final project/poem/ RESURGAM

For my final project I plan on writing a long narrative poem (short story?) that will attempt to juggle many gothic elements. Much of the major themes I think have been/will be drawn from Stoker's Dracula, and also Coppola's film version, with specific regard to "I shall rise from my own death.... with all the powers of evil" &c. This really interested me, and our frequent discussions about the interaction between literature and film will definitely be prevalent in my poem. The idea that many novels and children's books become movies- but not poems draws my attention and the "speaker" of the poem will be a sort of interaction between traditional poetic techniques, and an almost film-viewer/audience. I guess the word for this might be metapoem or metascreenplay. I imagine the setting as a corrupted version of Wuthering Heights, the sublime, picturesque English landscape will be the basis- and somehow I would like to incorporate the desolateness of the Frankenstein landscape. The idea brought up in Dracula of polyglot will certainly be addressed, and although not to the degree of Finnegan's Wake, it will break from normative English speech patters- which I believe lends itself well the the poetic form. Bringing up Finnegan's Wake just now, I think I will try to supplant the Wuthering Heights idea of mansions and estates in a very picturesque landscape onto an Irish setting- in a kind of disjunctive/confusing display of Irish aristocracy (an unusually sublime idea in my mind) The principal characters of the poem will be involved in murder, patricide, resurrection, and vengeance. All pretty good elements for "Gothic" in my mind; and though unvampired, the story will incorporate a sort of ghost-situation. Combining verisimilitude (seems a common technique in the gothic texts we've read so far- a desire to present themselves as "real") with the fantastic- I believe the poem will live in a universe of its own blending fear of the known and unknown reality- and distorted reality. I plan on leaving 'holes' in the story a little bit to let the reader do some of the work as far is internalizing the poem. This could be influenced by its use and control of time (chronology will certainly be thrown by the wayside, but also, an uneasy feeling between what century it takes place in will be apparent. Some elements will seem more classical while some will be sparkly modern.) I think this is conveyed in Dracula and Interview... Because of vampires' inherent need/desire to become “out of time.” I kind of imagine the poem through a German Romanticism lens- fragmentation certainly, and occasional instances of humor I think, and maybe just Aestheticism- with a hint of this kind of that hyper-capitalistic American ideal we lately discussed- that 'capitalistic-got-whats-coming-to-him' facet (Marxism?). I intend this to be a long poem- not quite The Odyssey or Divine Comedy, but certainly longer than a haiku or limerick. That is to say, approximately the length of Eliot's The Waste Land, a poem which I would consider post-Gothic in many ways- and will probably lend a lot to my own poem. I know the title already will be "RESURGAM" and, as I will mention in the poem, I see the principal female character being played by Sophia Bush.