The Blind Arcade Thesis

(2011). The Blind Arcade . 10.25148/etd.FI11050601

thesis or dissertation chair

authors

  • Svenson, David C

abstract

  • THE BLIND ARCADE is a collection of poems chronicling several of the pressing conditions of contemporary American life: poverty and class, sex, violence, hunger, longing and mourning, and the inverse of the latter, requited love and emotional ecstasy. The poems are set in crowded markets, on trains and in apartment bedrooms, city squares and campus quads, dentist chairs, bridges, riverbanks, and kitchens. This contemporary and familiar backdrop dictates the form of most of these poems to be free verse, although terza rima, ekphrastic, haiku, and prose forms are also utilized. The book presents its poems in three sections. As if a series of decorative arches in a blind arcade, they are not broken down into themes. Rather, they are each utilized and are ordered around the weight of their individual topics to demonstrate the capriciousness of life.

publication date

  • March 7, 2011

keywords

  • Bridges
  • Cancer
  • Cars
  • Death
  • Love
  • Narrative
  • Poems
  • Poetry
  • Prostate
  • Whitman

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)