Award Date
May 2023
Degree Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Fine Arts (MFA)
Department
English
First Committee Member
Claudia Keelan
Second Committee Member
Donald Revell
Third Committee Member
Megan Becker-Leckrone
Fourth Committee Member
Maile Chapman
Fifth Committee Member
Lynn Comella
Number of Pages
58
Abstract
Sight Words is a collection of poems that questions the image as the central unit of meaning in poetry. Sight words is a lyric bildungsroman, that traces the process of metaphysical alienation that an individual undergoes in the postmodern world. The speaker is exposed to an overabundance of meaning that the visual world transmits and as the order of language deteriorates, meaning multiplies and falters. The language and poetics of Sight Words struggles to reconcile the disconnect between visual language and spoken language. Every missed communication points to a denial of access to the self, which the speaker apprehends as a death of self. The creative process of this book takes as its inspiration Guy Debord’s Theory of the Dérive, after which I recorded the fragmented and erratic changes in ambience of my sojourns through the city in which I live. Sight Words pits this death of the author against the Dérive’s root in physicality in order to make the philosophical claim that dualism of body and mind is spiritually fatal. With this truth at its center, the broader implication is of the fugitivity and dispossessed status of the artist and art itself in the contemporary world.
Disciplines
Creative Writing
File Format
Degree Grantor
University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Language
English
Repository Citation
Socolofsky, Benjamin Harrison, "Sight Words: Poems" (2023). UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones. 4782.
http://dx.doi.org/10.34917/36114807
Rights
IN COPYRIGHT. For more information about this rights statement, please visit http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/