspension of the outside world and the ability of the mind to corrupt its own workings is one of many major similarities between artists/poets and those with trauma and other catalysts of mental illnesses. This work seeks to represent many of those voices who cannot, either through mental struggles or existential circumstances, speak out for themselves. Just as poetry suggests, there is not one reality but there are many that we create within ourselves.

Comments

Data is provided by the student.

Library Comment

Dissertation or thesis originally submitted to the local University of Memphis Electronic Theses & dissertation (ETD) Repository.

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