Abstract:
The following collection of poems, About Suffering, constitutes my MLS project. As the poems were created and rewritten, common themes began to emerge, giving the collection cohesion. The title is taken from the first line of a W H. Auden poem titled, "Musee Des Beaux Arts": "About suffering they were never wrong / The Old Masters .... " The poems in the collection deal with human suffering. Many of the poems are about illness and accident, mostly as a result of precarious forces, and, as the Auden poem suggests, it is tragedy that permeates life while life goes on. As an extension of the theme of suffering, the poems also reflect the lack of protection or safety in the world. The location of experience moves through the poems from personal to public, yet they are connected by the common themes of suffering and lack of protection. The book is divided into three sections. In the first section, the poems are private; that is, the poems are personal to the extent that most are written in the first person and involve infertility, death of a parent, family strains and fears in parenthood. The poems in the second section move into a third-person narration; they are less private as the narrator is more of an observer reporting a story. In these poems, physical illness again plays a role. Also explored is the fragility of human relationships in such poems as "Marriage Counselor" and "Greenhouse Effect." The final section is comprised exclusively of public poems-poems as a response to a news event. Again, physical illness is a topic: both "Burn Victim" and "Mother & Son" involve a physical abnormality. The vulnerability of human life theme is presented in this section in various ways including natural disaster. My interest, as the author of the collection, is to reflect upon suffering and for a moment pay attention to it rather than turn "leisurely from the disaster," to quote Auden's poem.
