Current Students

Dawn Watson

I will write a prose poem novel, exploring the form’s unique possibilities for place, character, voice and address. I will examine the genre-disrupting features of this complex form. That is, poetry written as prose while foregrounding the characteristics of poetic form. I will examine the possibilities of the lyric for narrative and fictionality, with an eye to potentially definitive aspects of prosody, syntax and structure. I will test the value of genre boundaries, and how it fits within and pushes beyond recognised set fields to something more than a mere hybrid of two forms. I will also write a critical thesis investigating the vital emergence and evolution of the form to a prominent place in contemporary Irish, UK and US literature. Can prose poetry intervene in a rapidly-evolving political sphere in a way "traditional" set form poetry does not? Does it have its own emergent aesthetic power? I am concerned with the prose poem as being particularly suited to communicating fragmented patterns of perception, emotion, memory and feeling—and how poetic characteristics of speaker and syntax seem more connected to this than a traditional novelistic narrative. Is the prose poem an immersive method of narrative communication in its own right? 

dawnwatsonwriter.com

Supervisory Team: Dr Leontia Flynn, English (Queens University Belfast), Dr Gail McConnell, English (Queens University Belfast).

Start Date: October 2018