Publication Date
5-2024
Advisor(s) - Committee Chair
Tom Hunley, Marla Zubel, Michael Seidler
Degree Program
Department of English
Degree Type
Master of Fine Arts
Abstract
“The Good Place That Cannot Be” is what Stephen Kampa called a “collocative” poetry collection, spanning Vaughn Hayes’s poetic output during his MFA. As both the fatalism in the title suggests, the speaker of these poems wrestles with his ideas of poetic romanticism and artifice as they run aground in brutal reality.
The first section circumscribes the more idealistic side of the poet, and, in it, an attempt to impose romance and dreams onto his rather quotidian life. The second section is one sprawling poem (previously published in The Mid-Atlantic Review) and it sets the stage for the overarching conflict between the sections that surround it. The final section skewers these endeavors and shows the reader that history and familial woe may not allow for such quixotic whimsy.
The collection is organized this way because, while collecting them, Hayes found that most of his poems from that time contained either a pastoral dream or its brutal awakening. Thus, this structural principle is organic, but not narrow in terms of narrative. The hope is that these concepts tie the poems together thematically and provide readers with an interrogation of romanticism as such.
Disciplines
Arts and Humanities | Creative Writing | Poetry
Recommended Citation
Hayes, Tyler, "THE GOOD PLACE THAT CANNOT BE: POEMS" (2024). Masters Theses & Specialist Projects. Paper 3716.
https://digitalcommons.wku.edu/theses/3716