Notes towards & Maggie Nelson’s Rhetorical Fictions: a study of Bluets

Notes

Towards, is a narrative long-form poem. It uses poetic practices such as docupoetics and an engagement with archival material, to explore a family history and questions of nationality. It is an exploration of how to realise a story.<br><br>The critical component analyses Maggie Nelson’s Bluets in order to better understand the long-form narrative poem.

The thesis begins by exploring the use of docupoetics in Nelson’s earlier work, Jane: A Murder and The Red Parts. The thesis then turns to consider Bluets as a prose poem, exploring the ways in which Nelson revises the boundaries of the genre. These include her fragmentation and complication of the lyrical ‘I’ and the disruption and incorporation of non-poetic linguistic discourses into the matter of poetry in order to create narrative.

The thesis identifies two prose genres in Bluets, the philosophical treatise and the essay, and explores how Nelson’s exploitation of these genre conventions produces a poem that is subversive and playful, mimicking the language and tone of the essay and using a philosophical treatise as the overarching structure, enabling Nelson’s unique propositional poem to come into being.