The advantage of studying poetry at an intense level of academia is that it can underlie a multitude of topics. Mental fingers in many pies. It’s counterintuitive, ‘poetry’ could hardly be further from today’s fashionable STEM subjects. That misses the point. At its heart, poetry is an intense study of language. Language is the lifeblood of human communications externally, the language with which we talk to ourselves, mind-talk, internally. To understand how it works is to understand how to alchemise human energy. It is to understand the nature of beauty, aesthetics, charm. It is also to understand selfless hard work (there’s more money to be made stacking shelves in the supermarket), craft and technique, ambiguity, compactness, the contradictions of life. The word ‘academic’, although hinting at the unpoetic, is crucial because academic product takes internal rigour mixed with methodological output.
The plan, post-Doc, has been to break down my PhD into those components, cognitive components, not delivered components*, in order to produce post-doctoral papers that expand the house by breaking down the Leggo bricks as if each topic was its own thesis. My knitting-together theme is how each component has a ‘real-world’ implementation. What I mean by that is the idea that a young woman or man completes their degree, arrives in industry and is told by the old-hand mentor, ‘this is the real world, forget all that theory shit’.
*A delivered PhD is constrained by ‘real world’ boundaries, for instance word count, availability and skill-set of supervisors, being able to pay for it, etc
My PhD was an ‘artistic’ PhD, a body of word count equivalent was poetry, the thesis then split between theory and the creative process induced by that theory. It was entitled ‘Meum Pactum Dictum [sic]: Metaphor, Image and Symbol in Modern British Poetry and beyond.’