A poetry chapbook. / https://dc.etsu.edu/alumni_books/1011/thumbnail.jpg

Winner of the 2011 Split Oak Press Chapbook Prize. / https://dc.etsu.edu/alumni_books/1009/thumbnail.jpg

A poetry chapbook. / https://dc.etsu.edu/etsu_books/1148/thumbnail.jpg

https://dc.etsu.edu/etsu_books/1153/thumbnail.jpg

This collection is a conversation between the internal vs. external self--"vs." being operative, as I'm considering these things in tension or argument. I see writing as inhabiting a middle ground between thought and action, spanning both the internal and external act of communication simultaneously. The mouth seems an apt site for exploring this duality of experience. It is the great molder of language as it becomes. And mouth as passageway. I often experience the intersection of the inner/outer as obstructed or knotted. I wonder how one connects to an other given this blockage of passage. I'm thinking about this blockage as the felt reaching and indirect contact inherent in communication and by extension, relationship. I'm interested in how the impulse to connect emerges distorted and what it looks like to have this revealed in the body. I recognize the experience of love as capable of transcending this distortion. These poems reflect also, on how this relates to spaces, rooms--the inside or outside of a house being analogous to inside or outside the body. I'm interested in giving the internal environment greater voice--seeing how objects rest, make meaning and animate this environment. Stillness and life of the inanimate (or dead) feel crucial to the interior space. I'm interested in the object's capacity to extend beyond the illusion of ownership (and the life of the body). I see the particles of the human body (skin, hair) speaking to mortality and also to the resilience of what is lost. These poems seek beauty or truth in the small, ordinary thing--they see the enormity of an ant. This beauty is of course, not without suffering and futility. Rather, the experience of beauty is a simultaneously celebratory and heartbreaking act. All of this is very serious (and thus also very comic).

b o y is an extended lyric poem/essay that uses repetition, fragment, and syntax to continually build a form that continually falls apart. The poem is both a meditation and an investigation into loss, and into the relationship of loss to identity, with making a poem, and with holding on to something. What does mourning look like and how does it change as it accrues? How is mourning inherited? This work does not claim release; it reenvisions or argues against narratives that insist that the end of great loss is to "let go," "set free" or "rest."

The poems that comprise Murmuration are an act of vigilance in the face of loss. At certain moments in the distorted timeline of grief one searches the remaining world around them for signs of the beloved, signs that they are not simply gone but instead transformed or dispersed into another way of being. In this looking one's relationship to the external world undergoes a radical transformation of its own and demands a sustained attention from the bereaved that often draws from, but ultimately outruns cataloguing acts of memory. These poems attempt to render the movements of that attention as it learns to track a body made formless. These are moments of a consciousness dispersed in language as it follows the undulations, ambiguities, absences, presences, and transformations of form after death. Here, the speaker of these poems listens and watches for the languages of the transformed in whatever form they take; an attempt to listen to the murmur and eventually to learn to murmur back.

This dissertation is structured around five Australian mystical poets: Ada Cambridge, John Shaw Neilson, Francis Webb, Judith Wright and Kevin Hart. It examines the varieties of Western Christian mysticism upon which these poets draw, or with which they exhibit affinities. A short prelude section to each chapter considers the thematic parallels of their contemporaries, while the final chapter critically investigates constructions of Indigeneity in Australian mystical poetry and the renegotiated mystical poetics of Indigenous poets and theologians. The central argument of this dissertation is that an understanding of Western Christian mysticism is essential to the study of Australian poetry. There are three sub-arguments: firstly, that Australian literary criticism regarding the mystical largely avoids the concept of mysticism as a shifting notion both historically and in the present; secondly, that what passes for mysticism is recurringly subject to poorly defined constructions of mysticism as well as individual poets’ use of the mystical for personal, creative or ideological purposes; thirdly, that in avoiding the concept of a shifting notion critics have ignored the increasing contribution of Australian poets to national and international discourses of mysticism.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, 1910. / Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (M.A.)--York University, 2008. Graduate Programme in Communications and Culture. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 140-156). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:MR38769