Plaque and Plague: The Poetics of Temporality from Ashbery to Homer

My thesis is in two parts: a book of poems and a research thesis, comprising three chapters on poets relevant to my practice and comprehension of poetry. My research commences with depictions of temporality in John Ashbery, and how those depictions remember earlier poets, specifically Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Homer. My interest is in how poetic history reverberates in the present, and how each poet makes that history, which is both plaque and plague, continuously present. The accompanying book of poems Albatross Diagram reflects my evolving engagement with the field of ideas explored in the thesis within my current practice.