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The axe of the house is a collection of poetry written and collated over three and a half years. The vast majority of the poems are about women: these are women’s voices usually recounting specifically female experiences. Many of these female poems were informed by the confessional mode, as appropriated and transmuted by the contemporary women writers I read and studied. The collection begins with confessions of my own in poems like “Anne Askew’s ashes” and “Jean,” and then moves on to include love poems like “Prayer” and “Gulls,” which are also at least partially autobiographical. Also confessional, but not autobiographical, are the poems at the centre of this collection. These are poems in which women from various different walks of life speak about their inner lives. Some of these women, like the speakers of “Hate mail” and “Silver Ghost,” are my own creation, while others, like “Mrs Rochester,” are borrowed from elsewhere. These poems examine intimate relationships from various angles: marriages, one night stands and vicious rivalries are all explored via a first person narrative. Body image is also a common theme. There are a few poems which are more overtly political, delivering feminist messages about the ways patriarchal society portrays and often ostracises women. “Harpies,” for example, looks at women who are seen to have no sexual worth, while “The picture in your mind when you speak of whores” concerns women whose only perceived worth is sexual, dismissing the various marginalising stereotypes that exist around sex workers. The collection moves farthest away from its examination of the female experience in the poems towards the end. However, these poems form a travelogue in which privilege of various kinds is examined and critiqued. Poems like “Witch” and “Belongings” are still concerned with the lives of women, while “Big heat” uses a female narrator to examine the more recognised privileges of wealth and mobility. These ideas recur in poems like “Barcelona diptych” and “Highway: Skagit County, WA,” but the poems that round off the collection are also attempts to capture a sense of place and space. Throughout this work, there are poems that are particularly interested in liminal space: several of the poems in the collection, including “Poltergeistrix” and “The women” look at the hours and days immediately after death. The space between travel destinations is also liminal, and these final poems attempt to make sense of it – finally succeeding with “Hydra,” which delivers a sense of acceptance and advocates living ‘in the moment’. The critical section, “Entangled in biographical circumstances,” looks afresh at the female confessional poem, most commonly associated with Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton and Adrienne Rich. With reference to the works of these literary foremothers, I focus on the ways in which a new generation of women poets has been inspired to adopt this mode. As well as noting the often hostile response of male critics to confessional work by female writers, I examine the very different ways in which Sharon Olds, Sapphire and Liz Lochhead work in the confessional tradition to produce poetry that speaks candidly about the inner lives of women. I also discuss the ways in which the work of these three poets has influenced and shaped my own poetry.

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This dissertation consists of a collection of sixty pages of poetry of various styles and forms, predominately in free verse. Subject matter includes family and relationships, especially between women of different generations; history, both personal/family and public; language; means of handling grief and death; travel and return; and sense of place/home. As a writer, I often find myself taking moments from my own life and transforming them into poems. All language fascinates me, especially words that are closely tied to the culture from which they emerge. Several poems in the collection rely on unusual, untranslatable, or forgotten words. These poems explore the relationships between place, history, culture, and language. All of these are intertwined, and it is often difficult to extract one element and study it discretely from the rest. Additionally, history, both collective and personal, often provides a stimulus for my poems and is useful in bridging the gap between personal memories and associations and those of the reading audience. I often approach the past through photographs, physical objects, or landscapes, or share stories of my own family’s history. Many of these poems are about questioning one’s own ancestry. I create myths about myself and others, often my own family and ancestors, building a story around a particular truth. In these poems, I rewrite my own history and experiences.

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This project reconceives the methods critics use to define and analyze the critical field of documentary poetry. Although scholarship on documentary in the visual arts abounds, literary criticism that explores poetry through a documentary lens is sparse. Documentary poetics criticism focuses almost exclusively on socioeconomic class within the poems and on defining the genre. Critics have not attended to the ways that the category “document” inflects this poetic arena. I argue that documentary poetics includes engagement with specific documents and with the power they hold within a given historical moment. This requires attending to what I call document culture: a document’s visual and stylistic norms, in addition to the customs of its subject matter and material/medium. In addition to contributing to critical theory, this project traces documents’ shift from the twentieth century into the twenty-first from wood pulp to strings of code. I focus on representative collections of poetry that foreground the effects particular documents, like congressional hearings, dictionaries, and social media posts, have on people based on their position within the society in which they live. These documentary poems function differently than other poems that engage documents. A second category, poem-documents, interrogate the historical genre of English-language poetry in the nominally postcolonial US, with special focus on the African and Jewish diasporas, and experiences of indigenous people in the colonizing nation. These poems confront the genre’s social position and critically-imposed limitations to demonstrate poetry’s potential to act as a document that names and remembers injustices. My project emphasizes poetry by women, particularly women of color, in order to revise documentary poetics criticism’s interest in class and style to include textual resonances of race, gender, sexuality and nation. Just as the collections documentary poets offer are interdisciplinary in ethos, so is this project, with roots in documentary studies, media studies, feminist criticism, queer studies, and critical race studies in addition to literary criticism. Each chapter of this project follows the slippage between poem-documents and documentary poems. Chapter one grounds documentary culture in Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead (1938), widely considered to be the first American documentary poem. I juxtapose Rukeyser’s interest in document cultures and theory of poetry’s ethical possibilities in The Life of Poetry (1949) with, in Chapter two, Irena Klepfisz’s A Few Words in the Mother Tongue: Poems Selected and New 1971-1990, a collection that reframes lyric poetry as mode of documentation. Chapter three places Harryette Mullen’s critique of English-language reference texts and the accumulations of connotative meaning, Sleeping with the Dictionary (2002), in conversation with M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! (2008), which re-documents African women’s experiences of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The final chapter addresses Citizen (2014), in which Claudia Rankine re-envisions the archive of anti-black racism to include speech and Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings (2015), Joy Harjo’s polyvocal and iconoclastic collection that uses poetry to redefine the archive’s temporality in a way that might counter the erasure of indigenous peoples in the Americas. The nuanced ruminations these poets offer illustrate that, as an area of study with its own investments, interests, and modes of inquiry, critical documentary poetics has just begun.

