Title
Sponsor
Portland State University. Department of English
Advisor
Michele Glazer
Date of Award
Spring 7-27-2017
Document Type
Closed Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Fine Arts (M.F.A.) in Creative Writing
Department
English
Physical Description
1 online resource (vi, 113 pages)
Subjects
Memory -- Poetry, Psychic trauma -- Poetry
DOI
10.15760/etd.5895
Abstract
The poems in this collection are in search of. They are digging through the debris of memory, of memory blurred by trauma or degraded by time or worn thin from retrieval, from repeated examination—an ongoing attempt to apprehend. They are poems of internalized violence, addiction, domestic upheaval, sexual abuse, assault, abandonment, separation. They are also poems of adoption, of the overlap between stories, of roots and more roots, of tangled histories, of the point of rupture being the point of origination. As such, they are unsure of how to proceed, how to present themselves: they are self-conscious poems, anxious to communicate yet at times unable to break free of their own spiraling repetitions: the ritualized performance of pain as both an attempt to speak back to suffering as well as unintended proliferation of such. Compulsion. Depression. Suicidal ideation. Of course what we are talking about is the longevity of grief, its many mutations. How we learn to recognize it for what it is. What we can do with it.
Persistent Identifier
http://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/22723
Recommended Citation
Mottram, Darla, "Matryoshka" (2017). Dissertations and Theses. Paper 4011.
https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/open_access_etds/4011
10.15760/etd.5895
Description
This thesis is only available to students, faculty and staff at PSU.