Hello, my name is Haley Chung and I’m a senior
pursuing a BFA in Creative Writing with a concentration in Poetry. I’m working
with professor and poet, Susan Tichy on my senior thesis which is comprised of
a twenty poem manuscript and a number of close readings on poems from published
writers. My thesis attempts to unveil the concept of “home”. It poses the
question: “As society becomes more interracial and intercultural, how does
affect our interactions with physical space and place?” I became interested in
this project through self-reflection. I began to wonder about my personal
experience with the world around me through a bi-racial lens. Having grown up
in an interracial family and in multiple places around the United Sates, I felt
that my childhood was in constant motion, embarking on new landscapes, people,
accents, etc. I wanted to explore this inconstant, and at times, transitory
self. This project not only explores my identity right now but will help me
understand my identity moving forward in life as a writer and human being. One
of my obvious goals is to be a poet but I also aspire to become a professor for
creative writing in the future. By
working closely with such an intricate topic and experiencing what it’s like to
complete a “poetry research project”, I can assist future creative writing
students with their endeavors .While asking and thinking about these big
questions, I’m also writing and reading poems every week to help gain a better
understanding of my research topic. Reading the works of other poets is
extremely helpful when trying to develop my own language as a poet. Doing this
also provides a great source of inspiration throughout the writing
process. For instance, I discovered this
week to “play with form”. During this week’s writing process, I tried shaping
my poems differently in order to add aesthetic and sonic diversity to my body
of work. I got this idea from my mentor after she gave me valuable feedback on
my first batch of poems I had written for this project. I was also reading
through a book of poems by Patricia Lockwood who helped me think differently
about poetic form through her ability to shape abstract story-telling and
re-telling of her own childhood.