This thesis explores how women's writing in mid-twentieth century Uruguay enables a reconsideration of the intertwined hegemonic practices of literary canon formation and national identity in this seminal period. Within a national history and a cultural tradition conceived of as patriarchal, progressive and homogeneous, in correspondence to a European/Eurocentric concept of time and historicism, women writers struggled to find a recognised position from which to speak. Nevertheless, like other marginal groups, women writers have challenged the hegemonic discourses of modernity in Uruguay, as elsewhere in Latin America, producing what can be described, following Elaine Showalter, as a double-voiced textual strategy that replicates as well as subverts the dominant order. In this respect, Concepción Silva Bélinzon (Montevideo, 1900-1987) offers a remarkable case study to show how women's poetry destabilises and renegotiates the great discourses of modernity. Socially and culturally marginalised, Silva Bélinzon's life demonstrates the failures and limitations of a patriarchal/paternalistic society, while her poetry problematises the homogeneous national discourses of modern Uruguay, exposing the discontinuity inherent to a national history conceived of as masculine, linear and teleological. Silva Bélinzon's poetry has been defined as a synthesis of Modernismo and Surrealism, and described as a combination of free associations, biblical references and metaphysical concerns, all expressed within conventional metric forms, notably, the sonnet. Her poetry has been considered incoherent and bizarre, and has thus received little critical attention. However, one of the most interesting characteristics of her poetry has been overlooked. That is, the juxtaposition of different artistic trends and the dialectical tension that exists between the use of random, discontinuous and disconnected images within strict traditional poetic forms. The theoretical approach of this thesis is predominantly framed by postcolonial, feminist and gender theories, including those of Homi K. Bhabha and Judith Butler. In addition, drawing on Henri Bergson's work, Matière et mémoire (1896) and Marcel Proust's well-known idea of mémoire involontaire, I interpret Silva Bélinzon's elliptical poetry as a virtual journey through layers of the personal and national pasts that thereby deterritorialises the national, hegemonic discourses of the modern nation. Thus, using Silva Bélinzon's poetry as a case study, the thesis aims to demonstrate how women writers ‘overlap in the act of writing the nation' (Bhabha 2003: 292).

The definition of one's femininity and its reflection in poetic language are two recurring issues examined by contemporary feminist critics. In their works, they consistently challenge the opinion that true poetry is essentially masculine, and that a woman poet is inevitably an inferior poet. Sylvia Plath, whose poetry represents the central subject of this thesis, could hardly be considered an inferior poet. Despite her early death, Plath's poetry continues to be immensely influential, and it tends to be adopted as an example by feminist critics who attempt to define the branch American women's poetry, reaching back to poets such as Anne Bradstreet and Emily Dickinson. From their point of view, Plath's works illustrate the fact that women's poetry has not only its history, but also its language. One may thus discover interesting parallels between the French-based concept of l'écriture féminine and Plath's poetic language. For the representatives of the l'écriture féminine movement Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva, Western discourse is phallogocentric, i.e. based on the centrality of the phallus as a primary signifier. To disrupt the traditional (masculine) discourse, they neither propose a total split between the "male" and the "female" signifiers nor do they encourage women to...

This creative thesis is a collection of original poems entitled Other. The poems in Other reflect my study of the aesthetics of poetry as well as that of how women are represented as poets and as the subject of poems. Some of these poems are the product of my particular interest in the use of persona. Most reflect my desire to achieve self-reflection, to write from my experiences and perception, while still maintaining the universality that is an essential element of successful poems. The critical introduction situates my poems within the framework of the poetic mode Personal Classicism—poetry that is emotionally based but relies on formal techniques and controlled elements in order to maintain distance. My primary goal in the critical introduction is to link my poems to the Personal Classicist lineage, which includes H.D., Elizabeth Bishop, and Louise Gluck – to whom I will pay particular attention.

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