Ain't Dere No More is a poem

This is a collection of poems in four sections– “Scholasticæ,” “Frontiers,” “So Lately,” and “Afters.”

My thesis is a microscope on all the things that have contained me or had some proximity to me throughout my life. Some major things of that list being: my own body, i.e. skin (color, and condition [eczema]), being socially perceived as a woman while existing as a trans (nonbinary) person, Major Depressive Disorder, General Anxiety, my childhood home in St Louis, MO, growing up in the Catholic Church, and my father’s alcoholism/ abuse. Some of these themes are more prevalent than others, but it is my goal for my first poetry collection (of which this thesis will make a great sum of) to cover these themes at length. The medium I am exploring these themes through is primarily memory poems. This writing endeavor has been an experiment in vulnerability for me. As someone who has engaged with therapy the past ten years, I have already dissected a lot of these memories/this trauma, but it was important for my healing process to write them in the best way I know how: Poetry. I have encapsulated these feelings in a “before” and “after” sense, thus, the three sections. These three sections encapsulate childhood, adolescence, and the “now”.

A chapbook-length collection of poems.

"Momentarium" is a collection of poems that examines the instability of moments. By engaging with photography, the poems examine the strengths and flaws in representation. Qualified accuracy, in other words representations that exact no absolute authenticity, are paradoxically, most accurate. The original poems attempt to express both empathy an end to empathy, "I mean to give you what you cannot keep: a blue twice as true" and "I mean to give you what I cannot." The competing forces animate a contingent moment, before it becomes the past.

This collection represents work produced between September 2015 and April 2017. A phantom limb is characterized not by what is absent but by the wound that created its loss--the haunting of a pain, and the confusion caused by its non-presence. These poems shift and shutter around their phantom limbs, tracking the wounds split open by grief, the physicality of time’s passing, and the mind’s inability to reconcile its own impermanence. The poems hope to resist the lyric while simultaneously imploding form, confronting the mind’s relationship with the natural and digital worlds it inhabits and is informed by. Celestial bodies and human bodies share a panic of impermanence here––time is as unknowable but also as physical as star stuff. In their disfluencies and insistences grappling toward some kind of "feeling," these poems investigate what it means to live and survive a life characterized by loss in its various shapes and forms.

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.

This thesis deals with the writing process in poetry. It consists of two types of text – theoretical and poetic. This thesis asks, for the purposes of a poetics of writing, what knowledge of language poetry requires. Questions as to the sources of poetry are resolved as questions asked of the ethics in which writing is possible. Poetry is that discourse which stands out of the bivalency of judgement, constituting, as speech does in its unending, the delay of freedom. Tropology is structure with which to represent the world, and by limitless tropology we inscribe the manner and scope of poetry’s indirection. What individuals negotiate among differends amounts to their own authenticity. The community of writing is made up of shifting personae whose roles blur between the work of making and the work of keeping the canon. Canon is to literature as langue is to parole – meta-awareness in the service of common sense. We, who make up this community, are constantly at the work of protecting and violating borders. This thesis considers the prospects for a heuristics of poetry writing by way of the affinities of that process for those of (first and foreign) language learning. It contents that poetry’s role is to do inside a language what the foreign language learner cannot help but do between languages / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2006. / Title from title screen (site viewed on Mar. 30, 2007). PDF text: 75p. ; 132 K. Includes bibliographical reference. Also available in microfilm and microfiche formats.

Proefschrift--Amsterdam. / Includes bibliographical references.