Thesis Defense Announcement

College of Arts and Sciences announces the Final Thesis Defense of

Hunter Keough

for the Degree of Master of Fine Arts

October 29, 2019 at 02:30 AM in Patterson Hall,Room 335

Advisor: Marcus Wicker 

Wandering the Silence

ABSTRACT: This poetry book project strives to encapsulate the normalities and refutations of the poetic experience and to subvert the rules of craft and expectation while simultaneously providing a masterful level of craft within itself. Variation of form, diction, structural/visual appearance, and quality experimentation will be present to reinforce the subject matter of mental health and individual speakers' changing thoughts; the ars poetica will also serve, at least in some small way, as a connector between the natures of reality and fantasy promoted by the poems. Some of these poems about poetry can be thought of as interludes like in music, or like solos that drift from the written standard. This collection is meant to reveal alternatives to the conventional thoughts on poetry, how maybe we lose something by trying to define it. The collection also focuses on the idea of the mind itself, how best to convey the emotions and realities of those with mental illnesses such as depression, anxiety, and various forms of psychosis, among others. The suspension of the outside world and the ability of the mind to corrupt its own workings is one of many major similarities between artists/poets and those with trauma and other catalysts of mental illnesses. This work seeks to represent many of those voices who cannot, either through mental struggles or existential circumstances, speak out for themselves. Just as poetry suggests, there is not one reality but there are many that we create within ourselves. Lastly, the poems in this collection all serve as forms or expressions of vulnerability through their speakers, individual subject matter, the writer's voice, or some culmination of these three elements. Through discussion of daily ritual, aging, family, and the simple act of existing, these speakers' situations work to explore ideas of faith, personal resilience, and the external (as well as resulting internal) forces often imposed on the human body.