Date of Award

Summer 1983

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.E64P65

Abstract

Language is the process through which we try to understand each other. As children we develop a sense of denotation; we learn how much better we can talk about the world if we can accurately identify "flower" as a “tulip", for example. Later on, syntax is added to the choices of words we pick and it colors the meaning and depth of what we can say; language is connotative as well as denotative. The complexity and richness of the options while putting together a poem bring us even closer to being able to express and understand ourselves and others accurately.

When Yeats wrote "the center cannot hold" he rescued the world from chaos by transforming that chaos into art. In my collection, Three Disappearances, I write about disintegration because I see it in everything and feel it so strongly. When I write about a woman in El Salvador, it is because I want to understand her sense of loss; when I write about a woman who has lost her mind and is discovered sorting socks in a department store, it is because I want to understand what led her there; when I write about my mother's death, it is because I want to understand my own loss; and when I write about relationships of men and women, it is to explore the paradox of emptiness inside love.

If I write about loss it is because I fear for those I love and for myself if I should lose them. Memory works in conjunction with loss--memory works against absolute loss by retrieving some part of the experience. The glimpses we have of each other's lives, the know­ ledge we carry about ourselves and others shores up memory. Without memories of my mother, I wouldn't be able to confront her death. I constantly search for what I remember of her life, to feed me as an artist, to nurture myself with her life.

Through the experience of loss and the effort to understand and retrieve experience by writing, I have come to discover the nature of the human heart and its interactions. I have seen myself and my dilemmas in many others, and I have wanted to take the experience of others into myself in order to understand. To understand other people as complexly as possible, to be able to write about them and their human­ ness is a highly specialized form of communication. If it is the nature of the world to fall apart and disintegrate, it is the responsibility of the artist to find some way to hold it together, to find a language that heals us.

This is what I have tried to do in these poems: to order the chaos This is what I have tried to do in these poems: to order the chaos around me through a close attention to detail, a studied attention to craft, and with a belief that the language by which we speak and imagine on a daily basis can be made into poetry.

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DOI

10.25777/t4mv-9r26

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