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Full text of this paper is not available in the ETD Center. Copies may be available for inter-library loan from Bowling Green State University or may be available for purchase from Proquest/UMI

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Essaie

Blake, Evan Robert
http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4855-4101
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1587048511101683

Abstract Details

2020, Master of Fine Arts (MFA), Bowling Green State University, Creative Writing/Poetry.
The poems of Essaie explore important questions of existence and meaning: How can language help us connect with the world and others? How do we endure loss? How does transcendence and beauty enter our daily lives? What is the relationship between art and reality? In response to these questions, the poet turns outward to his surroundings, in an effort to discover what can be learned from the landscape, the plants and animals, the weather, the seasons, the streets, the houses, and each other. The observations found in Essaie come from someone going on a walk, through a neighborhood or forest, someone looking out their open window, someone sitting on a porch. Throughout the collection, there is a profound fascination in things that hover, shift, change, and take flight, and what they mean: What does the changing weather signify? What does the interplay of light and shadow have to tell us? What is the speaker’s relationship to the airplane making its way across the sky? By perceiving the world as vividly and as precisely as he can, the collection’s speaker hopes to find—if not the answers—then clarifications to the questions he is asking. To move beyond the superficial answers that prosaic language offers, the poet of Essaie tenses, pressurizes the language through the tools of poetic craft. In extended, complex syntax, the poems capture the seamlessness of the world and our experience of it—what a deep, prolonged scan of the horizon might feel like, varied but whole. Alternatively, the poet employs enjambment to emphasize the fractured, multi-faceted nature of existence—experiences are rarely free of disruption and incompleteness. These two feature in the collection—the seamlessness of experience, the fractured, multifaceted nature of experience—are at odds, but equally true in the reality portrayed by Essaie. Ultimately, the aim of the collection is to attempt, whether or not the attempt is successful—to attempt to explore important existential questions, to attempt to honestly depict the poet’s surroundings, and to attempt to find language that will communicate the wisdom of a world that cannot speak for itself.
Sharona Muir, Ph.D. (Committee Chair)
Rebecca Morgan Frank, Ph.D. (Committee Member)
Language Arts; Literature
creative writing; poetry

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Blake, E. R. (2020). Essaie [Master's thesis, Bowling Green State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1587048511101683

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Blake, Evan. Essaie. 2020. Bowling Green State University, Master's thesis. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1587048511101683.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Blake, Evan. "Essaie." Master's thesis, Bowling Green State University, 2020. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1587048511101683

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

bgsu1587048511101683
Release 3.2.12