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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.
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    Asserting and locating value in contemporary elliptical-style poetry : 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) Aitchison, Johanna
    This thesis has both critical and creative components. The critical study examines the strategies that contemporary poets—which I am characterising as elliptical-style for their interests in postmodernist gestures and traditional affective responses—use to write about subjects that are difficult due to individual or collective trauma. It is based on close readings of the poetry of U.S. writers Terrance Hayes, Solmaz Sharif, and Dora Malech. The study analyses how the poets use found terms, erasure, anagram, and persona speakers, including alter egos, to assert and locate value in poetry that can at times be elusive or elliptical. Such poetry is characterised by evasive speakers, associative logic, and gamesmanship. Found poetry uses pre-existing material in poems, erasure selectively deletes text, while anagram remixes existing words to make new lines. Persona speakers are narrators of poems who are identified as distinct from the implied poet. This study examines Hayes’ use of alter egos in his 2010 volume of poetry Lighthead to examine issues of race, Sharif’s use of persona speakers and found poetry techniques to critique American imperialism in her 2016 collection Look, and Malech’s application of anagram in her 2018 volume Stet to write on confessional topics. I argue that these poets assert value by using persona speakers, found techniques, associative strategies, and juxtaposition of unlikely discourses, to thematic effect, while simultaneously distancing the reader from the poem by creating narrative, thematic, or grammatical gaps in the poems. The relationship between reader and poet in these elliptical-style poems is that of co-creators of meaning, as the reader must import outside information to fill in the spaces. I argue that elliptical-style poets assert and locate value in their poems by providing a co-creative experience for the reader, using techniques that are carefully chosen to both contribute to the themes of each poem, while also resisting closure and fixity, thus requiring an active reader-poem relationship that is experiential rather than linear. The creative portion of this thesis is a manuscript of original poetry. It uses found terms, erasure, and persona speakers to engage with material concerning Covid-19, the Christchurch massacre, travels in the U.S, and reflections on writing and depression. The pandemic section reimagines and reframes the civil emergency discourse of the lockdown to suggest an alternative, imaginative response for the poem’s speakers. Other sections use techniques to create elusive, dynamic lyric wholes, in which the reader is asked to contribute to the poems’ themes and narrative.
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    The lyric "I" and the anti-confessionalism of Frederick Seidel : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English at Massey University, Manawatū, New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2019) Upperton, Tomothy Lawrence
    This thesis investigates the anti-Confessionalist status of the lyric “I” in the poetry of Frederick Seidel and in a collection of my own poems. Seidel’s use of autobiographical details, including his own name, in his poems has been treated by critics as an invitation to identify the lyric “I” with the poet himself. His poetry has been discussed by both his admirers and his detractors in a Confessional context. To his admirers, Seidel extends the Confessional poetry tradition in exciting ways, breaking new taboos as he incorporates details from his glamorous, privileged lifestyle into his poems. To his detractors, he is a retrograde reactionary, stale and derivative. I argue that although Seidel uses Confessional strategies, and owes obvious debts to Confessional poets, his poetry is fundamentally outward rather than inward looking; it is a poetry of cultural critique, and not of personal revelation. This outward looking focus also distinguishes Seidel’s poetry from various post-avant poetics that, in their own sophisticated ways, are as concerned with the subjective, lyric “I” as Confessional poetry is. I argue that in Frederick Seidel’s poetry, the lyric “I” is of interest insofar as it provides a means of cultural critique—a way of interrogating the complicity of the individual in its engagement with capitalism in its various aspects. In the poems that comprise the creative component of my thesis, the influence of Seidel is evident in their tone, their outward focus, and their limited interest in the lyric “I.” I have attempted in these poems to get beyond the absorption with the self that I perceive to be a besetting quality in much contemporary mainstream poetry. The various post-avant poetics explored in my research seem in their own ways deeply invested in the lyric “I.” Seidel’s poems offered other possibilities, other ways of representing the subject in the world, and of critiquing that world, that I could use in my own poems.
