Academic literature on the topic 'The Most Original Poetry'

Thrust into a world of poetry, I’ve grown to embrace the poetic lens. Each topos, each trope, each rhyme, each cliché, each morning morning’s minion, each reduction to a state of almost savage torpor, each nightingale, each ode to an obscure, inanimate object, and every single Stella of the skies holds special significance hidden to the naked eye. Not insamuch as something undiscoverable upon ponderance. Rather, a way to contemplate the physical. The Ah, Sunflower! reaction. That is not to say that poets have a supernatural eyesight to certain beautiful images. My eyes do not see any more dandelion puffs whirl-winding in the sky than others.’ Take the image a step further. The puff of dandelion seeds becomes a floating scoop of ice cream. Dripping sweet nutrients to the field, fostering the growth of new dandelions. So, now we have the permission to kick the field of dandelions and birth more scoops. These words come after my project as they are a reflection of my poetry. There is a step after expressing one’s thoughts into a poem. That is to say, it is important to re-read your poetry once your mind has settled. You can begin to reflect more objectively on your actions that put you into the poetic mindset. In the following pages, I have organized a few stories with deeper philosophical insight than my poems. Like my poems, they are about loss, love, life. But they contain moments of meditation and reflection. Moments in which I engage the reader with what is swimming around my head now that I’ve tried to understand the situation more objectively. But does reflection bring us closer to objectivity? It is common to believe that memory alters and bends the truth. By expressing my emotions ‘in the moment,’ I am lying. My written emotions are more driven by how I’m feeling with the pen in my hand than how I felt before I jumped off a wall and broke my ankle. Yet, this prose sort of writing provides us with a different effect than poetry. Much of my poetry has been a series of images or emotions. Very little self-reflection on cause-and-effect or position in society is explicit. For the most part, I urge the reader to find my thoughts afterwards within my diction, syntax, or rhythm. During this prose section, I will outright express my emotions as they are. Rather than convoluting a failed relationship and describing it as a metaphorical moat, I will say that I feel as if there is a boundary between us now. I will address how frantically I behave when I see her in my peripherals, just dying to get her attention. I will conclude with the reflection that I only set myself up for more disappointment by expecting any kind of positive reaction. The result of these ‘after words’ is more insight on the reader’s end, hopefully. When writing poetry I try to apply sensory images that put the reader in the present moment I am trying to convey. My goal is to give the reader a first-hand view at the experience. My prose attempt to provide the reader with insight to a more reflective mode of expression. While my poems create a comprehensive view on the inner workings of my mind, I expect that this additional prose section will bring the project full circle.

Magister Artium - MA<br>My creative writing full master’s thesis, entitled Townships, Shacks and Suburbs, is a collection of poems that explores the role played by place in shaping identity. Poems in this collection seek to examine the interplay between identity and place, particularly the influence that environmental settings or contexts have in shaping how individuals define who they are. The theme of place is divided into three environmental contexts, namely the township, the rural context and the urban context. The poet navigates between these three environmental contexts, observing how each influences the way people define who they are and also how they identify with that particular environmental context. This definition of self, which forms part of identity, encompasses the day-to-day life, emotions, struggles, memories and a variety of other aspects that are linked to place and are inherent in identity-formation. The observation of how identity is shaped by place includes the poet and extends to people around him. This collection of poems can be viewed as a man’s attempt at finding out who he is, by exploring the history of his life, as well as reflecting on the intricacies of growing up or being exposed to a variety of environmental settings. It can also be viewed as an attempt at learning who people around him are and how their identities are shaped by the place(s) they live in.

Landscape reflects and informs the history which shapes it, the society of which it forms a part, and the culture and identity of its inhabitants. An introduction provides a brief survey of contemporary pastoral poetry, identifying two main strands, the Romantic and the social-pastoral traditions. Further chapters discuss the relations between landscape, society, history and identity in the work of Sean O'Brien, Peter Didsbury and Michael Hofmann. Sean O'Brien's poetry depicts 'marginal' post-industrial locations both as the subjects of historical forces and as idyllic; interrogates received English idylls; and substitutes localised idylls based in childhood experiences. Peter Didsbury draws on similar landscapes and a similar sensibility, but shows a more oblique engagement with history and poetic tradition; his treatment of landscape and local identity is also notable for its religious and rhetorical elements; and his creation of pastoral idylls is located resolutely in the contemporary here-and-now. The tenor of Michael Hofmann's work is different: his landscapes are typically dystopian; rather than drawing on a local identity determined by landscape, childhood experience or local culture, his work shows a gap between the idylls and narratives of European high culture and the contemporary world as experienced locally; and his use of temporary homes as locations reflects his style's restless performance of temporary identity. The thesis is accompanied by a creative project consisting of two elements: a collection of shorter poems and an extended sequence. The former develops such themes as the identification of self and culture with a landscape, the religious treatment of place and provincial culture, and the outsider figure as an analogue of the marginal landscape; and such formal features as the Horatian ode, apostrophe, prosaic and metered lineation, and the collision of high rhetoric with prosaic contemporary subject matter. The latter develops various features of the pastoral through the narrative context of an inmate of a lunatic asylum in early twentieth-century Central Europe, drawing on the formal materials of outsider art as well as the content of the thesis.