Feral

Abstract

One of the projects of my thesis collection, Feral, was to question, examine, and evaluate the ways in which form influences the function of a piece and its ability to connect with readers. If a poem started as a villanelle but wanted to bust out of the traditional formal structure, I had to ask myself why and take a close look at how form was working to contain the language inside. This helped me to identify my own patterns of repetition and rhythm. Because of this undertaking, my collection contains several forms, including prose poetry, traditional forms like the sonnet, lyric poetry that plays with spacing and pauses, and even a few pieces of flash fiction or micro fiction that take a narrative approach to the poetic form. In a literary world often consumed by genre, Feral attempts to challenge traditional formal expectations of what poetry can and should be.