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    How to draw a self-portrait of Wallace Stevens : how Terrance Hayes uses the figure to confront anxiety and The Museum of Masculine Beauty : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Master of Creative Writing in Poetry at Massey University, Manawatu, New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2018) Ingram, Callum Ronald
    This thesis consists of my research into the poetry of Terrance Hayes and poetic manuscript based on my research. In my research “How to Draw a Self-Portrait of Wallace Stevens: How Terrance Hayes Uses the Figure to Confront Anxiety” I argue that Hayes uses the figure in his work as a means of representing, confronting and overcoming his speaker’s anxiety of identity. By analysing the Hayes poems “SHAFRO”, “FOR ROBERT HAYDEN” and “SNOW FOR WALLACE STEVENS” I will show the role of speaker possessor of African, broader American and poetic identities in depicting and confronting anxiety, the role of racial issues in inciting anxiety, and how the figure – a presence in the poem based on an historic, cultural or pop-cultural figure – has been developed from a representation of a particular type of identity to a confrontation of identity anxiety. In my poetic manuscript At the Museum of Masculine Beauty I use the conclusions drawn from my research into Hayes’ use of figure and anxiety and attempt to apply them to my own poetry concerning masculine identity.
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    The graffiti artist : doing the work of the lyric through juxtaposition of disparate social discourse : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for Master of Creative Writing, Massey University, Manawatu, New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2016) Ingram, Gail
    One way the lyric has developed over the last century is to accommodate non-poetic social discourses, e.g. languages of prose, genre, profession and cultural groups into the lyric tradition. This thesis investigates the use of discourse to perform the work of lyric. It does so in two parts: in a critical essay and through my own creative work, a manuscript of original poetry that is meant to account for 60 percent of my thesis. The critical component analyses four contemporary poems that do the work of the lyric through this accommodation of social discourse: “A History” by Glenn Colquhoun, “Mountains” by Sarah Jane Barnett, “Torch Song” by Laura Mullen and “Gesamtkunstwerk” by Lisa Samuels. It examines, in particular, these poets’ use of juxtaposition of disparate social discourse as an organising technique that illustrates the process of perception that is integral to lyric tradition. The intensity of the juxtaposition of social discourse increases with each of these poems, challenging some of the more traditional characteristics of what it means to be lyric, such as whether the lyric is “uttered by a single speaker” or “expresses subjective feeling”. But if these poems increasingly seem to fall outside the traditional lyric, this study argues that they in fact do the work of the lyric by treating the disparate discourse as both a representation and product of an increasingly globalised and fractured world. At the same time, the opportunities the poet provides to make links across the contrasting discourses allow the reader to construct an enunciative posture that provides a lens onto the “ache” of living in such a world, and thus recover the subjective experience associated with the lyric. This critical study investigates questions that are also of interest in the creative portion: how to use multiple strands of social discourse in poetry in an effective and relevant way, and how to organise a disparate set of poems into a collective whole. The essay, therefore, informed the creative component of this thesis, a collection of poetry entitled “The Graffiti Artist”. This collection offers juxtapositions of disparate discourses as well as narrative snapshots, each snapshot nevertheless intersecting with and connected to the life of the protagonist, a mother who turns during a time of crisis – personal crises with her children and social crisis in the aftermath of the Christchurch earthquakes – to graffiti art. A narrative in fragments, the poems juxtapose strands of story and types of discourse she encounters in her different roles as graffiti artist, mother and wife. Such discourses include, for example, scientific discourse associated with her scientist son, the medical discourse of mental illness, the discourse of advertising, and the discourse of the earthquake-damaged city she inhabits. By using these techniques to extend defamiliarisation, I aimed to reveal a troubled world through the lens of a graffiti-artist speaker so a reader might see her experience from within, thus effecting a change in perception, and doing the work of the lyric.