'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.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:629212 |
| Date | January 2011 |
| Creators | Goodson, R. P. |
| Publisher | Nottingham Trent University |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/160/ |
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