The kindness of strangers.

Abstract

This thesis is a collection of poems and an introduction to my aesthetic. The introduction serves as both a description of my artistic process and a platform from which I acknowledge my antecedents. In the writing of these poems, I was aware of a tension between the narrative and the image. The entire work, then, has become a means of discovering which of these components dominates the work itself. Now that I have finished the poems, I am able to see that the narrative almost always takes precedence with regard to theme, but that the images contribute just as necessarily to narrative. Without the images, the narrative becomes descriptive prose broken into lines, but the image, around which the theme revolves, provides a locus for the poem and gives the reader something more concise and more concrete than narrative has to offer. In this way I have come to understand that neither image nor narrative takes precedence, but that both are essential to the type of poem I am interested in writing. I am satisfied with the balance that has been achieved. The actual form of the poems remains subordinate to both narrative and image, sometimes to the point of being arbitrary. In some cases, the lines are broken according to meter; in others, the shape of the stanza dictates form. The result is a poetry which does not banish the novice reader, nor, hopefully, bore the connoisseur.