The Chimney

Abstract

There is nothing worse, I think, than paraphrasing a poem, much less a whole manuscript of poems. Doing so wrongly implies that poetry exists mainly as ideas, and not, as it truly does, as words. Thus, that an "abstract" should summarize the writing in this thesis seems to me not only impossible, but also undesirable. Instead, for an expression of my methodology I offer the poems themselves, many of which take the form of the ars poetica; they discuss what I try to do when writing far better than I ever could here. All I can say to introduce the poems, then, is that I hope they speak for themselves.