Abstract

My thesis project, The Salt Lick , a collection of poems, explores the contemporary effects of industry and nature on the human psyche, approaching the subject via themes such as desire and consumption; industry and futility; lost potential and renewal as they intersect with animal, human and world. Many of the poems oscillate between discretion and deviance. The actual and concrete, explored in some poems--in terms of objectivity or historicity, are often subverted by implicit or metaphorical meaning. Subjectivity, in poems like, "The Salt Lick", moves away from pure linearity, interrogating, instead, the perceptions of the subject operating outside of temporal constraints--a departure which also creates agency. The work of both D.H. Lawrence and Joyce Carol Oates, could be said to influence this project in terms of its gothic elements and interest in "sexual psychology", as it relates to seduction and corruption; social observation and estrangement; unconsious forces and violence. Whether explicit or restrained, this project revisits experiences born from an American mill town; where poems are narrative, or imperative, in tone and tense, this thesis hopes to remain unified thematically by the prosperity and poverty--both material and psychical that derives from a collision between industry, nature and man.