Year of Award
2024
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Type
Master of Fine Arts (MFA)
Degree Name
Creative Writing (Poetry)
Department or School/College
Department of English
Committee Chair
Sean Hill
Committee Co-chair
Brian Blanchfield
Commitee Members
Sean Hill, Brian Blanchfield, Valerie Hedquist
Subject Categories
Poetry
Abstract
Capoferri, Marko, M.F.A., Fall 2023 Creative Writing - Poetry
Light, Loneliness, and Location
Chairperson: Sean Hill
In many better-known works by the 20th century painter Edward Hopper, I find a locus of visual concerns that overlay the fixations of the majority—if not all—of the poems that comprise my thesis, what I like to think of as the three L’s: light, loneliness, and location (to which I could also add, as secondary colors, longing and landscape). Additionally, there are what Mark Strand identifies as “two imperatives” in Hopper’s work, “the one that urges us to continue and the other that compels us to stay” (3). These dueling imperatives, along with the abovementioned attributes of Hopper’s paintings, are very much in conversation with my experience of America as I have come to understand it over the last decade and a half of travel, study, writing, thinking, and living and working in a multitude of places and landscapes around this country.
When I think about and try to process “America” via my identity and life experience, I’m inevitably led to thoughts about empire, whiteness, masculinity, patrilineality, westward expansion, place and placelessness, belonging and alienation, isolation as corollary to the ideal of rugged individualism, how that ideal works with (or more often against) attempts at interpersonal intimacy, an immensity of space that is “[l]arge and without mercy” (Olson 11), and the multiple, ongoing tragedies that have given birth to this country and my ability to navigate its contours, both figurative and literal, while attempting to live a fulfilled and conscious life.
As Carolyn Merchant writes, “[w]e act out our roles in the stories into which we were born” (4). These poems are one small way I have tried to step outside of my own subjectivity, to see the story I was born into from a further vantage, to interrogate the narrative of my life thus far in the context of a larger story, to see how I am helplessly, inextricably linked to the forces that have made me and my place in the world, and to hopefully begin thinking a more complex role for myself as an artist and thinker in this frayed century.
Works Cited
Merchant, Carolyn. Reinventing Eden: The Fate of Nature in Western Culture. Routledge. 2003.
Olson, Charles. Call Me Ishmael. Johns Hopkins University Press. Paperback edition. 1997.
Strand, Mark. Hopper. Ecco. 1994.
Recommended Citation
Capoferri, Marko C., "A CONSTELLATION IN TRAINING" (2024). Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers. 12240.
https://scholarworks.umt.edu/etd/12240
Included in
© Copyright 2024 Marko C. Capoferri