'Writing The See-Through Man: Poetry and Commentary' is a Creative Writing thesis in two parts. The first part is a collection of poems called The See-Through Man, written specifically for this project. It comprises thirty short poems (of approximately one page in length) and one long poem, '1969' (approximately sixty pages in length). The second part of the thesis is a personal, critical commentary which reflects on the evolution of the themes in this collection, from an initial desire to write about the male nude in art, to a desire to write about masculinity, to, finally, a desire to write autobiographically on issues of male embodiment. It reflects, retrospectively, on the creative processes behind the writing of the poems, with specific reference to technical experiments undertaken during the writing of key poems. It uses my own contemporaneous journals to piece together their 'histories', from idea to final draft. It also reflects on the influence of other poets and poetic traditions, with particular reference to the long poem, the prose-poem and the sonnet (and how assigning a central place to the sonnet grew out of a translation of Michelangelo). The sonnet, for example, comes to be understood as a metaphor for the Apollonian male body (considered to be a negative construct) and the versions of sonnets in the collection as examples of that form undergoing Dionysian adjustments. The end of the commentary explains how this leads to the formulation of a Queer poetics, one in which texts signify not solely by their apparent themes but also by their 'open' and inter-penetrative forms. The single poem in the collection which best exemplifies this poetics is '1969', although the whole collection is structured in order to demonstrate it. The thesis contributes to the field of Creative Writing and to Queer literary studies.

This thesis explores the function of poetry written by strikers during 1984-5, analysing the ways in which these writings articulate an essential dialogic exchange of key issues during and after the coal dispute. Focusing closely on the politics of fonn, this research interrogates the significance of the mode, means and function of strikers' literature and of the alternative narratives propounded by established novelists in the wake of the coal dispute. Contesting Bakhtin's notions of poetry as a monologic mode - a position which Bakhtin modified in his later writings - this study explores the ways in which strikers' poetry challenges the boundaries of the poetic form through combative discourses of heritage and culture. Throughout a collective archive of published and unpublished materials, strikers communicate through the medium of poetry, employing fonn to highlight both their own minority visibility and the capacity of literature as a weapon. Putting culture to political use, strikers hijack the mode and means of cultural representation to communicate counter-discourses, new languages, meanings and visions of the future. The thesis seeks not only to address and reclaim new perspectives on the 1984-5 dispute, transporting strikers' writings from the anonymity of the archive to the illumination of the collective consciousness, but to juxtapose the perspectives they offer with competing counter-histories and heterodox - sometimes contradictory - ways of understanding the events in question. The significance of the competing representations offered by these very different modes of history as they engage in a wider battle to 'author' the conflict is central to the following discussion.

