ANX: A creative thesis

• Main Author: Ho, Mark Adrian Crisostomo
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2018
• Subjects: Poetry; Poetry > Themes; motives; Poetry > Therapeutic use
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etd_masteral/5553
• Institution: De La Salle University

ANX is a collection of fifty poems that explores the tensions between stillness and motion, solicitude and disquiet, harmony and discord arising from and/or in response to anxiety vis-à-vis the poetic space. Here, the page the poetic space becomes the site for both my anxious persuasions and aspirations. As a person suffering from anxiety disorder, I, on the one hand, am given to the tranquility afforded by silence, stillness and order. Achieving silence, I believe, is an exercise in quelling, controlling, even containing, my anxiety. On the other hand, a part of my being also aspires for the excitement of action, motion and experimentation; there exists this other side of me that is pleading to break free from the stronghold of silence one that is more attuned to taking risks and letting the anxieties loose. This tense dichotomy between stasis and kinesis brought on by anxiety is what I have explored and embarked on in this collection, where the page becomes both instrument of and witness to the collisions and collusions between these binary oppositions. ANX responds to the heightened visual culture that is prevalent in the current era of digital information and social media, where the poem becomes the interface of anxiety and visuality. This collection of poems, which punctuates both poetic traditions and experimentation, is divided into five sections: Tales of Trauma and Tears; The Architecture of Muffled Woe; Resist the Quiets Creeping; The Mum Knocking on Your Door; and Lets Make Parables of Trees. Each section negotiates the following respectively: anxiety as a shared condition; death and grief as mans intercession with time; art as imprints of personal and cultural anxieties; emphasis as a postmodern trans-creation of anxiety; and nature as a mystical and divine healer.