How do poems remember? What kinds of memory do poems register that factual, chronological accounts of the past are oblivious to? What is the self created by such practices of memory? To answer these ...questions, Uta Gosmann introduces a general theory of “poetic memory,” a manner of thinking that eschews simple-minded notions of linearity and accuracy in order to uncover the human subject’s intricate relationship to a past that it cannot fully know. Gosmann explores poetic memory in the work of Sylvia Plath, Susan Howe, Ellen Hinsey, and Louise Glück, four American poets writing in a wide range of styles and discussed here for the first time together. Drawing on psychoanalysis, memory studies, and thinkers from Nietzsche and Benjamin to Halbwachs and Kristeva, Gosmann uses these demanding poets to articulate an alternative, non-empirical model of the self in poetry.
Crooked Windows is a collection of poems that explore our longing for connection. Connection, in the context of these poems, is defined in multiple contexts: chance moments of connection encountered ...among strangers or while traveling, romantic connections that are often tenuous but leave a lasting mark, familiar connections that both trouble and define the speaker, and connections to history which, while often obscured, exert a profound influence on the present. These poems express existential yearning for connection with something even deeper: truth or uncertain cosmic forces. At the same time, they are contextualized by belief in an empirical worldview that undermines the more traditional religious frameworks of the past. What remains is a yearning for those sources of awe that might still inspire us: the looming beauty of the natural world, the heroism of human intimacy, and a belief in the power of love despite the odds against it—in evolutionary and interpersonal terms—ever having existed at all. Beginning from the speaker’s lower-class background in a trailer park, it traces his journey through disparate places and encounters and his eventual homecoming to the Pacific Northwest.
A series of interconnected poems and lyric essays exploring themes of place, perception, and performance. The pieces in this thesis explore, through the lenses of phenomenology and feminist theory, ...the question of shifting identities and perspectives and whether it is possible or desirable to unite these into a coherent narrative or sense of self. The role of landscape and geography, as well as art and images, in shaping identity, is also addressed. These pieces attempt to enact and embody the fragmentation and partiality that is their subject through the combination of poetry with lyric essays containing nonlinear narratives and juxtaposition of short, intentionally disjointed sections.
California Metaphysics is a collection of poetry and aesthetic theory written between Fall 2018 and Spring 2020. The front matter addresses how my primary motivation for writing poetry is to explore ...the balance between reality and fantasy in the modern world. In today’s capitalistic society, work and play are ordered into a dichotomy that separates waking and dreaming life of labor and imagination. Labor is separated into a hierarchy of legitimate and illegitimate, devaluing emotional and imaginative labor and systemically ignoring the value of play. This work/play dichotomy operates like the Madonna-whore dichotomy, identified by feminist psychoanalysis, in that it reinforces capitalist conceptions of legitimate labor versus illegitimate labor. Using motifs of myth, my poetry aims to critique this fundamental separation between fantasy and reality, adult and child, work and play, inner and outer life. My reasons for doing so rely on theories of poetics articulating how the imaginative life of a child is subordinated under the larger narrative of adult labor.
This study aims to explore the role of the human self in nature poetry by asking how poets use the natural world as the context for examination of the self. Through close readings of Robert Hass’s ...poem “On Squaw Peak” and Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s “Pale Rider”, this essay hones in on nature as setting, subject matter, and inspiration for the two poems. Beginning with the lens of craft, this essay then addresses the role nature plays for the speaker in each poem, and culminates with a discussion of how the inclusion of nature in a poem can lead to an experience of “poetic transcendence”.
A look at how the dramatic monologue as a poetic form has transformed since the 19th century by examining representative works from poets Robert Browning, Norman Dubie, and Frank Bidart.
“Every land / carves a people, marks them heavy like an / accent,” writes Gavin Lambert in his poem, “In Summer We Move Slowly,” and Lambert’s collection explores the connective tissue of that very ...relationship—the one between a land and its people. On the dirt roads and highways that take us along the continuum from geography to identity (part drunken road trip, part afternoon stroll, part shambling hike, part not-so reliable history tour) he takes us on a journey through a strange and familiar landscape where “Every place is sacred / or near a sacred place.”
The dissertation before you is a manuscript of poetry with an introduction. The introduction of the dissertation provides a context for understanding the governing aesthetics to the manuscript of ...poetry. The poems themselves exercise a technique which combines qualities of the lyric and the narrative, with a penchant for the fragmentary typography employed by late modernist poets, such as Lorine Niedecker and George Oppen. Topically, the poems attempt to reflect historical and spiritual insights from the perspective of a speaker who embodies the cultures of Korea and North America. Since poetry as discourse is indirect and interpretive, the emerging message of the manuscript concerns the result of a text written in English about topics not inherently of English.
