Browsing by Author "Moores, Margaret Ruth"

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    Loading the image : a critical and creative thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Creative Writing, Massey University, Manawatū, New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2016) Moores, Margaret Ruth
    This Master of Creative Writing research project consists of a collection of lyric and prose poems, Sea Glass, and an accompanying exegesis, “Loading the Image.” These works were written to explore the creative and critical opportunities inherent in a photograph album. Both exegesis and poetry collection reflect my research into the ways in which the contents, form and meaning of a personal, family photograph album could be represented in a series of auto/biographical and ekphrastic poems. Specifically, I asked how an emotional response to certain kinds of photographs could be reflected in poetry and how a sequence of such poems could be ordered in a collection so that the experience of reading the poems resembles the experience of viewing an album. The poetry collection accounts for 70% of the thesis and the exegesis for 30%. The exegesis investigates photographs and albums within two contexts which are in turn reflected in the collection in individual poems and in the sequencing of the whole. The first context is concerned with the concepts of punctum, studium and that-has-been described by Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida. These concepts, and my reading of other theorists interested in the relationship of the photograph to its subject and how this relationship is perceived by a viewer, suggested analogies between photographs and lyric poetry. Parallels between the experience of looking at a photograph and reading or writing a poem about a photograph are explored in the exegesis most specifically through an analysis of Ted Hughes’ poem “Six Young Men” and, in the creative component, through the lyric and ekphrastic poems I wrote for inclusion in Sea Glass. The second context is concerned with photographs and photograph albums as instruments of social history. Here, critical writing from authors Annette Kuhn and Martha Langford on how albums and their contents provide connections with the past through memory-making offers insights into the use of photographs for life writing. These insights are explored in the exegesis in reference to selected poems from Lyn Hejinian and Kerry Hines and in Sea Glass though auto/biographical poetry and in the sequencing of the collection. My research into theoretical responses to photographs and albums inspired me to develop a creative project for which I wrote a series of poems to represent individual photographs and the experience of viewing them in the context of my family album. These poems include ekphrasis of the photographs as well as prose and found poems which are meditations or commentary by a speaker who represents a present-day viewer of the photographs. My reading of Barthes, and in particular his insights into how a photograph might evoke an emotional response from a viewer, encouraged me to consider how ekphrasis of a photograph could itself evoke such a response. The collection is structured so that it reflects the way in which the implied author of the poems comes to understand the contents of the album. Here, Langford’s discussion of the role of a domestic photograph album in the recitation of family stories suggested how Sea Glass could be sequenced to tell the family story contained within the poems. By drawing on these contexts I aimed to replicate the visual story-telling capabilities of an album in a poetry collection where poems represent the photographs.
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    Miniatures of reality : an inter-photo-textual investigation of ekphrasis of photographs : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Creative Writing at Massey University, Manawatū, New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2021) Moores, Margaret Ruth
    This creative thesis comprises a critical study of contemporary ekphrastic poems about photographs and a manuscript of original ekphrastic prose poems that focus on photography or are inspired by photographic technique. The balance of the thesis, approximately 60/40 in favour of the critical study, reflects how the creative manuscript was informed by my investigation of critical theories of ekphrasis and photography. Ekphrasis, commonly defined after James Heffernan as “the verbal representation of visual representation” (3), is a relationship traditionally cast as a struggle for dominance between image and word. However, this thesis is inspired by contemporary poet Cole Swensen’s challenge to this perspective in her essay “To Writewithize” (2011), in which she expands the term to cover works in which the encounter between poet and artwork is of “fellow travelers sharing a context” (70). In this mode of ekphrasis, art is no longer sequestered in a museum or gallery but has become an element of the poet’s world, providing them with “a model for formal construction” (71) for their work. In the critical portion of this thesis I argue that the visual turn of the twentieth century, and the invention of photography in particular, has contributed to developments in ekphrasis that Swensen identifies. Specifically, I argue that the context sharing that Swensen describes is particularly productive in prose poem ekphrasis of photographs, an intersection characterized by aesthetic and theoretical synergies. A sequence of lyric ekphrasis by Carol Snow, whom Swensen identifies as a “writewithist” poet, provides an introductory case study for my research, and provides a lens through which I consider Natasha Trethewey’s lyric ekphrasis of photographs in Bellocq’s Ophelia and a further sequence from Snow. These case studies provide a reference point for my exploration of the aesthetic intersection of prose poetry and photography via close readings of prose poetry ekphrasis in Mary Jo Bang’s A Doll for Throwing and prose poem selections from Kathleen Fraser’s Discrete Categories Forced into Coupling. The creative component, Miniatures of Reality, is a collection of prose poems that presents the life experiences of an implied speaker via ekphrasis of photographs. In writing these poems, I set out to creatively explore the questions raised in my critical component by producing “writewithist” ekphrasis in which the poems demonstrate aspects of the aesthetics and theory of photography in both form and emotional content. The poems, largely presented in linked sequences, consider aspects of the speaker’s life story as memories transformed by a “camera vision” which shapes the way these experiences are recounted. An underlying subtext to all the sequences is the notion of “hidden motherhood” inspired by Victorian “Hidden Mother” photographs. Notions of hidden motherhood occur throughout, e.g. in poems about the speaker’s grandmother who died when the speaker’s mother was a child or in poems suggesting the speaker’s ambivalence about motherhood and mothering. A further creative imperative is represented by my use of the prose poem as a form to represent what Fraser describes as the “the average female’s habituated availability to interruption” (Fraser, “Hogue Interview” 9). This notion of gendered experience contributes to both the internal structure of the poems and to the structure of the collection as a whole as the speaker revisits events from her life through the medium of photography and often retells them from differing perspectives.