Year of Award
2023
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Type
Master of Fine Arts (MFA)
Degree Name
Creative Writing (Poetry)
Department or School/College
English
Committee Chair
Brian Blanchfield
Commitee Members
Sean Hill, Kyle Volk
Keywords
Poetry, Montana, motherhood
Subject Categories
Creative Writing | Poetry
Abstract
At once fantastical and down-to-earth, the poems of Witness This Thing So Tender are concerned with the convergence of the speaker’s many selves and influences. Gritty and mysterious happenings shape the speaker’s physical, emotional, and psychological circumstances in the world. Whether the triggering topic is ecological, parental, or sepulchral, the work of the poems is to examine and integrate the changeable natures of memory and reality.
Each poem in the second movement of the collection, entitled “Lunar Cycle,” employs the idiom Once upon a time as its entry point. This small, well-worn turn of phrase operates as a springboard into specific moments in the speaker’s reality, while simultaneously allowing expansive, imaginative exploration of the way mundane events can evolve into touchstones of mythic significance in a person’s life. The poems of this movement repeat and reconstitute the generative expression until it becomes incantatory, a summoning, a consideration, and an elevation of remembered everyday experiences.
“Lunar Cycle” functions as the emotional and thematic fulcrum of the collection, building on the questions and setting established in the first movement. The third movement introduces wounds in need of repair which the fourth movement seeks to heal by way of the grounding and mythology that “Lunar Cycle” established.
The poems of Witness This Thing So Tender are tinted by the shadows of such poets as Ross Gay, W.B. Yeats, Victoria Chang, CD Wright, Doireann Ní Ghriofa, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, and Robert Hass — testament to the confluence of many disparate influences upon a single life and how they alchemize to become a curious and tender new thing.
Recommended Citation
White, Erin Marie, "Witness This Thing So Tender" (2023). Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers. 12225.
https://scholarworks.umt.edu/etd/12225
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© Copyright 2023 Erin Marie White