I Have Been Somewhere: Place In The South Carolina Poems Of Nikky Finney And Kwame Dawes

The following thesis focuses on the role of “place” in the poems of two black South Carolinian poets, Nikky Finney and Kwame Dawes. Borrowing from cultural and humanistic geographers’ myriad understandings of place, as well as philosophers’, I examine the ways in which Finney’s Rice and Dawes’s Wisteria function as meditations on and transmutations of the South Carolina low country in both its physical and non-physical dimensions, ultimately shedding light on historically silenced and marginalized emplaced realities. I also examine how Finney and Dawes employ different strategies of emplacement and their influence on the poems’ structure and meaning. In the final chapter of my thesis, I put my own emplaced poems in conversation with Finney’s and Dawes’s, and I further analyze my creative process and product to understand more deeply the range of choices available to poets interested in poetry of emplacement.

Name thesis:degree_name

M.A. in Southern Studies

Level thesis:degree_level

Thesis

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Southern Studies

Year dc:date.available

2015

Author dc:creator

• Cornish, Purvis L.

Contributors dc:contributor

• Chiyuma Elliott
• Leigh Anne Duck
• Kathryn McKee

• African American Poetry
• History
• Kwame Dawes
• Nikky Finney
• Place
• South Carolina
• American Literature

Repository record dc:identifier

https://egrove.olemiss.edu/etd/866

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:egrove.olemiss.edu:etd-1865