John Clare, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Edward Thomas form a trio of disparate yet tantalisingly related poets. What distinguishes them also conjoins them: the desire, in Hopkins’ words, to invest their poetry with ‘an individualising touch’. The poetic achievement of all three is animated by the effort to discover an idiom that answers to the pressure of a unique cast of mind, feeling, and vision of experience. All three poets stand consciously apart from their period. They articulate a recurrent counter-voice in English poetry of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, grounded in an effort to imbue poetic language with an acutely personal bearing. The Introduction establishes the interrelation of their personal and poetic individuality, exploring the way their poems formulate and embody shared aims. Clare once enthused over Keats’s description in Isabella of an eye ‘Striving to be itself’. The phrase gets purchase on the spirit of embattled innovation that the three chapters on Clare’s poetry locate in his language. The first seeks to characterise the haphazard ingenuity of Clare’s style, pursuing his trust in a brand of seemingly improvisational inventiveness as a means of discovering new modes of expression. Chapter 2 concentrates on the more controlled aspects of Clare’s experimentalism, attending to his poems’ twinning of actual and literary discovery. Chapter 3 focuses more explicitly on the disarmingly personal nature of Clare’s poetry, thinking about its strange marriages of personal fervour and literary archetype. Hopkins insisted on ‘originality’ as a ‘condition of poetic genius’; but his poetry is alert to originality’s costs as well as its virtues. The concern of Chapter 4 is with how Hopkins’ valorisation of distinctiveness sits in tension with his wariness of ‘Parnassian’ – the quality of ‘being too so-and-so-all over-ish’; it contends that Hopkins is most himself at his most unpredictable. Chapter 5 extends an emphasis on Hopkins’ blend of craft and spontaneity, and the intricacy and fervour of his expression of feeling, into a consideration of the rich presence his poetry affords to the heart. Chapter 6 attends to the ways in which Hopkins’ nerviness about the potentially alienating qualities of his individual style feeds back into the distinctive tenor of his voice. Thomas thought that ‘nothing so well represents […] singularity as style’. The first chapter on his poems explores takes off from T. S. Eliot’s notion of the ‘auditory imagination’ to explore the fusion of poetic and personal ‘singularity’ in Thomas’s harnessing of the postures of speech, and experimentation with the forms and rhythms of folk song. A large part of the individuality of Thomas’s style owes to the intricacy and tenacity of his syntax, and Chapter 8 explores the way in which his poetry’s distinctive voice arises out of an effort to trace the contours of thought and feeling. A final chapter devotes itself to the way in which, for all his idiosyncrasy, Thomas, like Clare and Hopkins, strives to achieve intimacy with a reader, contending that his best poems often invite us into the confidence of a personality that remains finally elusive. A coda emphasises the inventiveness and personal candour that unites the three poets’ language.

Rooted in reflective practice, this critical study uses a consideration of environment writing to open up and explore the concept of interiority. It argues, with particular recourse to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the ‘chiasm’, that the human individual experiences a porous reciprocity between her thought, perception and language and that of her social and physical environment, and that this has implications for any written presentation of ‘nature’ – a contested term that is explored via Timothy Morton’s thinking about environmental aesthetics. The study offers close readings of poems by Michael Haslam and James Schuyler which exemplify a fluid interiority in chiasmic relation with a locale and – drawing from an example of contemporary environment writing – proposes the concept of the feral as a mode of thought which does not so much challenge binarized conceptualizations such as wild/tame, nature/culture (or indeed, interior/exterior) as treat them as irrelevant. It suggests that ferality is particularly suited, therefore, to critical-creative thought. Drawing upon the work of Paul Valéry, Veronica Forrest-Thomson and Simon Jarvis, this thesis argues that to write poetry is to utilize a way of thinking that is distinct from prose and distinctly feral. Consequently, any avowed poetics will always emerge after the event of writing, and will be an incomplete articulation. Bearing this in mind, the study goes on to reflect upon the accompanying poetry collection’s techniques and the compositional practices developed while writing it in order to discern the impact of the research undertaken. Natural Phenomena, the creative portion of this PhD thesis, is a collection of poems responding to the sub/urban locale and to the conceptualizations of ‘nature’ and interiority encountered during the course of study.

This thesis investigates contemporary poetry of migrants and expatriates in the United Kingdom. The thesis starts with a collection of my poems that emerges as a correspondence to changing locations from Jordan, my homeland, to England, the host land. The second part is a dissertation that studies the work of four poets: Merle Collins and her Rotten Pomerack (1992); Amjad Nasser and Shepherd of Solitude (2009); Fathieh Saudi and Daughter of the Thames (2009); Sofia Buchuck and Orange Nights in Autumn (2008). The approach taken in this dissertation is through giving special attention to political context and to the ways in which Collins, Nasser, Saudi and Buchuck reflect it in their poems. In addition, the study shows how both Saudi and Buhcuck use poetry as a means of renewing identity and creating a new homeland. The study also includes personal interviews with Saudi and Buchuck that tell about the difficulties and opportunities faced by migrant poets. Both the critical and creative work offer insights into different experiences with location which result in various poetic expressions and definitions of host land, homeland, and home.

