Cycles of Awe Project: Prototype Three

I have my three poems completed. I plan on putting them on my own personal blog (my personal angle) and on Google+ with tags specific to my topic. Hopefully this generates interest and responses from relevant and interested online communities. Any comments or suggestions are welcome.

Cycles of Awe Bibiography

(sorry this post is so late. I'm doing massive catch up after a long two weeks)

Working Thesis
People experience cycles of awe (similar to how characters experience the hero's journey [ps thank you +Greg for the comment about the heroic journey]) for two reasons: first, to return to personal sources of awe because of their psychology, as these sources provides for a spiritual enlightenment, comfort, or resolution; second, whether accidentally or purposefully, these cycles continue because people become stuck in an ever circling loop without ever reaching an enlightened, comforted, or resolved state.

Cycles in Awe Project: Prototype Two

My work in progress!

I mentioned at the bottom of this post how I changed my poetry format from my original ideas to a roundel poem. I would like to do maybe three poems (one for each book I'm studying) that incorporate the ideas I'll be discussing in my final paper (cycles of awe). I'm not sure this is working the way I want, or where to take it next. The poem has not been edited yet, but here is my first draft for the first poem about Alice visiting Wonderland. Let me know what you think. I'm hoping the poem talking about Alice cycling back to Wonderland, which ultimately leads to her becoming self aware, can be like the Dancing Dissertation videos we watched; the poem should be a small representation of what my paper discusses, just as the dancing dissertations tried to tell the main ideas of the dissertation.

Cycle One

Is it a wonder? She calls it Wonderland.
Curious and enthralled she wanders under
spells of caterpillar "who's?," Cheshire "where's?." And
is it a wonder

that one so young would cycle back to plunder
the cakes, rich teas, red queens, strange things odd yet grand?
She goes for fun but finds herself asunder;

madness would split her self in half. Yet she stands
anew. Sane. Tolerant. Aware. Her blunders
from asking "who I am" she can now withstand.
Is it a wonder?

Cycles of Awe Treatment

Treatment of Final Paper: Click through for the Google Doc. Basically I will be examining the psychology of awe and how people go through cycles of awe as children or as adults, how we encounter awe differently, and what happens when we have an "awe moment" but do nothing with it.

Prospective Venue: I haven't found anything that exactly correlates with what I'm writing about, but I think I could swing my paper for these potential venues.

1. http://www.cfplist.com/ has a lot of options for current calls for paper. I highly encourage all of you to take a look if you're having problems finding venues.
2. Scottish Studies is interested in readings of Peter Pan and perpetual childhood. Since I will be looking at Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan in terms of perpetual awe and childhood, I think it could be interested in at least some aspects of my paper.
3. SF/F Now is interested in exploring the current research into the fantastic and the ways in which fantasy and "the weird" grapple with and illuminate social issues. Since I will be talking about Wonderland and Neverland and why these places are sources in which children return to, I could talk about the social contexts of why people return to fantastical or "weird places" as sources of development or escape.
4. 100 Dubliners invites any paper on Dubliners (since it's the 100 anniversary of the book) which is brilliant since a good portion of my paper will be analyzing several of the short stories contained in Dubliners.
5. Previous post for possible venues is another collection of places I could look to for other venues if previous ones don't work.

What's Next: I need to start getting concrete details and proof for my points. Quotes, more analysis, maybe even more secondary sources that look at the psychology of Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, and Dubliners. I also need to make sure that my outline works and isn't just a list with too much explanation that loses the reader.

**side note: I think for my creative project I might do a roundel poem because those are a bit easier to write compared to reverse poetry or palindrome poetry. Same ideas will apply to this style of poem as they wound have with those other poetry forms as I mentioned in my comments to Tara and Greg.

Project Prototype One

Creative Commons License 2.0
Road to Neverland by imsad

My final paper will be examining the psychology of awe and the cycles of it. Why do we turn back to the same sources of awe (like Alice to Wonderland or Peter Pan to Neverland)? Do we get caught in a cycle of experiencing an awe moment, then returning to the mundane (like the people in Dubliners)? I want to incorporate these cycles, and have decided to take one, two, or all of the options below as my final project.

Option 1: Mirrored or Palindrome Poetry

In case you don't remember, a palindrome is a word, phrase, verse, or sentence that reads the same forward or backward. In a mirrored or palindrome poem, the words read the same backwards or forwards like in these two examples. I could try this and incorporate the books I'm going to explore as the subject.

Option 2: Reverse Poetry
Where reading a reverse poem, one direction tells one meaning, then reading it backwards tells another message. Just last week a teenager's reverse poem went viral on twitter. It would be brilliant to tell something about the cycles of awe reading negatively one way, then positively the next. I just have to really practice this style of poem.

Option 3: Circle Poetry
There are a couple different variations of circle poetry. There is visual poetry where I could write poems in circles or circular styles. This book contains one variation of visual circle poetry. It's very simple. This blog section is dedicated to another style, though some of these poems I have a hard time understanding. Another aspect to circular poetry includes repeating first and last lines, or coming back to the same places in the start and finish. I'd like to be able to do that too.

I could put these poems online with specific labels or tags under the creative commons license to give people access to them. Or I could write one of these poems and make a simple YouTube video to cultivate my ideas there too. Any thoughts would be great on how I could get these poems out there. Or if you have any idea of a specific audience to target that would be great too.