An Empty House

Abstract

An Empty House is composed of a 66 page titular poetry collection (creative component) and 10 creative non-fiction essays (critical component) entitled. Ten Ways into An Empty House. The creative component is set in a modern-day inner city community undergoing radical and enforced economic, social and architectural change. The protagonist – a poet – mediates these transformations through reflections on their own historic victimization (of violence) and homelessness. Along the way, the contrasts and correlations between the enduring landscape, the shifting seasons, the process of mass eviction, old and new architecture, old and new politics, the severities of homelessness and luxuries of inhabitation are explored. In the creative component, the poems are narrative in style. To build architecture into the collection, a variety of forms are used, including free verse, concrete poem and found poem. The 10 creative non-fiction essays (critical component) intersect and juxtapose the creative component’s primary themes of belonging, residence, exclusion, assimilation, acceptance and resistance. The critical component examines the personal and cultural significance of home, the psychological and emotional construction of place and space, approaches to poetry and applications of various methods and practices to the development of work in the creative component of the thesis.