This investigation addresses formal and conceptual problems in poetry, identified through critical investigations of my own and my poetic peers’ work, and through theoretical and philosophical texts (Butler, 2000; Hegel, 1807; Owens, 1980; Rose, 1996; Kappeler, 1986). The notion of a ‘political’ poetry, as loosely posited by contemporary critics (Archambeau, 2009) is discussed, using Ancient Greek readings of polis (Arendt, 1958; Yunis, 1996). Subsequent related topics for discussion include critical irony, subjectivity, feminist theory, and fantasy. Source material for their identification includes my own poetry (Morris, 2006; 2007), the poetry pamphlet IRA Quid (Brady et al., 2004), and criticism on the work of J.H. Prynne (Sutherland, 2010). I then discuss the influence of these readings on my practice, and present practice work written in response to the research aims. I present my practical poetic outcomes as an extension of the theoretical questions outlined by way of analysing individual poems, and by presenting poems as their own mode of discourse within the critical text. Research is shown to have influenced my practice through an evolving methodology that responds to questions unearthed during the project. This methodology develops a body politics through compositional experiments with the typewriter (Olson, 1965; Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; Abramović, 2011), and places emphasis on live performance as crucial to ‘political’ poetry due to its affects. Also provided are case studies of poetry readings given during the research period and their effects on practice, and a summary of Lyric & Polis, a festival of poetry readings and open discussion, which I hosted in Falmouth in February 2012. A concluding section looks at future possibilities for poetic practice in light of my findings, and suggests some ways for moving on from some of the key contradictions arising in relation to unequivocal poetic statements, and the question of ‘aboutness’.

Why do so few contemporary dramatists write in metrical verse? One of the chief criticisms levelled at modern verse drama has been that playwrights’ use of verse fails to cohere with contemporary notions of dramatic action. As action-playing is largely a matter of text in performance, this thesis assumes that the best way to meet this challenge is to approach it as much from the perspective of the actor as from that of the playwright, and presents a psychophysical, action-based approach to the composition and analysis of metrical dramatic verse. Verse rhythm is explored through the application of Rudolf Laban’s concepts of Motion Factors and Working Actions, and with reference to contemporary theories of cognitive poetics. The rhythms of metrical verse are thereby understood and experienced as purposeful movements of the human body which are, in turn, understood and experienced as the psychophysical sensations of dramatic action. This approach, given the title of the Verse Psychology Game, draws together three original concepts: 1. Creating and interpreting dramatic texts according to Stanislavskian notions of action is a game, with the playwright as ‘gamewright’ and the actors as players. 2. The Motion in Poetry Metaphor: a conceptual metaphor that builds on the principles of the Laban-Malmgren System of ‘movement psychology’, allowing verse rhythms to be understood and experienced as embodied sensations of psychophysical dramatic action. 3. Hyperactivity: an ‘intensified’ form of action-playing that operates beyond the limits of ‘naturalistic’ performance. This enables a ‘specialist game’ in which verse serves a hyperactive dramatic function. Within this framework, metrical dramatic verse can be created and interpreted on the basis of its performative potential. This is demonstrated through the development of a new methodology for metrical analysis, ‘actorly’ interpretations of Shakespearean dramatic verse, a series of training exercises that ‘sensitise’ the playwright to the performative potential of verse rhythm, and the creation of original material for a new verse play. This approach also aids actors, directors and teachers when making interpretative choices. The theories and techniques of the Verse Psychology Game are pedagogical tools that can contribute to broader programmes on dramatic writing and inform the methodologies of conservatoire actor-training.

