Date of Award
2013
Type
Thesis
Major
Art
Degree Type
Bachelors of Art
Department
Art Department
First Advisor
Nick Norwood
Second Advisor
Patrick Jackson
Third Advisor
Nataha Temesgen
Abstract
The Influence of Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney My relationship with poetry has been complex. I once felt that poetry, my last friend and greatest hope, had betrayed me, had shut me out and left me very alone. My pen lacked the power that poetry had promised as the last refuge of those who wished to breathe deeply, speak intimately, and inspire intensely. Others had the power to move me, but I seemed incapable of moving others; my lines lacked clarity, my phrases caused confusion. In a mood of irritable desperation I wrote these lines:
You live in the world,
I live in the head.
Words convey thought as rain the sea;
if you want to know the sea, go swim.
I will never know you. You will never know me.
I wrote many such childish verses bewailing what I believed to be the failing of words, of poetry, and of myself. But still I wrote poetry. Once I had begun writing poetry, no amount of disdain or discouragement could stop me from continuing. And my relationship with poetry has convalesced.
Aside from crediting the value of knowing from where one has come, I mention all this for two reasons: first, to illustrate my main purpose for writing poetry and the force that drives me; and second, to provide rationale for my primary focus in composing this collection. As to the former, my intention is and always has been to communicate intimately, to create shared experiences through words. As to the latter, my primary consideration has been clarity, to find ways to express those things most difficult to express as clearly as possible. It has been particularly difficult to maintain clarity because of my dedication to contradictions and dichotomies. Such subjects often, by their nature, give the impression of the oracular. And far worse than lacking clarity, such poems can give the appearance of vacuous trickery, of misdirection intended to distract the reader from the poem's lack of substance; nothing could be worse than to write a poem that appears to mean nothing.
Recommended Citation
White, Nathan Adam, "Fire on the Tongue: A collection of Poems" (2013). Theses and Dissertations. 188.
https://csuepress.columbusstate.edu/theses_dissertations/188
