First Advisor

Primus St. John

Term of Graduation

Spring 2001

Date of Publication

5-16-2001

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (M.A.) in English

Department

English

Language

English

Physical Description

1 online resource (57 pages)

Abstract

Any abstract discussion of poetry must enlist a terminology wholly inadequate to its purpose, which is purportedly to clarify but which often serves to obfuscate or disempower the original language. The terms enlisted here for such purpose are "self" and "other." This collection of poems explores the distances and affinities between the self and others or other-ness. Exploration initiates movement. Because the self cannot arrive at the other, the poems resist finality, but seek to attain an economy of motion and direction that creates tension with a poem's necessity to come to a temporal conclusion. This gathering of momentum is one way to give the poem a life beyond the page, a life in the emotions. The title of this collection suggests such a continuing movement, a self in proximity to others, a quiet which is pregnant with meaning or meanings that words can't capture.

The three sections can be seen as organized around various manifestations of the other. The first section, "The World Should Lurch Forward in Joy," deals with the other primarily as the object of romantic love, but the movement of desire begins in the first two poems with childhood and carries over into adult life, encountering loss, consolation, and irony. As the title of this section suggests, the world should lurch forward in joy, but it is not always the case that the movement is a lurching, or that the direction is forward, or that it occurs with or in joy.

The second section, "Night Audits," considers the other in terms of familial affections. The title suggests a kind of taking stock of particular relations, and the darkness that surrounds all connections we establish with one another--a darkness felt more acutely in contrast with our most ardent affections. If the second section, with its focus on personal relations, represents a movement of condensation, the third section, "Other Evenings," represents a movement of expansion. The other here is frequently a stranger or strangers, but the poems often seek to relate to that other in emotionally intimate ways.

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Persistent Identifier

https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/44736

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