Date of Award

Spring 1985

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

English

Program/Concentration

English

Committee Director

Bruce Weigl

Committee Member

Philip Raisor

Call Number for Print

Special Collections; LD4331.E64C35

Abstract

My family is most often, to use Richard Hugo's phrase, "the triggering device" of my poetry. My poems about family are an attempt to understand why there cannot be a complete intimacy. From that dilemma grows the question of what, gave me the idea we were supposed to be hugging and kissing instead of cursing and slamming doors and then deciding we are human after all. These poems are a record of my discovery that we are individuals who have to accept our separateness but want to hang on to some form oi togetherness; they represent my acceptance of the fact that "I want to cut the cords" yet at the same time want to "tie bows and weave them into lace." Through the act of writing poems, I am able to find a form for this otherwise ambiguous and abstract struggle.

I often begin with a single word, phrase, or image that grows and undergoes metamorphosis, becoming, through imagination, something different and, hopefully, larger. I've learned as a poet not to limit myself to my original intention, to allow the poems their own direction. Thus, a snakeskin found on a fishing trip turns into a person who has been flung through a windshield and, finally, into an exploration of a person's fascination with pain and death.

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DOI

10.25777/ehfc-4f59

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