Of swans, the wind and H.D. : an epistolary portrait of the poetic process

This dissertation is a qualitative case study of a woman's poetic process. Rather than examine creativity from the outside, I have viewed it from the inside in an attempt to document my direct engagement, as an emergent woman poet, with my own writing. I have conducted personal, poetic research throughout this project in an attempt to construct a self-portrait of my own creativity.To do so, I have not attempted to prove a thesis, or strive for scientific objectivity. As the portrait of a woman's imagination, this text narrates the winding course of a transformative journey brought about by my experimentation with a number of writing strategies, or heuristics. Because the drafting of poems is a highly unpredictable endeavour, I have drawn on various techniques, discarding one if I became blocked in order to experiment with the hoped for success of the next.Chief among the heuristics I have employed was a yearlong fictive correspondence that I entered upon with the Modernist poet, H.D. [Hilda Doolittle]. During our exchanges, I would send her my musing about the writing process along with my poetry which she would critique and send back to me. After completing this epistolary venture, I analysed what our letters revealed about what both blocked and freed my developing voice. I conducted this investigation by laying down a secondary strata of theoretical intertexts addressed to a "Dear Reader" who symbolized my audience made up of my academic committee, in specific, and of writing theorists and scholars in general.I then appended this two-tiered effort with an introduction, multiple conclusions, and a closing-poem. The resulting structure of my dissertation is that of a palimpsest, a genre that H.D. herself often employed to create a more fluid convergence of autobiographical and mythic motifs. Other heuristics such as key word analysis, bodywork, a photograph exercise, dreams, travel, and the retelling of a fairy tale have been called upon, as well, to further inspire this palimpsest of the poetic process