For a rainbow to be seen, the sun must be behind an observer who is facing falling rain

This practice-led PhD project consisting of a manuscript of poetry and dissertation, explores poetry as a translation of, and emergence out of, a photography practice. Through this translation of one medium into another, I have devised the term ‘light-writing’, as both the form and method of my poetry. Drawing on queer theorists, affect theorists and poetics scholars, alongside a careful selection of critical writing made by practising poets and artists, I suggest that light-writing does critical aesthetic and theoretical work with the poetic image, and opens space for thinking and feeling with difference. This approach is demonstrated  through a full-length manuscript of poetry, entitled In the Printed Version of Heaven, which layers the affective power of image to reach through varied forms of address, both observational and self-reflexive. Drawing on poetic techniques which generate juxtaposition, such as collage, ekphrasis, self-address, and negation, the lyric voice of these poems present simultaneously as: gentle-delusional-philosophical-threatening-gay. The dissertation, For a Rainbow to be Seen, the Sun Must be Behind an Observer Who is Facing Falling Rain, as a critical form of light-writing, contextualises my poetry. It does this by framing each chapter around different concerns. These include the process of developing the manuscript, structuring devices used to organise the work, and questions of tone in relation to my lyric voice. Light-writing in this thesis is inscribed as both a form and method; for creating impossible images; navigating the crossing and collapse of boundaries; and for synthesising what I describe as a self-ridiculous lyric voice. In this diverse array of what light-writing signifies, including ascribing poetic images as slyly critical aesthetic surfaces, the project reveals itself as 'a special alignment of things'.