Writing The see-through man: poetry and commentary

'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.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

phd

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

Nottingham Trent University

Year dc:date.issued

2011

Author dc:creator

• Goodson, RP

Language dc:language

en