In my writing, I’m deeply concerned with abuse culture, femininity, and queerness. Too Much is the product of two years of processing my feminine identity and discovering my queer identity. This book is a coming out for me as a queer writer and an assault victim. It’s also a defiance of the censorship I’ve been confronted with in my life as a poet and a women. Oftentimes, in workshop or in conversation, I’ve gotten comments about my writing and myself being “too much.” These comments always appeared around moments that dealt with sexuality, violence, queerness. Initially, I reveled in this. It felt good to create discomfort in my readers, but I began to realize it was a kind of censorship, a deliberate turning away from the truth of abuse culture, violence, and feminine sexuality. So, I kept going. The stichic form has been transformative for me as a writer, as has been my exploration of new narrative poets. I love the trajectory and power in a poem with short lines and plain talk that refuses to break or pause for breath. We live in a world that is selective. We are buried in avalanches of news stories, Instagram posts, tweets, texts, new music, old music, TV, online shows, porn, writing. As a poet, I am interested in how I can possibly begin to catalogue all this cascading information even from just my own point of view. How much does depicting real life influence my work when I’m not even sure where real life ends and fantasy begins? What is my responsibility to the truth? To MY truth? I want Too Much to feel this way, true to experience, true to the way life is now. I want it to feel like too much and not enough all at once.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UMASS/oai:scholarworks.umass.edu:englmfa_theses-1124 |
| Date | 01 January 2020 |
| Creators | Davis, Gion |
| Publisher | ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst |
| Source Sets | University of Massachusetts, Amherst |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | MFA Program for Poets & Writers Masters Theses Collection |
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