The thesis begins with an introductory chapter that explains the creative process, providing quotes from well-known poets and examples from my own personal history and ideas. Some of the creative concepts discussed are different manifestations of inspiration, such as the duende and the Muses. However, the act of creating a work of art--what actually occurs when an artist works--remains undiscovered. Every poet is part of the poetic tradition, yet she also strives to supersede that very tradition. In my poetry, I try to build on and deviate from the poetic tradition, while simultaneously representing events from my cultural and personal history. Twenty-nine poems follow the introduction. The poems included in this volume represent a contemporary writing style influenced by Romanticism and Modernism, apparent in nature imagery and ambiguity.

In this study, Kenneth Burke's methods of dramatistic analysis is applied to the selected poetry of Nikki Giovanni, a Black contemporary female poet. The procedure, analysis of poetry for symbolic action, is a functional approach which focuses on the poetic language, Agency. The thesis, divided into four chapters, concentrates on discovery of the Purpose, a Black female motive, for the Act, Giovanni's poetry, in the Scene, contemporary Black America.

My final thesis exhibition, Effluvia and Aporia, explores impermanence, loss and uncertainty. I use materials and images in a poetic way, where there is a link between what the work is and what it means. I use looped videos with images of water, light, and dissolving clay to invite a meditative state. I also use materials like tissue paper, paper-mache, and paper thin porcelain tiles to invite fragility and complexity into the viewer's experience. I am concerned with creating an interactive environment that allows for a multiplicity of responses and interpretations from each viewer depending on their unique perceptions. I am interested in impermanence, loss and uncertainty as themes because I find that they are ever present in life. My intention is to explore these ideas and create an experience that allows for the viewer to reflect on them as well.

What I Meant to Say about Love is an ever-differing interstitial text which has left open spaces for artists, researchers, and teachers, called a/r/tographers, to contest the curriculum and pedagogy of reduction and pragmatic means-ends orientations that monopolize schools. This text wanders, meanders, and digresses to places where, through poetic inquiry, the notion that there is no pedagogy without love can be explored. In a broad understanding of midrash, as it is performed poetically, three years of an English teacher's life are recorded fictionally. James, the main character, discovers that love is a physically potent force that structures and deconstructs, just as it connects and disconnects. His story considers how the professional emphasis in education compartmentalizes and separates the inner life from the outer life. In love with life, with learning, and with others, the James of this story writes poetry to acknowledge love's power, and to restore its credibility in the classroom—that the lovers' discourse might be trusted again. This un/authorized autobiography ruptures the predictable stories of what it means to be a successful teacher by considering one teacher's journey as a limit case, examining phenomenologically how he connects his life of love and poetry to his classroom practice and how his students respond to his poetically charged way of being. My hope is that it might be possible to offer here, in this place, one poet's understanding and celebration of difference in the world. Recognizing the relationship between what is original and what is shifting, I hope to keep complexity and diversity alive, to resist answers, to continue to converse and traverse and transgress. Thus, with careful attention to poetry as a way of knowing and unknowing, and by attending to the paradox, humour, and irony in one poet's lived experiences, both public professings and inner confessings, as they are understood in relations of difference, or as they are understood in relations of decomposition and fertility, it is possible to consider how powerful emotive experiences, oftentimes relegated to the personal and therefore insignificant, can and do have profound transformational effects on praxis.

No description available.

No description available.

What I Meant to Say about Love is an ever-differing interstitial text which has left open spaces for artists, researchers, and teachers, called a/r/tographers, to contest the curriculum and pedagogy of reduction and pragmatic means-ends orientations that monopolize schools. This text wanders, meanders, and digresses to places where, through poetic inquiry, the notion that there is no pedagogy without love can be explored. In a broad understanding of midrash, as it is performed poetically, three years of an English teacher's life are recorded fictionally. James, the main character, discovers that love is a physically potent force that structures and deconstructs, just as it connects and disconnects. His story considers how the professional emphasis in education compartmentalizes and separates the inner life from the outer life. In love with life, with learning, and with others, the James of this story writes poetry to acknowledge love's power, and to restore its credibility in the classroom—that the lovers' discourse might be trusted again. This un/authorized autobiography ruptures the predictable stories of what it means to be a successful teacher by considering one teacher's journey as a limit case, examining phenomenologically how he connects his life of love and poetry to his classroom practice and how his students respond to his poetically charged way of being. My hope is that it might be possible to offer here, in this place, one poet's understanding and celebration of difference in the world. Recognizing the relationship between what is original and what is shifting, I hope to keep complexity and diversity alive, to resist answers, to continue to converse and traverse and transgress. Thus, with careful attention to poetry as a way of knowing and unknowing, and by attending to the paradox, humour, and irony in one poet's lived experiences, both public professings and inner confessings, as they are understood in relations of difference, or as they are understood in relations of decomposition and fertility, it is possible to consider how powerful emotive experiences, oftentimes relegated to the personal and therefore insignificant, can and do have profound transformational effects on praxis.

No description available.

Poetic dwelling, both as the perception of and engagement with the environment, has predominantly been lost in contemporary society. As a result, the earth had become an ‘inexhaustible inventory’ in the eyes of the dweller, resulting in a culture that merely consumes without giving anything of itself. In response to a Regenerative approach to the making of architecture, the dissertation combines the theories of Robert. P. Harrison and Martin Heidegger, in that poetic dwelling finds its extension in the form of building, and its fulfillment in the garden. The design aims to facilitate the healing of both people and environment on a site scarred by the consumer model of modern industry, and does so on a derelict brick quarry site in Monument Park, Pretoria. / Dissertation MArch(Prof)--University of Pretoria, 2014. / Architecture / Unrestricted

This study aims to define design poetics as a category of design practice set apart from commercial, industrial or market-led design that generates a collection of experimental artefacts which investigate the everyday life of contemporary culture. It is argued that in creating an active interplay between users (human agents) and objects, poetic design involves a different kind of production (which is not about improving the functionality of a product) and alternative forms of "consumption" (which is not about a 'using up' of objects), by developing new practices of living with things. As such it is suggested that design poetics depends on the production developed by consumers as a creative users (postproducers), within unconventional experiential and social scenarios of living. In changing the bilateral relationship object-user poetic design develops objects from the point of view of the user - its activities and models of operation - and this aspect is related to an emotional and experiential evaluation. Thus the study proposes a re-evaluation of objects and users through experiential, narrative and performative criteria in order to understand their various roles and functions. In proposing these particular points of evaluation, poetic objects are distinguished as a particular category of objects together with the practices they engender or support; and within a network of relationships and contexts, as specific sites of interaction.1 In this light, it is shown that poetic design proposes a class of objects that respond to needs beyond the objects' instrumental (functional, practical) power; but to their contribution to life experience, embodying a variety of processes and manifestations. They translate immaterial interactions and make these interrelations visible.