The Aesthetics of Everyday Life: The Poetics of Frank O'Hara, Barbara Guest and Lyn Hejinian & Belonging is a Prolonged Thirst

This thesis examines the rising demand for attention to everyday life in the United States in the post 1945 period. It explores this phenomenon by analysing the work of three poets: Frank O'Hara, Barbara Guest, and Lyn Hejinian. It is comprised of two parts: the creative collection entitled Belonging is a Prolonged Thirst and the critical research. This collection reveals that the search for belonging is an important element of every life due to alienation and provides different perspectives of understanding and creating belonging in both reality and poetry. The research on the three poets' poetics and the philosophers' everyday theories has expanded the meaning and expression of belonging. In other words, this collection is an integration of poetic practice, theoretical investigation, personal reflection and emotional evolution as a poet, a researcher and an individual. The critical research introduces the social, cultural, political and aesthetic circumstances to contextualise the growing attention to daily life and to reveal the perilous ramification of alienation or non-belonging. Due to the close interrelation between philosophical theories and poetic experiments of everyday life, this thesis investigates these two streams in tandem so as to more fully understand the everyday. It draws attention to everyday theories of Henri Lefebvre, Guy Debord, John Dewey, and Ludwig Wittgenstein to reveal the diversity and possibility of reconsidering the everyday through the work of O'Hara, Guest, and Hejinian. These three poets transform the familiar yet unknown everyday through a multiplicity of innovative strategies and poetics that reflects the four mentioned theorists' understanding of the quotidian. It also articulates how these poetic strategies mitigate alienation and create reconnection for them to re-belong in the everyday. By exploring theories of the everyday and creative strategies of reconstructing daily experience in poetry, this thesis illustrates the urgency and significance of the reassessment of the everyday through poetry. In addition, it also demonstrates the vast possibility of reviewing and re-experiencing the quotidian from a diversity of poetic strategies.