Happy Comes After

Lucas Hunter, Purdue University

Abstract

Two facts I learned in my MFA, whose combination is the emphasis of Happy Comes After: All poems rely on a structure of some sort to arrive at meaning; sound is a structure. I believe any poem’s underlying structure offers accessibility to meaning that is unique to that combination of poem and structure—this is my acknowledgement sonic structure is not the only means by which language is structured. In fact, for natural English speakers, I imagine sonic structure presents itself only after a few other options have been exhausted. Take, for example, cause-and-effect, or narrative structure: if this then that. Causality of events is the tie which binds words, clauses, sentences, poems together. Another example is distributive structure, wherein A=B and B=C, therefore A=C. Associative structure is common too; were I to write moo, likely an image of a cow would arrive in a reader’s mind, despite never explicitly mentioning a cow. Further, studies of Biblical Hebrew have revealed a type of syntactical structure unfound in English— sentences arranged from most important word to least, or vice versa, resulting in a linguistic crescendo in which the final word of a sentence is the thing to which all other elements of the sentence point. This brief list neither does justice to poems which rely on many other means to arrive at meaning, nor imagines the types of structure that exist in poems when their language is one with which I am unfamiliar. But, I hope these considerations display a brief truth I’ve discovered in my efforts to present the poems contained within this collection. One example of many within this collection which demonstrates these considerations in-the-act could be taken from the opening lines of “Parable of the Sower via MF DOOM,” which read “farmer soil toiled seeds / slick-shaped trees boil foil me”. This is a play on Jesus’s famous teaching referred to as “The Parable of the Sower,” a metaphorized story wherein a farmer sews seeds in a variety of places—good soil, bad soil, roadside, rocks—to various ends. Seeds in the best soil grow healthily, seeds in other places succumb to birds, drought, or weeds; all these things an extended metaphor about Jesus’s teachings. Relying on narrative structure as Jesus does, The Parable of the Sower stretches across nine verses in Luke 13. However, by redirecting this story through a sonic lens in the poem, the idea that a farmer’s seeds are subject to conditions outside the seeds themselves (and to some extent, the farmer; this is one of many facets to the parable) is rerouted to a musical retelling. More precisely, “farmer soil toiled seeds / slick-shaped trees boil foil me” relies upon a hyper-condensed sonic infrastructure: “farmer” is first introduced to generate a protagonist focus; “soil” permits alliteration and rhyme to overtake the couplet’s remainder; s styled alliteration surrounds the line-break (from “soil” to “trees,” and s sound appears five times); opening t consonants form chiastic enclosure to the alliteration; “soil,” “toil,” boil,” and “foil” rely on exact rhyme, evoking a single vowel sound across all verbs in the couplet.

Degree

M.F.A.

Advisors

Akbar, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Creative writing|Literature

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