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Cities Beyond is a collection of poems about the liminal space between the suburbs and the pasture as metaphor for the created space of memory, self, and location.

Many contemporary writers maintain that a prime requisite of poetry is autobiographical sincerity. They would have the poet commit himself to an openness with his audience that is usually reserved for only the most intimate relationships. The thirty-two poems of this thesis were written as a reaction to current confessional trends and postulate that the creation of fictions to live by is an intrinsic part of the human process. Central to the work is the idea that past fictions, traditions, and myths are no longer functional, and no workable fictions have yet been created. The overriding image of the work is that of a dance in a mirrored room where illusion and reflection are difficult to separate from reality and where the dancers move without knowledge of the meaning of their movement.

This collection of poems explores themes of time and space, energy, entropy and decay, and the frames we use to resist the inevitable trend toward disorder that defines a human experience of the observable universe.

Poems.

In this poetry collection, I explore the intersections between reality, dream, myth, and memory. It begins with “The Accident,” a narrative poem recounting the event that throws the speaker into an anxiety-filled dream-world. The speaker is haunted by the image of the deer that killed her father, an image that takes several forms and personae throughout, but occurs mostly in the fallible landscape of dream. The tones of these dreams penetrate the speaker’s waking life, and she finds herself more and more incapable of separating the dreams from reality. The speaker begins to search elsewhere for answers—divination, history, art, myth—but the landscapes are always off, always de-familiarized by dream. In the conclusion of the manuscript, the speaker loses all sense of self and becomes the symbol with which she has been so obsessed, unable to wake from the final dream.

Typescript (photocopy). / Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries

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