This autobiographical poetry collection is about identity, belonging, and brokenness, dealing with the aftermath of a dead mother, a deadbeat father, and a decaying home filled with years of trash and memory. In many ways, this collection is a buildungsroman. For me, what seem like ordinary questions become a journey into memories and experiences that were once repressed. As a child of a hoarder, one who fielded questions from family, friends, and the Department of Human Service for almost twenty years, I am just starting to confidently address the many silences that were and are present in my family: my mother’s quest to hide her breast cancer and her subsequent death as a result of her secrecy; my father’s four other children that I have never met; and my grandparents’ military history spanning three continents in the 1950s and 1960s. / Master of Fine Arts

A poetry collection in two parts. Slingshot Catapult, the first half of the manuscript, explores the lives of two professional wrestlers. While the spectacle of professional wrestling is the backdrop for this series of linked, narrative poems, the relationship between protagonists Tracy and Dodge and who they are as individuals, rather than the caricatures wrestlers often play, are the core concerns of this opening section. Knotcraft, the second half of the collection, offers a mix of lyric, narrative, and formal poetry. As in Slingshot Catapult, common threads running through and between these poems include family history, romantic relationships, religion, and vision. Readers are invited to draw parallels between themes explored in Knotcraft and Slingshot Catapult. / Master of Fine Arts

"full water" is a collection of poems examining a single consciousness, from a singular experience, that resonates to generational experiences. full water is a personal and literal landscaping: from the southern calm of Virginia to the innate heartbeat of south Bronx streets, the poems are grounded in a firm sense of place. The personal landscaping strongly connects with this literal landscaping, as this is a collection of someone's constantly leaving, an attempt at establishing identity through the varied parcels of perspective. In the same way, this collection investigates the urban family landscape, the love still possible, despite the conventional shortcomings, the fullness of self, regardless. Through the rhythmic composition of the language, emotion flashes and restrains itself. Within the turns of language, personal truths thrive, in what they don't outwardly say. The book learns its significance from the poems. In the chaos of this, the reader finds kernels of meaning just as the poet did in process. / Master of Fine Arts

A collection of poems primarily in free verse that deals with loss, love, nostalgia, memory, nature (both human and wild), and the self. The title is a Fats Waller quote I found as the epigraph in one of my favorite books, The World Doesn’t End by Charles Simic. While it is literally impossible to waltz the rumba, since they are two different dances and types of music, I like the idea it provokes for me: it says to me, “let’s do this our own way"? or the old cliché phrase “let’s walk to the beat of a different drummer."? This quote embodies the spirit in which these poems where written. / Master of Fine Arts

In the preface, I discuss my poetry and poetics such as the free verse form and the narrative mode. I also discuss my influences such as Adrienne Rich, Sylvia Plath, and Sheri L. Wright. The poems in this manuscript attempt to explore the role of trauma, feminism, and memory in poetry.

"Blue & Red" is about sound, sense, paranoia, and experience. When intuition goes awry and projections are shot in all directions the camera and eye can go, poems are bound to be nearby. From beginning to end, the reader may wonder what landscape the wanderlust traveler walks on. Where he may settle. Is he a boy? What is manhood? Has the prince stolen the key from the queen? "Blue & Red" has tautological hair, performance anxieties, and actualizations. Sentimental at times, we remember. Some traumas are daily. "Blue & Red" stands on the argument that if you put all of your heart, soul, spirit, body, and mind, into a poem, the process will yield an art/entertainment for the thinking person. It rests on the fact that love and gratitude are not lost. It rests on intangible things we must agree on. It lastly rests on the autonomy of the free mind.

Thesis (doctoral)--Göteborgs universitet, 1981. / Extra t.p. with thesis statement inserted. Summary in English. Includes indexes. Includes bibliographical references (p. 285-294).

Boston University. University Professors Program Senior theses. / PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / 2031-01-02

This thesis is a collection of poems that meditates on the legacies we inherit and the legacies we leave behind.

Of the many aspects of the composition of poetry, the most common component of the form involves emotional response. There is an infinite number of ways to write a poem, and likewise an infinite number of forms which a poem can be structured according to. In writing this collection of poems composing my thesis, I set out to write poetry in as many ways as I could to explore how different forms, devices, voices, points of view, sounds, tones, and as many other variables as I could think of affect poetry as stimulus. The poems in this collection cover a range of classic poetic forms and styles as well as variations of free verse and contemporary forms. My hope is that the readers of these poems will be able to experience a wide range of emotional responses and gain the same insight into the vast abilities inherent in poetry that I gained in writing them.