ABSTRACT In this book-length poem, The Orchard Green And Every Color, the material eye becomes lingual, forging Vision from the consequential glintings of solid light through the many-colored world. Following a notational mode that foregrounds clarity which splits apart at its limits, its language attempts to be astonished before the intelligence of images and the capacity of the mind to move in step with them, even as saying and seeing run in counterpoint to one another at varying speeds in its early sections, concluding in a series of prose poems that move on the thin ice of repeated syntax. This thesis seeks to prove that poems provide more than an example of a world-weary or language-damaged individual consciousness but function as a type of sensory organ for echolocating one’s way through the world.

Double Helix approaches the conjunction of visual poetry and long poetry from two distinct but related viewpoints. The first is a scholarly examination of the techniques used to make a long poem visual or a visual poem long. The second is a production of an original long visual poem exhibiting these techniques. The first part, "The Look of the Long Poem," posits that there are five major techniques which are used in long visual poems: line breaks, imagetexts, white space, page division, and collage and montage. These techniques are grounded in the theoretical work of, among others, Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe, W.J.T Mitchell, Marjorie Perloff, and Johanna Drucker. The techniques are examined in detail as they play out in the work of Anne Carson, David Daniels, Christine Wertheim, Johanna Drucker, Langston Hughes, Ed Dorn, Lisa Jarnot, and Tom Phillips. The second part consists of an original sixty-four-page long poem / poetic sequence titled "diluvium." "diluvium" utilizes all the techniques analyzed in the previous part, attempting furthermore to educate the reader in the process of negotiating its parts as it is read – that is, to act as a poetics as well as a poem.