Date of Award

Spring 1988

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.E64 C62

Abstract

I have entered a phase in my life in which I seem to be becoming distanced from the world around me. At this point, the cause does not matter: is it really age? culture? who knows? The change, separation, the forced adaptation brought about by experience is the subject the collection addresses. What happens next when one is set apart from everything, separated even from one's own rational self, by circumstance? The collection explores this phenomenon.

Themes and voice unify these poetic gesture studies of separation, death, memory and illusion. The title poem, "Gesture Studies," introduces the theme separation and also the voice which ties this mostly narrative collection together into a whole. No matter what the point of view, the narrators speak with the same voice: confrontational, unsentimental, non-judgmental, compelling.

These psychic explorations have for their landscapes relationships: between the persona in the poem and family, friends, death, and the self. Family relationships form the landscape for a large body of the poetry presented. The relationships range from tender to ironic to horrific.

The most important relationship in the collection, the collection's primary motif, occurs when the persona has to confront him or herself with recent or remote past, or with life's mystery, death. In many of these poems the two converge. In "Shooting Flamingos Near Buenos Aires,· the known and unknown emanate from the unnamable place in the persona's psyche where she finds a conflict between what she understands and a nameless fear that takes the form of sundown, A young doctor's experience in "The Occasion, the Third Day of Your First OB/GYN Rotation," illustrates the beginning of a struggle between the doctor and his reactions to birth and death, a struggle that he is, for the first time, becoming aware of.

The persona confronts the self in madness in several of the poems. In "Linen," the madness takes the form of eating a dress, because the memories and illusions of madness are, for the persona, embodied in the garment. In "This ls How They Are," memory and illusion merge in madness and that madness becomes the fragile construct the persona creates to enable her to deal with her father's addiction, "he did twist his fingers/ inside of her endlessly."

Each poem began as an image and the process of exploring imagined undertones became the poem. In this way the content is very loose, and I hope that, as a painter might say of a painting, each poem extends beyond the edges of its canvas, the rendering of image and situation. And, I hope, that the ritual of partaking of these poems is healing. I want to cure myself, and perhaps others, of the habit of turning away from life. It may be a hopeless goal; still it is a part of what motivates me to engage in the act of writing.

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DOI

10.25777/8eds-sg15

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