My poetry portfolio is 75 pages long, and consists of single poems as well as two series. The first series includes the ‘Good Work’ poems, which explore different ideas of ‘good work’ based on characters’ occupations, preoccupations and mental perspectives. The second series is the ‘Makar’ poems, depicting an imagined world in which the poet is a guardian angel or guiding force. The style of my poetry varies from lyric to prose poetry, with a few language-focused abstract poems, and more formal styles, like a villanelle. Dreaming and waking are two themes that reflect aspects of reality and perception. Much of my portfolio is rooted in reflections of identity: Identity in terms of work, and the story we tell to the world about what we do; identity in terms of inter-personal relationships and how those connections form who we become; identity in terms of memory, and the story of who we have been; and identity in terms of the stories we tell ourselves about who we think we are. And if none of those stories align, what kind of fragmented self-identity does that reveal? The narrative poems often use different characters and personas in order to enact these lenses of identity. Even with only a few epistles in the collection, my poetry has been influenced by the epistolary ideas of separation and reunion (as critic Altman describes them: ‘bridge’ and ‘distance’). Similarly, the prose poems often riff on the unification and distancing of various themes, in a mediation of together- and apart-ness. I have used letters and diary-entries as addresses to the audience, and also as invitations for the reader to access the poem through different points of entry. My academic thesis focuses on the utilisation of epistles in contemporary American prose poetry. It is 26,000 words, and is divided into three sections: focused on Epistles: Poems by Mark Jarman; Letters to Kelly Clarkson by Julia Bloch, and The Desires of Letters by Linda Brown; and Dear Editor: Poems by Amy Newman. Why are we still writing poems as letters when we don’t habitually write letters for personal correspondence anymore? The poem-as-letter, or epistle, offers the ability to craft complex relationships within the reader/author, writer/recipient, and open/closed dynamics of intimacy in literature. The criticism is framed within the methodology of reader-response theory, and draws upon examples of epistles in history and literature to connect and establish themes.

A poetry chapbook. / https://dc.etsu.edu/alumni_books/1011/thumbnail.jpg

Winner of the 2011 Split Oak Press Chapbook Prize. / https://dc.etsu.edu/alumni_books/1009/thumbnail.jpg

A poetry chapbook. / https://dc.etsu.edu/etsu_books/1148/thumbnail.jpg

https://dc.etsu.edu/etsu_books/1153/thumbnail.jpg

This collection is a conversation between the internal vs. external self--"vs." being operative, as I'm considering these things in tension or argument. I see writing as inhabiting a middle ground between thought and action, spanning both the internal and external act of communication simultaneously. The mouth seems an apt site for exploring this duality of experience. It is the great molder of language as it becomes. And mouth as passageway. I often experience the intersection of the inner/outer as obstructed or knotted. I wonder how one connects to an other given this blockage of passage. I'm thinking about this blockage as the felt reaching and indirect contact inherent in communication and by extension, relationship. I'm interested in how the impulse to connect emerges distorted and what it looks like to have this revealed in the body. I recognize the experience of love as capable of transcending this distortion. These poems reflect also, on how this relates to spaces, rooms--the inside or outside of a house being analogous to inside or outside the body. I'm interested in giving the internal environment greater voice--seeing how objects rest, make meaning and animate this environment. Stillness and life of the inanimate (or dead) feel crucial to the interior space. I'm interested in the object's capacity to extend beyond the illusion of ownership (and the life of the body). I see the particles of the human body (skin, hair) speaking to mortality and also to the resilience of what is lost. These poems seek beauty or truth in the small, ordinary thing--they see the enormity of an ant. This beauty is of course, not without suffering and futility. Rather, the experience of beauty is a simultaneously celebratory and heartbreaking act. All of this is very serious (and thus also very comic).

b o y is an extended lyric poem/essay that uses repetition, fragment, and syntax to continually build a form that continually falls apart. The poem is both a meditation and an investigation into loss, and into the relationship of loss to identity, with making a poem, and with holding on to something. What does mourning look like and how does it change as it accrues? How is mourning inherited? This work does not claim release; it reenvisions or argues against narratives that insist that the end of great loss is to "let go," "set free" or "rest."

The poems that comprise Murmuration are an act of vigilance in the face of loss. At certain moments in the distorted timeline of grief one searches the remaining world around them for signs of the beloved, signs that they are not simply gone but instead transformed or dispersed into another way of being. In this looking one's relationship to the external world undergoes a radical transformation of its own and demands a sustained attention from the bereaved that often draws from, but ultimately outruns cataloguing acts of memory. These poems attempt to render the movements of that attention as it learns to track a body made formless. These are moments of a consciousness dispersed in language as it follows the undulations, ambiguities, absences, presences, and transformations of form after death. Here, the speaker of these poems listens and watches for the languages of the transformed in whatever form they take; an attempt to listen to the murmur and eventually to learn to murmur back.

This dissertation is structured around five Australian mystical poets: Ada Cambridge, John Shaw Neilson, Francis Webb, Judith Wright and Kevin Hart. It examines the varieties of Western Christian mysticism upon which these poets draw, or with which they exhibit affinities. A short prelude section to each chapter considers the thematic parallels of their contemporaries, while the final chapter critically investigates constructions of Indigeneity in Australian mystical poetry and the renegotiated mystical poetics of Indigenous poets and theologians. The central argument of this dissertation is that an understanding of Western Christian mysticism is essential to the study of Australian poetry. There are three sub-arguments: firstly, that Australian literary criticism regarding the mystical largely avoids the concept of mysticism as a shifting notion both historically and in the present; secondly, that what passes for mysticism is recurringly subject to poorly defined constructions of mysticism as well as individual poets’ use of the mystical for personal, creative or ideological purposes; thirdly, that in avoiding the concept of a shifting notion critics have ignored the increasing contribution of Australian poets to national and international discourses of mysticism.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, 1910. / Also available on the Internet.