Andrew Rudd
E-mail: a.rudd@mmu.ac.uk
Title of PhD project
"Church of the Imagination: Post-Christian Spiritualities in the Work of Some Contemporary Poets"Supervisor(s)
Professors Michael Schmidt and Jeff Wainwright, Dr Laurence Coupe
Project outline
Following Wallace Stevens, a number of contemporary writers appear to be using poetry, in the words of R S Thomas, as a ‘laboratory of the spirit’ –distinctively re-imagining the spiritual in an area once ring-fenced by traditional belief. This is not primarily a matter of expressing pre-formulated spiritual ideas, but rather discovering, exploring and shaping those ideas through the process of writing. Through form and rhetoric, and the continuous creation of meaning through metaphor, these writers may participate in an active exploration of the spiritual. It may be that they are re-speaking and refreshing the language of religion: their practical exploration of language has become a kind of practical theology. The following poets seem to me to exemplify this process:
(1) Mark Doty. His work, haunted by the loss of a partner, can be read as a spiritual exploration of the human self: how it can be described and defined for his own time and circumstances, particularly in the presence of death. Drawn to conventional religious belief, his sexual orientation leads him to perceive himself as an outsider.
(2) Jorie Graham. Her shifting engagements with the indeterminacy of language have increasingly focused on the ‘spiritual.’ According to Vendler, she ‘brings the presence of poetry into the largest question of life, the relation of body and spirit.’
(3) Mary Oliver. Her poems and prose attempt to capture the ecstatic and numinous: particularly in a response to the natural world. Her poetic engagement with these experiences takes a very accessible and popular form.
Publications
- ‘Life Lines’ (six poems winning the Cheshire Prize for Literature), Chester Academic Press, 2005.
- ‘“Not to the Bible but to Wallace Stevens” – what R. S. Thomas found there’, PN Review 2004.
- ‘The Writer’s Rooms’, Computer Education, 2004.