English-speaking Germanists have shown considerably less interest in Gottfried Benn than their German colleagues. The latter have produced, in recent years, a multitude of critical works, approaching Benn from various angles and arriving at very different conclusions. Outside Germany, the picture is less variegated. The few voices to be heard seem to agree that there is, or may be, some value in Benn's poetic works, but little or none in his theoretical pronouncements. By offering a dissenting view, this thesis hopes to animate the discussion outside Germany and, with due respect, to expose and correct a number of misconceptions that have, in my view, tarnished Benn's image and brought upon him undeserved opprobrium. I shall endeavour to show that Benn's views on lyric poetry form a consistent and significant pattern of thought which defies the many suggestions we have heard of his fickleness, irrationalism, rigid formalism and all-pervading self-contradiction. A diachronic approach seemed best suited to counter the assumption of an essential stasis of Benn's views - an assumption that underlies tacitly most critical discussions of the various aspects of his alleged irrationalism. At the same time, this approach brings out the consistency with which Benn's views developed and crystallized. Three chapters of my thesis are devoted to tracing this development (chapters two, three and four): close interpretations of some critical and literary works, selected to represent the successive stages of Benn's evolving thought, are designed to illuminate and place into context Benn's understanding of the various issues he himself raised and elaborated over the years. From these analyses emerges a poetic theory identical with that presented at Marburg under the title 'Probleme der Lyrik' and discussed, for strategic purposes, in my first chapter. This rather extended discussion has three principal goals: First, to show that Benn, in order to be understood, must be approached as a poet and provocateur who aims at neither accuracy of quotation nor conceptual precision and consistency, but at effective formulation. Second, to present in a new light the salient aspects of Benn's poetological conception. The creative process is shown to be thought of as involving, at all stages, a close co-operation of intellectual and imaginative energies. It is suggested that the 'absolute poem' , as Benn envisages it, is a vehicle of depth and significance whose 'monologic' character activates and affects the reader; that poetic 'montage' aims at the production of an organic whole whose 'fascination' addresses itself to the reader's emotional and cognitive faculties; that the 'transcendence of the creative pleasure' is an aid in life. Third, to call attention to Benn's 'historical' stance which causes him to relate every important aspect of 'modern' poetry to the poetic tradition and invalidates the charge, levelled against Benn from various quarters, that he adopted a progressive pose to present an antiquated second-hand theory. Chapter five deals with the question of Benn's alleged self-contradiction. It argues that 'ambivalence' and 'tension', to be clearly distinguished from 'contradiction', are the principles informing the whole of his poetological thought, endowing it with perspective, depth, and ultimate credibility. In conclusion it is suggested that the generally accepted placement of Benn's poetology at the extreme 'absolute' , 'anti-human' end of the modernist spectrum and, consequently, our evaluation of its historical significance, need to be reconsidered.

This Sad Kingdom is a collection of lyric, dramatic, and narrative poems that are post-modern revisions of the American Romantic impulse of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The Inevitable: Withdrawn is a critical preface and collection of non-fiction writing: personal essay, lyric essay, fragments, and experimental forms. The work’s cohesive subject matter is the author’s European vacation directly following her divorce. Within the pieces, the author attempts to reconcile who she is when starting over and she begins to ask questions regarding the human condition: How do I learn to exhibit intimacy again, not just with romantic partners, but with also in a familial way with my father, and how does absence in these relationships affect my journey and how I write about it? How do I view, and remake myself, when finding my identity that was tied to another individual compromised? How does a body, both physical and belonging to me, and physical as text, take certain shapes to reflect my understanding? How do I define truth, and how do I interpret truth and authenticity in both experience and writing? How do I define and know the difference between belief and truth? And finally, how does narrative and language protect, or expose me? The Inevitable: Withdrawn considers debates regarding the definition of narrative in order to address a spectrum of non-fiction writing. The collection takes into consideration non-fiction conventions, form as functionality, philosophy, linguistics, cognitive psychology, prose and poetic theory, and the works of other notable writers.

The Constitution is a collection of poems weighing loss, home, family, love; asserting, and refracting those assertions, in a dance around a center of a belief. It focuses on the microtonal and minimal approach to exacerbate the anxiety of the voice. It was written from 2008-2013, mostly at UMass Amherst, under the tutelage of Peter Gizzi, Dara Wier, and James Tate with help from Mark Leidner, Ben Estes, Ben Kopel, Emily Hunt, Francesca Chabrier and many others.

No description available.

No description available.

Instant Conductors is a collection of poems meant to engage the reader in conversation about the imperfect nature of the world in relation to the imperfect nature of readerly experience. Walt Whitman wrote, “I have instant conductors all over me whether I pass or stop / they seize every object and lead it harmlessly through me.” And so the things on these pages are intent on transmitting what one experiences in the minutiae of memory and routine: the sounds that surround a blackwater tidepool, what one imagines happens behind the closed doors of the friendly neighbors, or what's heard in the whispers of an elderly man sitting in a waiting room. These pieces are situated along the spectrum of narrative and lyric, between self and other, around various speakers and listeners. They flow through the sensors of Florida swamp, pray to the train ride of some nebulous god or lack thereof, and comment on the artifice of social media. They visit the transient nature of relationships and interrogate how one comes to know, or not know, the self. These pieces speak to old form and new verse. They touch on place, and time, and timelessness. They attempt to reimagine the negative space of individual, sometimes muddled, histories, into some understandable or at least familiar, organic, whole. Universal truths or no, these are the electric currents of language. They are hazardous. They are harmless. They are instances and instants.

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No description available.

A Forecast is a manuscript of poems that explores themes of longing, loss, uncertainty, time, place, and love. The poems also attempt to explore and adorn these themes through inventiveness and imagination. While inhabiting this imaginative landscape, the poems play with notions of perception, acting as objective witnesses to very subjective persons, places, and things. These poems are held together by their movement through stasis, fascination with weather, seasons, and the future, and the fragmented yet illuminated spaces they occupy, where the extraordinary seems ordinary and the ordinary seems extraordinary. What results is a series of explorations through a dreamlike world, led by a voice who wonders, hesitates, and hides, all the while trying to say something, to shape the world and tug you into it. / Master of Fine Arts