Award Date

1-1-2008

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Fine Arts (MFA)

Department

English

First Committee Member

Claudia Keelan

Number of Pages

68

Abstract

There are two important foundations upon which my poetry stands: (1) Epistemologically I am an empiricist, not a realist; (2) my poetry is not empirical. That is, it operates in the realm of the thought experiment --the laboratory of the mind. This demon is a good analogy to how I write poetry. I usually get the urge to write a poem after thinking about a question, or a fact. In Maxwell's gedankenexperiment the fact is the second law of thermodynamics, and the question is: What if a demon partitioned the fast and slow molecules in a box?;Hence, there is this gedankenexperiment, and this is the general movement of my poetry. The poems begin with facts and/or questions, which arise from contiguous, often disparate events. Like Maxwell's demon, much of my poetry, and I suspect poetry in general, performs the activity of organization. But this is not all --the poem is an experiment. When writing a poem the mind puts things into a system, or takes them away, and then observes, and through observations transforms.

Keywords

Original writing; Saras; Three

Controlled Subject

British literature; English literature--Irish authors; Irish literature

File Format

pdf

File Size

962.56 KB

Degree Grantor

University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Language

English

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