The axe of the house is a collection of poetry written and collated over three and a half years. The vast majority of the poems are about women: these are women’s voices usually recounting specifically female experiences. Many of these female poems were informed by the confessional mode, as appropriated and transmuted by the contemporary women writers I read and studied. The collection begins with confessions of my own in poems like “Anne Askew’s ashes” and “Jean,” and then moves on to include love poems like “Prayer” and “Gulls,” which are also at least partially autobiographical. Also confessional, but not autobiographical, are the poems at the centre of this collection. These are poems in which women from various different walks of life speak about their inner lives. Some of these women, like the speakers of “Hate mail” and “Silver Ghost,” are my own creation, while others, like “Mrs Rochester,” are borrowed from elsewhere. These poems examine intimate relationships from various angles: marriages, one night stands and vicious rivalries are all explored via a first person narrative. Body image is also a common theme. There are a few poems which are more overtly political, delivering feminist messages about the ways patriarchal society portrays and often ostracises women. “Harpies,” for example, looks at women who are seen to have no sexual worth, while “The picture in your mind when you speak of whores” concerns women whose only perceived worth is sexual, dismissing the various marginalising stereotypes that exist around sex workers. The collection moves farthest away from its examination of the female experience in the poems towards the end. However, these poems form a travelogue in which privilege of various kinds is examined and critiqued. Poems like “Witch” and “Belongings” are still concerned with the lives of women, while “Big heat” uses a female narrator to examine the more recognised privileges of wealth and mobility. These ideas recur in poems like “Barcelona diptych” and “Highway: Skagit County, WA,” but the poems that round off the collection are also attempts to capture a sense of place and space. Throughout this work, there are poems that are particularly interested in liminal space: several of the poems in the collection, including “Poltergeistrix” and “The women” look at the hours and days immediately after death. The space between travel destinations is also liminal, and these final poems attempt to make sense of it – finally succeeding with “Hydra,” which delivers a sense of acceptance and advocates living ‘in the moment’. The critical section, “Entangled in biographical circumstances,” looks afresh at the female confessional poem, most commonly associated with Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton and Adrienne Rich. With reference to the works of these literary foremothers, I focus on the ways in which a new generation of women poets has been inspired to adopt this mode. As well as noting the often hostile response of male critics to confessional work by female writers, I examine the very different ways in which Sharon Olds, Sapphire and Liz Lochhead work in the confessional tradition to produce poetry that speaks candidly about the inner lives of women. I also discuss the ways in which the work of these three poets has influenced and shaped my own poetry.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of South Africa, 2001.

This work consists of a collection of poetry, Lessons in Augury, preceded by a thesis, ‘Beating the Bounds: Exploring Borders and Scale in Contemporary British Environmental Poetry’. This thesis examines the significance of borders that are both culturally and ecologically meaningful, asking how these borders function in contemporary environmental poetry. It argues that such borders provide sites in which environmental poets can explore the interconnection of anthropocentric and ecocentric systems of value and work towards an understanding of human concerns at more-than-human, ecological scales. The first chapter examines the significance of the borders of the ‘dwelling space’ in John Burnside’s poetry. The following chapters move on to investigate the significance of more specific borders: coastlines and mountain ranges in Thomas A. Clark’s recent collections, the river in Alice Oswald’s Dart and the border between day and night in Richard Caddel’s posthumously published Writing in the Dark. The main focus of this thesis is creative practice. It investigates how poets writing out of very different traditions use borders that are culturally and ecologically meaningful as sites where they can develop their environmental poetics. The analysis of these poets’ explorations of borders provides the basis for a comparative study of their creative practices and poetic techniques. In particular, this thesis argues that the act of ‘beating the bounds’ – the physical exploration of border spaces – is fundamental to all of the works discussed. The final chapter, ‘Lines of Flight’, offers a point of connection between the critical and creative aspects of this project. It examines the relationship between critical research and creative practice, and charts some of the links between this thesis and the poetry collection Lessons in Augury.