The term ‘writing coastlines’ implies a double meaning. The word ‘writing’ refers both to the act of writing and to that which is written. The act of writing translates aural, physical, mental and digital processes into marks, actions, utterances, and speech-acts. The intelligibility of that which is written is intertwined with both the context of its production and of its consumption. The term ‘writing coastlines’ may refer to writing about coastlines, but the coastlines themselves are also writing in so far as they are translating physical processes into marks and actions. Coastlines are the shifting terrains where land and water meet, always neither land nor water and always both. The physical processes enacted by waves and winds may result in marks and actions associated with both erosion and accretion. Writing coastlines are edges, ledges, legible lines caught in the double bind of simultaneously writing and erasing. These in-between places are liminal spaces – points of both departure and arrival, and sites of exchange. One coastline implies another, implores a far shore. The dialogue implied by this entreaty intrigues me. The coastlines of the United Kingdom and those of Atlantic Canada are separated by three and a half thousand kilometres of ocean. Yet for centuries, fishers, sailors, explorers, migrants, emigrants, merchants, messengers, messages, packets, ships, submarine cables, aeroplanes, satellite signals and wireless radio waves have attempted to bridge this distance. These comings and goings have left traces. Generations of transatlantic migrations have engendered networks of communications. As narratives of place and displacement travel across, beyond, and through these networks, they become informed by the networks’ structures and inflected with the syntax and grammar of the networks’ code languages. Writing coastlines interrogates this in-between space with a series of questions: When does leaving end and arriving begin? When does the emigrant become the immigrant? What happens between call and response? What narratives resonate in the spaces between places separated by time, distance, and ocean yet inextricably linked by generations of immigration? This thesis takes an overtly interdisciplinary approach to answering these questions. This practice-led research refers to and infers from the corpora and associated histories, institutions, theoretical frameworks, modes of production, venues, and audiences of the visual, media, performance, and literary arts, as well as from the traditionally more scientific realms of cartography, navigation, network archaeology, and creative computing. Writing Coastlines navigates the emerging and occasionally diverging theoretical terrains of electronic literature, locative narrative, media archaeology, and networked art through the methodology of performance writing pioneered at Dartington College of Art (Bergvall 1996, Hall 2008). Central to this methodology is an iterative approach to writing, which interrogates the performance of writing in and across contexts toward an extended compositional process. Writing Coastlines will contribute to a theoretical framework and methodology for the creation and dissemination of networked narrative structures for stories of place and displacement that resonate between sites, confusing and confounding boundaries between physical and digital, code and narrative, past and future, home and away. Writing Coastlines will contribute to the creation of a new narrative context from which to examine a multi-site-specific place-based identity by extending the performance writing methodology to incorporate digital literature and locative narrative practices, by producing and publicly presenting a significant body of creative and critical work, and by developing a mode of critical writing which intertwines practice with theory.

In 2006 selected Cornish mining areas were validated as UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Here are found numerous remnants of the mining industry that justified Cornwall’s prominence from the Industrial Revolution up to the close of the last major mine in the 1990s. An essential part of that history is the trade of The Boulton and Watt Mining Company, formed when Midlands businessman Matthew Boulton (1728-1809) joined forces with Scotsman James Watt (1736-1819). This partnership influenced the history of Cornish mining and the whole Industrial Revolution. Traces of their endeavours remain on the Cornish landscape and in Cornish identity. Correspondence between the two men and Cornish mine manager Thomas Wilson (1748-1820) is held at the Cornish Records Office and is available online. Creative work began with these letters, seeking moments, words and gestures to resonate with narratives of the Cornish post-industrial landscape. These narratives were gathered through interviews with locals, tourists, students, mining enthusiasts and those who knew nothing of the Cornish industrial past, and were supported by experience and observation of the Cornish landscape. Poetry written from these sources strives to reflect upon contemporary landscape use and promote cultural ownership and understanding. To this aim, readings of the two collections were given in 2013 and the collections subsequently self-published. Responses to the work show that this project not only promoted Cornish industrial heritage but also prompted recognition of how stories of the contemporary Cornish landscape are intertwined with its history. This project’s partner was the King Edward Mine Museum, Troon, near Camborne, and its aims were supported by the Cornwall Record Office, Truro.

