This thesis is a creative and critical exploration of "radio poetry" -poems commissioned and produced for radio transmission, which utilise a verse-script, sound effects, music and other sonic materials as part of their poetic make-up. It argues that radio poetry has been overlooked in both literary criticism and radio studies, because of the ephemerality and ubiquity of its medium, and on account of the absence of a fully developed critical framework for its analysis. The thesis is intended to redress such a lack, and to outline the potential of radio poetry as a mode of sono-poetic expression different from other forms of radio output, including radio drama. The creative component is a thirty-seven minute radio poem entitled Captain Swing. This concerns the 1830 "Swing Riots," an agricultural uprising in southern England. The poem employs a multitude of voices and minutely detailed sound design to create a heightened soundscape of Nineteenth Century England in turmoil. The main critical component provides a definition of the radio poem, before detailing a history of this idiosyncratic literary mode at the BBC, a pioneering organisation in the production of English-language radio poetry. It also develops a heuristic method for the analysis of radio poems, using examples from a wide range of broadcasts by contemporary poets. The final part of the thesis is a self-reflective essay, which examines Captain Swing through the prism of the radio poem tradition.

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This Creative and Critical Writing thesis is both the documentation of a creative journey towards the composition of an epic poem and the inauguration of an original poetic methodology. Under the diverse influences of Joseph Beuys (1921-1986), Matthew Barney (b.l967), T. S. Eliot (1882-1965), and David Jones (1895-1974), and embracing the essential critical criteria for a Creative Writing project undertaken within Higher Education, it transforms the reflexive rationale into a coequally creative part of the artistic process. Aestheticising the ancient religious tradition of apophatic theology, and deploying a hermetic correspondence with Big Bang cosmology, the concept of what an epic poem can be is radically reconsidered, creating through the hermeneutic exchange between poetic and critical voices what is here termed a conceptual, or disembodied. poetics. Whilst the epic remains very much a work in progress, the original contribution to creative knowledge made by this thesis is fourfold. Firstly, it is the documentation of a creative journey, tracing the development of a unique creative perspective and the maturation of a creative voice; secondly, it re-imagines what an epic poem can be, moving beyond the purely textual into a negative-conceptual space; thirdly, it translates the religious import of apophatic theology into creative form; and fourthly, it demonstrates how the conventions of Creative Writing within Higher Education can be transformed from a reactive requirement into a coequally creative part of the art.

My critical study argues that a majority of traditional ‘nature’ poetry has not formed a language able to confront the acute problems of our current environmental moment. I suggest that what is needed within poetry is a kind of ‘ecological’ writing, writing that is not only about ecological subjects, but is in itself ecological: open to the pattern of relations existent between the human and the nonhuman. In my critical study I look at Adorno’s theories about the nonidentity of the nonhuman — the difference that human thought has suppressed in its attempt to achieve a unified and coherent identity — and how this nonidentity might paradoxically be revealed by the human foregrounding their inability to access it fully. Adorno argues that such nonidentical difference may be crucial in unpicking identificatory thinking practices, challenging the rigidity of reified human thought. I examine, through close reading, how Stevens’ poetry enacts the kind of paradox Adorno describes, moving between the intense desire to understand nonhuman life, and the awareness that nonhuman difference can never fully appear within human consciousness or language. The thesis argues for radical nonhuman difference as something able to emerge from the processes of flexible and resistive poetic language; a form perfectly suited to gesturing towards, though never fully containing, nonhuman difference, agency and being. In my critical study poetry demonstrates its ability to become ecological; offering up new cognitive possibilities the challenge the supposed coherence and rigidity of human identity and thought. WITCH, the creative portion of this thesis, explores difference as it appears for ‘female’ and differently gendered persons. The poems in WITCH use the transformative potential of magic, witchcraft and the occult to question what a feminist poetic language might look like; gesturing towards gendered difference and oppression, without containing or commodifying it. This collection re-connects poetry to its origin in spell making and ritual, exploring contemporary ideas of alterity, knowledge and power.

