A Dynamic Exchange Between Us
- Submitting institution
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University of Plymouth
- Unit of assessment
- 27 - English Language and Literature
- Output identifier
- 1276
- Type
- A - Authored book
- DOI
-
-
- Publisher
- Shearsman Books
- ISBN
- 9781848616318
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- -
- Year of publication
- 2019
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- The 50 poems of this book were written between 2014 and 2019. In advance of book publication, 11 poems were published in the literary journals Granta, Poetry Ireland Review, Mechanic's Institute Review (Birkbeck University), Magma, and Cassandra Voices.
At the forefront of its composition was a desire to explore, exemplify, and perpetuate our contemporary sense of spirituality and imaginative wonderment, utilising a discourse to expose a fruitful tension between the body and the mind, the corporal and the imagined, the living and the dead. Poems intended to lend a contemporary manner of thought (perpetuating intentional disjunction at the level of the sentence within a prose paragraph) to the idea that humankind is a puzzle, that our existence is enigmatic, that our human nature is not universal or eternal, and that we are often opaque, unclear, and unpredictable to ourselves.
Research questions included 1) how can contemporary poetry address religiousity?, 2) how can poetry move between expressions of the physical and the meta-physical worlds to push into innovative and new imaginative territory?, and 3) how can poetry provoke a contemporary readership to ask questions about their own sense of spirituality and wonderment?
As a springboard, initial research into religiousity was conducted, specifically into the personal declarations of and about godliness ('I am' statements) that are presented in religious texts such as the Bible (Jewish and Christian) the Qu'ran, and the Buddhist Sutras. This constituted part of the literature review, which also included relevant 19th, 20th and 21st century poetries of spirituality and wonderment (with special attention to analysing Dickinson, Stevens, O Hara, Hill). The method of 'practice-as-research' took the form of a routine writing practice and extensive drafting process, whereby poems went through upwards of 100 iterations in order to achieve the sought relationship to 'wonderment'.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
