Event Title
Faculty Sponsor
John Gery
College(s)
College of Liberal Arts
Submission Type
Drama/Literary Performance
Location
Room 117, Earl K. Long Library
Description
My honors senior thesis, a creative project entitled Separate Spaces, is a collection of fourteen poems that reflects on trauma, loss, interpersonal relationships, and nature. Many of the poems are dramatic monologues, which means that they are written in a voice that is distinctly not my own. This allows me to portray a range of extreme voices, including a survivor of the bombing of Hiroshima, a U.S. veteran of the Iraq War, and murderer Perry Smith. Although I consider myself a free verse writer, preferring to work without regular meter or rhyme, one of the poems is written in iambic pentameter. In addition, I took material from the Yahoo! Answers website and composed it as a found poem, generating even more diversity in the manuscript. / The poem that has had the most impact on my writing is “What the Doctor Said” by Raymond Carver, both for its conversational tone and narrative style. The dramatic monologues of Ai Ogawa, however, have also influenced me as a writer. The distressed social outcasts often featured in Ai’s poetry appeal to me as speakers of dramatic monologues; although, unlike Ai, I make more attempts to incorporate my speakers’ emotions and diction in their speech. / One value of this collection is the variety of speakers, themes, and kinds of poems that are included. There is, hopefully, something that everyone can relate to or be interested in. With a reading performance, these voices and experiences can be brought to life.
Creative Commons License
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Included in
Separate Spaces
Room 117, Earl K. Long Library
My honors senior thesis, a creative project entitled Separate Spaces, is a collection of fourteen poems that reflects on trauma, loss, interpersonal relationships, and nature. Many of the poems are dramatic monologues, which means that they are written in a voice that is distinctly not my own. This allows me to portray a range of extreme voices, including a survivor of the bombing of Hiroshima, a U.S. veteran of the Iraq War, and murderer Perry Smith. Although I consider myself a free verse writer, preferring to work without regular meter or rhyme, one of the poems is written in iambic pentameter. In addition, I took material from the Yahoo! Answers website and composed it as a found poem, generating even more diversity in the manuscript. / The poem that has had the most impact on my writing is “What the Doctor Said” by Raymond Carver, both for its conversational tone and narrative style. The dramatic monologues of Ai Ogawa, however, have also influenced me as a writer. The distressed social outcasts often featured in Ai’s poetry appeal to me as speakers of dramatic monologues; although, unlike Ai, I make more attempts to incorporate my speakers’ emotions and diction in their speech. / One value of this collection is the variety of speakers, themes, and kinds of poems that are included. There is, hopefully, something that everyone can relate to or be interested in. With a reading performance, these voices and experiences can be brought to life.