Advisory Committee Chair
Adam Vines
Advisory Committee Members
James Braziel
Kerry Madden-Lunsford
Document Type
Thesis
Date of Award
2018
Degree Name by School
Master of Arts (MA) College of Arts and Sciences
Abstract
KINSHIP SCOT P. LANGLAND ENGLISH ABSTRACT The body of poems collected in this thesis encompasses the stages of loving and losing. As a whole, these poems fixate on themes of absence, grief, denial, dejection, love, and lust. The narrative within this body of work threads through the transformation between innocence and experience. As one aesthetic identity flows into another, the voice and form of each poem expand and contract. The formal nature of these poems offers a mold with which reactions and observations can be poured into and then broken. With the broken nature of traditional forms (the sonnet, Spensarian, triolet, haiku, tanka, villanelle, ode, blank verse, aubade, etc.) these poems challenge expectation. The negation, subversion, and erasure of form acts as a tension between traditional aesthetics and subject matter. In the parody poems, the mode of dejection takes precedent and precedes the maturation into the acceptance of identity. This apprenticeship to outside aesthetics informs the identities of the speakers as well as the objects they react to and keep. Furthermore, these poems attempt to convey authentic Southern lies told in miniature as a way to work through a wayward past comprised of failed kinship. Our relationship between the I and the you lies in the conflict between our exterior and interior lives. The resolution is forgiveness. Keywords: poetry, grief, family, absence, loss, identity
Recommended Citation
Langland, Scot Pierrot, "Kinship" (2018). All ETDs from UAB. 2217.
https://digitalcommons.library.uab.edu/etd-collection/2217