Abstract

Abstract




Irregularities in the flow of fluent speech, dysfluencies are breaks caused by a person’s stutter, extended or repeated syllables and other forms of non-fluent communication. These are most often discussed in the realm of speech pathology, when specialists of communicative disorders endeavour to treat people affected by them.

Verbal articulation varies in nature, and some types are less fluent than others. It is this broad sense of the term “dysfluency” that the thesis explores: the scope of our patterns of communication is comprised not only of disorders or lack of them, but of subtleties and delivery. Fluency, perhaps, is not as simple as a lack of stutter, or a standardized verbalization. Grammatical and syntactical differences can also dramatically alter the sound of a sentence. These poems express the nuances and difficulties of communication between a patient and his speech therapist, and track the gradual disintegration of their conversation. As the voice of the stutterer becomes increasingly anxious and introspective, the poems begin to offer examples of the many types of miscommunications that occur in human interactions. By the second half of the thesis, the therapist/patient dynamic transforms into an exploration of the misspoken and the unsaid.

From the formal language of speech therapy to the anxiety in a troubled relationship or a man talking to a deceased relative, these poems explore language and the dysfluency of speech, finding through both compression and sparseness the possibility of more fluent communication.