Striking Legacies: Place Attachment and the Post Industrial Landscape in the Poetry of Helen Mort, IanParks and Tony Harrison

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My thesis is a critical-creative project. The critical component will explore place attachment in the context of post-industrial landscapes in the poetry of contemporary poets from northern English post-industrial locations. This will be supported by, and in dialogue with, a book-length portfolio of my own poems on the same theme. Part of my creative work will include the development of a film-poem script, exploring imagistic metaphor and how this can be translated into a visual medium that is evocative of post-industrial location and the person-place attachment relationship. The film-poem will also examine how poetic form can be used to dictate action in scriptwriting, in the context of Tony Harrison's and Helen Mort's incorporation of scriptwriting elements in their poetry, most notably Harrison's film-poems such as 'The Shadow of Hiroshima' and Helen Mort's 'Ex-Industrial (a trailer)'; this element will be presented as a written script. The critical aspect interrogates the impact and representation of the post-industrial landscapes presented in the poetry of Helen Mort, Ian Parks and Tony Harrison, three significant contemporary poets from different generations, all of whom write about working-class experience and its transcendence in their northern hometowns. A substantial proportion of the poems thus far developed as part of this project are due for publication in March 2019, as part of my forthcoming selection (of 25 pages) in an anthology of three new writers for Soundswrite Press. This thesis builds on critical, creative, and analytical research skills developed during my MA study, particularly my dissertation (which was awarded a distinction, and which interrogated the meaning and impact of home in the development of poetry; for this I interviewed Ian Parks as preliminary research into his use of place). I have further developed these skills during my first year of PhD-level study,incorporating both psychoanalytic and sociological theory, and I have at this point completed a 7000-word chapter exploring Helen Mort's depiction of place. My research also utilises skills I have developed through the Royal Court Young Writers' Programme and BBC script feedback and development, as well as my experience of preparing a poetry manuscript for publication. The film-poem aspect will also draw on my undergraduate experience in European Theatre Arts and my scriptwriting background, as my understanding and experience of both script and poetry will enable me to engage with poetic form in a dramatic context.