Indeterminacy and Chanson

Indeterminacy and Chanson considers uncertainty from both academic and creative perspectives, the former through the dissertation, Indeterminacy: An Investigation, which investigates the specific idea of Indeterminacy, and the latter in the accompanying Chanson: A Creative Collection. The dissertation's investigation of Indeterminacy is undertaken from various viewpoints including the relationship between Indeterminacy and metaphor, the use of the term Indeterminacy in literary theory (and the dissertation's proposal of its own definition), the related consideration of John Ashbery's 'The Skaters' and Lyn Hejinian's My Life, and the final bridging chapter which relates the foregoing academic analysis to the creative collection. Chanson is a collection of poetry that comprises eleven sequences of poems in various forms of presentation, ranging from single and multi-column arrangements to prose poetry and images. Its time of writing can be summarised as from the final phase of the pandemic, through the brief phase of apparent recovery, and on to the renewed uncertainty of the current period. Its poems combine personal experience and related writing, and elements from historical literary texts including the anonymous La Chanson de Roland, Chaucer's House of Fame and Jean de La Fontaine's version of the fable, ''The Wolf and the Lamb''. Chanson: A Creative Collection's subject matter is approached from experiential and analytical perspectives, the latter including the relationship between writing and mortality, textual and visual expression, the collection of different objects and their association, and the inherent uncertainty (if not failure) of language to recount experience. Indeterminacy is not a word used in Chanson but a principal result of its writing was the discovery the essential condition of the poems is uncertainty, in various different ways, and related attempts, through the compositional process, to achieve a measure of certainty, failed or otherwise.