POSSUM IVORY is a collection of poems written during my tenure as a graduate student at Missouri State University. My principal goal throughout the graduate program was to establish myself as a disciplined apprentice to the study of poetry and its functions as forms of both art and discourse, which necessarily includes intellectual and aesthetic considerations of the form and theory of poetry, as well as its craft and practice. That said, the poems collected herein are a representative sample of the progress I have achieved toward that goal's end. These poems draw from my own experiences, and those of my friends and family, for the purposes of construing psychological and emotional truths and insights that are aesthetically rendered into poems bearing some modicum of artfulness.
poetry, free verse, dialect, vernacular, idiom, plain-spoken, persona, rural, adolescence, family, friendship, love, loss, English Language and Literature
Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations