1,720,952 research outputs found
Refrains
No full text2015 Fall.A refrain is the line or lines repeated in music or verse. The poems that compose my thesis repeat themselves formally (the'’re all sonnets) and thematically. The central figure of the poems is Lester Lovely. Lester is a composite persona of my anxieties and poetic influences. He is made of parts of me and the things I know about but he is not the author and should not be read as such
Zero's blooming excursion
No full text2010 Spring.Includes bibliographic references.Covers not scanned.Print version deaccessioned 2022.This work covers a ten-year period, 1996 to 2006, finding the news and details of two and more lives together deriving from the planetary being involved in circumscribed localities--who prove so intimate with others as to seem suspicious. The work’s treatment, often explosions, of form, paints pictures while engaging in dialogue with itself. The work looks to its own performances in order to explore myth’s formation, potency, and reason for being. It examines the case for the lyric as a durable narrative form, inquiring into the actual and perceived histories of a locally embodied national psyche. It recovers various artifacts from recent history left behind which, upon resurfacing, are recognizable by their alterations. It embraces subjectivity, error, and frailty as operative ecological and social principals, arriving at readings of lives and texts transcending humanistic prejudices and presumptions
Shadow through hours
No full text2014 Spring.This manuscript of poems explores the possibility of constructing a relationship with another person via the experience of aesthetic fascination. Throughout the course of this manuscript, the initial gaze onto a beloved other necessarily rebounds on the self, deconstructing the intentional self until an aesthetic common ground opens between the manuscript's two characters. As its own depth of being opens up, one self becomes capable of more fully registering the existence of another. The manuscript progresses in four sections, beginning with a kernel of fascination that begins to starch into the comprehension of a self as it tests the boundaries and similarities between self and world. This section is followed by a second section in which the double existence of the self as the world gives rise to a psychological shadow that the idea of self casts wherever it goes on its worldly aspect. In the next section, the rings of a hunted, drowned self spread out as ripples of identity on an oceanic image of being. The manuscript concludes with two lovers half-asleep in an apartment, echoing the mythic repose of Vishnu and Lakshmi as they drift together on the unknowable water while dreaming the world
How to dress a fish
No full text2016 Spring.In 1901, my great-grandfather, Michael Chabitnoy, an orphan and full-blooded Aleut, was sent to the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania, far removed from his Alaska Native heritage. He died shortly after my grandfather was born, and as a result, my family grew up knowing very little about the history and culture of the Aleut, though we’ve benefited from the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act. This practice of boarding schools and displacement was common in the early twentieth century, but is glossed over in American history, as are the effects of this history on Natives today. As a result of early and brutal contact and relocation practices, much Aleut culture has been lost. This work seeks to redefine history through family, Aleut culture, and story to address questions of the relationship of culture, place, and the individual. In these poems I combine research into early encounters of the Russians with the natives of the Aleutian Islands, Aleut culture and traditional stories, and archived student records of my great-grandfather from the Carlisle Indian School with influence by the work of contemporary poets, native and non-native, that I have read closely while at CSU to explore family history and the Aleut culture as well as questions of the relationship of culture, place, and the individual and how language can reflect and remake experience and meaning. Heavily influenced by research and documentary poetics, this work seeks to provide witness to and understanding of the Aleut. This work is significant because it attempts to realize the potential effectiveness of using poetry as an act of witness and tool for social change. It demonstrates how language is capable of shaping one’s experience of the world, and how language can thus ultimately reshape one’s understanding of that experience. Through poetry, it examines the history and culture of a specific people, the Aleut of Alaska, as well as the history of the Native American experience on a more inclusive level through examining the history and experience of the Carlisle Indian School and modern complexities of Native identity. By incorporating excerpts from my great-grandfather’s student records, borrowing language from early ethnologies, and engaging with traditional Unangan storytelling motifs, it engages with documentary poetics to give witness not only to the treatment this people has already endured, but also through the incorporation of the Alutiiq language and traditions to give testimony to a people that persists today. Its interrogation of history and identity emphasizes the complexities of race and the politics behind every telling of history. This work is personally significant as a gesture of gratitude and act of reuniting with my ancestral culture
Drift
No full text2022 Summer.The poems in Drift explore cyclical, nonlinear ways of experiencing and viewing time and our relationship to the natural world. Centered in the coastal landscapes of Southern California, these poems examine how ecology shifts over time. Interspersed throughout the collection are poems from the point of view of a young speaker as she revisits her childhood memories, connects them to the present day, and imagines how her present self might evolve in the future. Both the landscape-centered and human-centered poems question what appears stable and fixed, exploring the ways memory and landscape are malleable, fluid, and interconnected
Blue sail come cover
No full text2020 Summer.Blue Sail Come Cover is a study of love—an investigation of care blurred by fear and gratitude, a searching for sign in world and word, both. These poems explore conditions of loss and fear, and within those wounds, the necessity of love and its manifestations—patience and care. This manuscript's central personas, a lyric I and a lyric you, encounter omen, song, and the sky's changeable weather, ever in search and in awe of a more companionable world. As they move through geographies of memory, grief, fear, and the American Midwest in search of a kinder ontology, they discover a means by which to stay. While explicit internal and external landscapes remain legible throughout, these poems are rooted most by their assertions of how care can keep us. As the I and you transform across the three sections, they attend to silence and song within themselves and in their environment, eventually discovering a more welcoming world. This manuscript explores how attention—to the world, each other, and the lyric—can enact the sort of faith that helps people stay. In Blue Sail Come Cover, the objective isn't to solve life's big questions, but to learn how to live with them. It is a book of discovery, slowly uncovering its own ethos for living and dwelling, for caring for one another through every joy, sorrow, and ordinary day. It is my hope, then, that these poems are first and foremost companionable—that the I and you who occupy these pages are participants in the very world we live in. In this project, I am interested in troubling the I/thou tradition and seeing what these pronouns can accomplish when freed from static identities. These pages formally and substantively probe lyric tropes—I/thou, sky, birds, song—in an attempt to unearth larger questions surrounding the trouble and necessity of a lyric voice
Commedia
No full text2012 Spring."Commedia" is a poetry manuscript focused on etymology and cosmogony viewed through stock characters from traditional Commedia dell'arte improvisational theater. The text focuses on the characters ability to dream a new world into reality, pulling from the traditions of several ancient creation myths (Welsh, Norse, Greek, and Roman, among others) as well as the tactics of visual and literary Magical Realism. These poems are carefully focused on the dream-space as "real," in the sense of Slavoj Žižek's philosophy of the real, rather than dreams as an interpretive space (Freud, Lacan)
Of a vale
No full text2017 Spring.Includes bibliographical references.Of a Vale uses the form of the poetic Bildungsroman to account for the formation of a poetic and a subjectivity, all while staying aware of the stakes, limits, and implications of the generic framework that it operates within, as well as the ways that all frameworks become generic, genetic. In five parts, each containing narratives of the development of a speaking subject, of a poetic consciousness, and of an erotogenic body, this manuscript tries to engage with and subvert mythic accounts of the "I." As Dan Beachy-Quick once noted of Of a Vale, this book traces "a coming into consciousness in the medium of that consciousness." Becoming conscious of its medium, this book takes the media of consciousness to be pre-given; that is, it takes the media of consciousness to be the word, the world, and the body. Each of these entities is constructive of, but wholly exterior to, the Self. Thus, the medium of consciousness lies outside the consciousness. Here, in Of a Vale, I seek some way to think my way back into feeling, back into a "global nonverbal experience." Here, I try to think past thinking. I try to hold out a living hand. I try to hold a living hand
Un/limited
No full text2018 Summer.UN/LIMITED is a collection of poems divided into three primary sections, moving from a group with multiple versions of "I" through to one long poem with multiple versions of "You." Focused primarily around themes of grief, emotional instability, and maturity, the book attempts to parse what it means to be a poet and an empathetic human being in a contemporary world—and a single body—thrumming with limitless potential and possibility
Little mercy
No full text2021 Spring.Little Mercy is an exercise in interrogating the natural and exploring the intimately personal. Set in a cabin in the foothills of the Bighorns of Wyoming, the manuscript hopes to reach towards the universal through attending to the particular. This work engages the human and more-than-human worlds as equal partners in pursuing otherwise inaccessible truths. Engaging in multitude of forms derived from a variety of poetic traditions, Little Mercy hopes foremost to make its own language anew. The ethic of this work is grounded in a belief in the reciprocity of attention, attunement, and care
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