These poems do not cohere around any single drive, ethic, or experience, and they do not even express, I don’t think, a consistent mode of seeing or being seen. I do hope there is some aspiration, some active dreaming in here for the latter possibility—that the “lyric I” (though I think the “lyric Me” is more apt a word for the poetic voice’s automatic, reflexive self-scrutiny) might be regarded—and, through mysterious reactions, amplified or diminished, transformed or transfixed, by the objects it sets out to capture. Even if the inevitable and old (and always renewed, and always dignified, if growing always old) project of overcoming the ego had any chance of success, it isn’t what we’re about. We are content, and poets see an invitation, to receive the Holy Ghost of the poem’s counterturned gaze, its anti-attention. In the poems we are content to perpetually appear under all the eyes we set up in the ether, beyond our reach. And the more outsides we create, and the more often we turn ourselves into offerings for re-seeings, outside-in, the closer our brushes with a casual and occasional grace.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UMASS/oai:scholarworks.umass.edu:englmfa_theses-1020 |
| Date | 01 January 2014 |
| Creators | White, Evan |
| 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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