Date of Award

Spring 2010

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Fine Arts (MFA)

Department

English

Program/Concentration

Creative Writing

Committee Director

Luisa A. Igloria

Committee Member

Remica L. Bingham

Committee Member

Timothy Seibles

Call Number for Print

Special Collections; LD4331.E64 D69 2010

Abstract

The poems of I Have to Tell You Something will hopefully invoke the spirit of duende, that city of sinister images Federico Garcia Lorca so passionately described. They are my attempt to make sense of the reality I wake to everyday, and they are a challenge to my perception and my audience's perception of the realities that have been created by the technological and digital machine of the 20th and 21st centuries. In these pages is a collection of highly imagistic poems, reminiscent of the imagist poetry of the late 1960s and early 1970s. They live by the W.C. Williams credo that "there are no ideas but in things," offering a collage of surreal images, carefully juxtaposed to create an overall sense that one is always living in a world of dreams. The language is meditative and self-reflective, the images performing a lovely and dangerously dark dance, simmering in the throat. The speaker in these poems is searching for truth, a purpose for existence; he shouts his name into the air, he consults maps in search of his home; he lives on the outside of everyone and everything, desperately trying to find his way back into his life. He is surrounded by the presence of death, the slow moving death of isolation and loneliness. These are poems of a sad man, but a sad man always on the edge of hope. The poems ask readers to "rise out of the sheets, like a zoo on a Sunday" or to take notice of “the rusting shovel" which is already outside "under the pine boughs" turning their graves. Throughout the collection, we also discover a sexy kidnapper in a red skirt, a junkie moon, a blues band playing on a mailman's lawn, a bank robber with a love note, a marching band gathered around a pool looking for their tuba player, a child being pulled from a man's throat, and a ghost carrying a mirror in the rain. These poems leap between the conscious and subconscious, reality and unreality, and I sincerely hope they will, if just for a moment, alter the angle by which you view your own life, and in doing so, rattle your body's cage of bones.

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DOI

10.25777/c8hr-d658

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