“Slowly Rushing Absent Mind” explores themes of origin and nature through poems about family history and the natural world. This collection explains poetry through poetry by using different forms—the ghazal, the prose poem, the sonnet and the lyric, to convey an awareness of a deeper consciousness. These poems seek to fill the space in the air above your shoulder at which the retail clerk stares as he hands you your change and wishes you good day. “The world we know,” Foucault explains, “is a profusion of entangled events;” these poems are meant to hint at a true beginning, one at which only the most exhaustive of genealogical research could possibly arrive, yet one that is intrinsic in the details of everyday life. / University of New Brunswick, Theses, Master of Arts

Recent work in the geohumanities has renewed a call for the inclusion of creative work within the discipline of geography. This dissertation works both creatively and critically to answer that call, and to contribute to the geohumanities generally and the subfield of geopoetics particularly. In the theoretical portion of this work, I draw from and dialogue with creative geographies, emotional geographies, nonrepresentational theory, and post-human geographies, arguing that geopoetics is both theory and practice-based and focuses on how to apprehend the world, how to acknowledge and practice the act of perceiving, and the relationship that grows through the act of perceiving and being perceived. This attendance is an ethical act; it helps to enrich understandings of place and of human relationships to the world. I use this understanding of geopoetics to rethink relationships to place through the embrace of poetic technique, an ethics of care, and an acceptance of situated, autobiographical emotion in practice. I use the work of three philosopher-poets (McKay, Zwicky, Lilburn) to argue that geopoetics is a relational ontology that helps contribute culturally to embodied understandings of ethics, landscape, and environment through its practice of attendance and perception. Separately, all three writers contribute variously to conceptualizations of wilderness, home and place; together, I propose that their work serves to further define geopoetics through the manner by which one attends to the world. I also specifically use Zwicky’s work on lyric to intervene in non-representational theory, clarifying ideas on a body-in-the-world. Attendance, for me, involves emotional, sensory, and philosophical engagement but is focused on the world, not on the perceiver. The creative portion of this dissertation puts the theoretical work into practice, adding to understandings of what geopoetics might do. This creative work is an act of attendance, which has as its root a geography of love and an emphasis on how to perceive. Its inclusion further validates creative practice and the inclusion of creative professionals within the discipline of geography. / Graduate / 2022-08-25