WILD EMBRACE is a collection of poetry that explores the themes of abuse, survival, and fragility. The speaker of these poems, older and distanced from the abuse, asks what it means to be a survivor, and explores our obligation of compassion that, as human beings, we owe one another. While much of the work in this collection is rooted in personal experience, it is not intended to be read as memoir or autobiography. Many of these poems may have begun as lived experience, but between memory, the transcription of memory, and their final form on the printed page, they have been run through a variety of embellishment, artistic license, and shifting narrative forms. The poems in this collection attempt to capture a heightened emotional truth that can’t be attained by mere reporting of fact. WILD EMBRACE sifts through the ashes of suffering and loss, and constructs a mythology as personal as it is collective.

"Edge Effects: Poetry, Place, and Spiritual Practices” focusses on the intersection of the environmental and religious imaginations in the work of five West Coast poets: Robinson Jeffers, Theodore Roethke, Robert Hass, Denise Levertov, and Jan Zwicky. My research examines the selected poems for their reimagination of the sacred perceived through attachments to particular places. For these writers, poetry is a constitutive practice, part of a way of life that includes desire for wise participation in the more-than-human community. Taking into account the poets’ critical reflections and historical-cultural contexts, along with a range of critical and philosophical sources, the poetry is examined as a discursive spiritual exercise. It is seen as conjoined with other focal practices of place, notably meditative walking and attentive looking and listening under the influence of ecospiritual eros. My analysis attends to aesthetics of relinquishment, formal strategies employed to recognize and accept finitude and the non-anthropocentric nature of reality, along with the complementary aesthetics of affirmation, configuration of the goodness of the whole. I identify an orienting feature of West Coast place, particular to each poet, that recurs as a leitmotif for engagement of such aesthetics and related practices. In chapter one, I consider a group of Jeffers’s final poems as part of a project he designated “our De Natura,” attending especially to his affinity for stones and stars. In chapter two, I investigate both Roethke’s and Hass’s configurations of ecospiritual eros in accord with their fascination for flora, while in chapter three, I employ the concepts of “aura” and “resonance” to explicate Levertov’s meditations on the “coming and going” Mount Rainier-Tacoma and Zwicky’s reflective iterations of the sea. / Graduate / 2019-04-04

<p>This paper presents Theopoetics, a theo-philosophical aesthetic movement that arose from the 1960’s Death of God theology, as a hermeneutical framework that accounts for both embodiment and the numinous in poetry. Through an examination of the life and poetic works of the disenfranchised religious poet, Thomas Merton, and a more religiously nebulous poet, Denise Levertov. This paper will present two different perspectives from these poets who encountered the need to qualify the numinous in their poetry and subverted that qualification through a theopoetic process. </p>