This thesis deals with the writing process in poetry. It consists of two types of text – theoretical and poetic. This thesis asks, for the purposes of a poetics of writing, what knowledge of language poetry requires. Questions as to the sources of poetry are resolved as questions asked of the ethics in which writing is possible. Poetry is that discourse which stands out of the bivalency of judgement, constituting, as speech does in its unending, the delay of freedom. Tropology is structure with which to represent the world, and by limitless tropology we inscribe the manner and scope of poetry’s indirection. What individuals negotiate among differends amounts to their own authenticity. The community of writing is made up of shifting personae whose roles blur between the work of making and the work of keeping the canon. Canon is to literature as langue is to parole – meta-awareness in the service of common sense. We, who make up this community, are constantly at the work of protecting and violating borders. This thesis considers the prospects for a heuristics of poetry writing by way of the affinities of that process for those of (first and foreign) language learning. It contents that poetry’s role is to do inside a language what the foreign language learner cannot help but do between languages / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This research investigates the ‘performativity’ of the ‘author function’ through collaging the audio recordings of American poet Sylvia Plath. The ‘author function’ is a term by Michel Foucault to describe how readers attribute certain characteristics that they believe belong to the author and ascribe them to the writing. ‘Performativity’ is a term used by Judith Butler to describe a set of actions that ascribe and predetermine a set of attributes to a subject through his or her gender, age, timeframe, nationality and race. The ‘performativity’ of the ‘author function’ appropriates these characteristics and attributes them to the author. How the determination of an authorial identity translates to the interaction of the practice component of the project, which includes several components of digital collage, is through attributions that readers make in the creation of an author. The practice component of the project consists of the collage of audio and video recordings, the programming of video with Max/MSP/Jitter, ‘performative’ elements and collage poetry on Twitter. The audio component was collaged from two poems entitled ‘Lady Lazarus’ and ‘The Applicant’ that Plath read to the British Council in 1962 to form a new poem entitled Lady/Applicant: The Lazarus. The video component consists of collaging recorded video clips of storefront and street signs in Camden, London, where she is associated with living and committing suicide at. A second video collage entitled Shadows/Shadows/Tomb takes place at a cemetery close to my residence in 2011 and documents symbols of death that reference my own authorial identity. The second set of videos run on a Max/MSP/Jitter patch that display four screens of filmed texts inscribed on tombstones that play four streaming poems through a systematic structure of boxes. The screens are displayed in each box and sourced from separate folders to display and play the film clips. The practice of collage and constraint-based poetry complicates the constitution of being the author when the collagist of Plath’s poetry is a different gender than hers. This research then expands on how identity radically shifts in the text when the subject and the collagist have very different identities. The radical shift in a collage takes place within a predefined and generalized concept of the reader as determined by Stanley Fish, a prominent writer on the subject of ‘reader-response criticism’, who believes that one way a reader could be approached is through his or her relationship with the writing.

Thesis (M.A.)--Indiana University, 2008. / Title from screen (viewed on June 24, 2009). Department of English, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). Advisor(s): Karen M. Kovacik, Susanmarie Harrington, Robert Rebein. Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 77-78).

Nicosia, a medieval walled city in Cyprus, was divided by a ‘green line’ in 1964 and remains the last divided capital city in Europe. This thesis deploys poesis and performance to interrogate the border as a site of reminiscence at the intersection of multiple and contested collective memory-narratives. In order to explore the nature of individual and collective memory the thesis challenges a series of physical and conceptual border zones: the disciplinary and discursive boundaries between poetry and philosophy; the border between memory and identity; the border between collective and individual memory and the physical terrain of the border that divides Nicosia. The dérive, translocated from Paris to Nicosia, is used to explore these borders through an autoethnographic poetics that crosses the fields of poetry, anthropology and art practice. Walking and the practice arising from it speak back to the border. The connections between poetry, performance, collective memories and mediated subjectivities are investigated through a multimedia totality of poetics that deploys film, photography and live performance as well as writing. The thesis consists of this written exegesis and documentation of the performance Memory in the Dead Zone, the website MemoryMap, the film-poem DVD An Architecture of Forgetting and The Archive of Lost Objects, a book of poetry and photography. This multimedia collection seeks to capture the complexity, diversity and fluidity of the phenomenological experience of memory and subjectivity. This thesis proposes and identifies a field of expanded life writing that is distinct from but related in ethos to the category of expanded cinema, to define such practice. The knowledge that arises out of the dérives is represented in a thesis that attempts to capture the multiplicity (though not the totality) and interrelationships of the discourses and practices that inform my border memories.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Beyond the boundaries of the classroom, the idea of emancipatory authority is a worldview which encourages the empowerment of the public to embrace different roles of authority, and take action as members of the local, regional, and global community. Within the classroom, emancipatory authority provides students and teachers with opportunities to create an atmosphere where both parties take responsibility for the development of education in one community, as well as creating a diverse environment where voices and ideas blend, and without the traditional classroom hierarchy.

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