This thesis investigates exchanges between poetry and criticism through the work of contemporary writers who seek to interrogate the boundaries between these discourses. Rather than conventional poetics or manifestos these poets are producing poetry that actively explores the tenets of their critical thinking, using hybrid forms to challenge perceived boundaries between practice and theory, art and criticism. In rethinking the nature and function of poetry while challenging critical conventions, this work has implications for both modes of writing. Itself a hybrid of poetry and theory, a fusion of critical and creative writing, the thesis enacts a performative investigation of this scene of writing.

This study is an investigation into the relationship between attitudes, beliefs and practices in relation to poetry and the study of poetry. Its participants consisted of teachers and students at a post-secondary institution in Malta as well as the chief examiner responsible for the Matriculation Certificate Advanced level English syllabus and examination. The study’s application of a mixed methods approach entailed the use of a number of research methods and instruments, including a questionnaire, classroom observation, and semi-structured and focus group interviews. These interviews employed the use of poetry as stimulus material. This research design was deployed as a means of developing an understanding of the participants’ attitudes and beliefs in relation to poetry and its pedagogy, as well as a way of examining their practices in the poetry classroom and their approach to poetry outside the school environment. This study shows that the interplay between attitudes, beliefs and practices is fundamental. Given that such research is to a large extent missing from the literature on poetry education, this study’s main contribution to advancing knowledge in the field is the light it throws on the importance of the relationship between attitudes and beliefs on the one hand and practices on the other. Rather than restricting itself to exploring the influence of examinations on poetry pedagogy, as is the case with much previous research, this study clarifies the importance of shared attitudes and beliefs in determining the way teachers and students approach poetry. It demonstrates how fundamental it is for them and other stakeholders to develop an awareness of the effect of attitudes and beliefs in relation to poetry and poetry pedagogy. Its findings lead to a better understanding of the complexity of the events that occur in the poetry classroom and beyond, events that are engaged in by teachers and students both consciously and not.

Since the advent of capture technologies poets have advanced, through their experimental practice, an expanded understanding of what constitutes a text to incorporate not only its content, but also its construction. Reframed by morphological and mechanical perspectives, our changing relationship with sound and image was constituent to a cumulative process of artistic abstraction that would, in time, come to define modernity. By highlighting the importance of technologies such as telegraphy and electricity in the conception of poetry as a connecting force, of photography and cinema in the recalibration of our perceptions of subject and object, and of gramophony, radio, television and computing technologies as key agents in a process of naturalization regarding the relationship between poetry and its audience, this thesis will attempt to illustrate the progression of technology-led abstraction in oral, written and music based poetries from the beginning of the industrial age to the present day. Our relationship with the communication technologies we invent has become increasingly interwoven with the epistemological structures such mechanisms advance. This thesis will propose that as a consequence, the ways we organise and remediate texts, sounds and images into new, creative contexts that utilize the mass communication technologies and distribution networks of our modern experience positions electronic music, rap, digital memes and other interdisciplinary modes of digital expression as significant poetic forms. Our day-to-day engagement with diverse media allows us to reconfigure all our manifestations of self and any examination of mass media's impact on poetic expression must likewise constitute a reading of both literary and popular materials. To this end, this thesis will consider the progressive technologization of our engagement with oral, written and music-based poetries that media technologies facilitate within the context of the praxis of prominent poets, their literary theories and those of the literary movements they endorsed.

This PhD by publication focuses on over fifteen years of my cultural production, including poetry, translation, critical essays, and work produced in the context of the visual arts. Ranging from my earliest published work in mor (1997) to my most recent writing projects such as pulllllllllllllllllllllllll: Poesia Contemporânea do Canadá (2010) and the “:”s, published in Open Letter (2012). I have consistently produced work in dialogue with the international context of linguistically innovative writing. The fourteen texts collected here provide clear examples of my approach to practice-led research. Accompanying this portfolio, I have produced a critical essay which reflects on the work. This essay employs a modular rather than a standard hypotactic structure to trace the influences on and the connections among the disparate group of texts which make up my portfolio. A crucial element in my work is the notion—expressed by various proponents of Language Writing and other key influences—that literary production and reception are political as well as aesthetic activities. The critical essay thus contextualizes my work in relation to the politicized experimentalism of North American and European poetics, and clarifies how my writing has consistently challenged the social authority of standard