Year of Award
2025
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Type
Master of Fine Arts (MFA)
Degree Name
Creative Writing (Poetry)
Department or School/College
Creative Writing
Committee Chair
Brian Blanchfield
Committee Co-chair
Katie Kane
Commitee Members
Heidi Eggert
Keywords
poetry, daily, domestic, contemporary dance, collective, public
Subject Categories
Arts and Humanities | Creative Writing | Poetry
Abstract
“Cullet” is an industry term for the refuse and smashed-up glass added to new material in the process of making new glass. It is related to the word “cull” from the old french “to collect” or gather. This collection of poems picks up the term as a framework for investigating the piece-meal of daily life, tracing relations between the individual and collective, and also tracing vantage and scale; shifts of where and how the speaker directs their gaze. The poems are invested in assembling an ethos of the domestic that recasts “the domestic” to include more public sites of daily residence such as the neighborhood, its sidewalks and parks, our work and our commutes, our friendships and their spaces of exuberance and deliberation. What is caught if the catchment area of the domestic extends beyond property lines (house/spouse) to include other forms of inhabiting and is capacious in its thinking with intimacy? What are the possibilities of thinking with and investing in the non-monetizable security of domestic habits (especially in an extended domestic)? In so far as the poems are invested in the domestic, so too in the doldrums of such spaces, many are set in the small events of daily life, developing a quiet and insistent argument for the non-dramatic, the non-spectacular as a site for building a politics of relation built gesture by gesture. Gesture is an embodied thing. A scatter of poems in the collection borrow language from contemporary dance practices. From this set of embodied practices, the poems look at our interlocking responsibilities for each other’s bodies, and given that, are thinking about establishing an ethic—-the poems go about gathering practices of collecting our awareness internally and externally, in order to feel our way somewhere together.
Recommended Citation
Easton Koehler, Celia Alice, "Cullet" (2025). Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers. 12528.
https://scholarworks.umt.edu/etd/12528
Included in
© Copyright 2025 Celia Alice Easton Koehler