Creature Constellation

Date of Award

12-2024

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Department

English

First Advisor

Alen Hamza, Ph.D.

Second Advisor

Thisbe Nissen, M.F.A.

Third Advisor

Jil Larson, Ph.D.

Fourth Advisor

Gina Franco, M.F.A.

Keywords

Contemporary, ecology, elegy, lament, place, poetry

Abstract

The opening poem of Creature Constellation, “January Halo,” sets the stage for a speaker’s journey from varied Western U.S. geographical locations (in this particular poem’s case, Sacramento, California) toward the Midwest, toward poems about home. Here, the term “home” is explored for its multi-dimensional complexities. How do sprawling landscapes, rivers of water, rivers of stars, flora and fauna lead a speaker toward a sense of belonging when home cannot always provide that necessity? How do physical journeys merge with the infinite sprawl of the internal life? How do desolate or damaged ecological terrains communicate? What does it mean for a spirit to inhabit a space, to inhabit a body? Through meditative poems of elegy that mark the inconstant in the speaker’s life as well as lyrical landscape triptychs and poems of ekphrasis and persona, the lines here seek to better understand a fractured personal and physical terrain.

The poems are arranged in four sections, each initiated by a persona poem in the voice of a prominent woman in conversation with the tensions the speaker explores. The persona poems, too, add another facet to the more personal figures who emerge throughout these lines. Family and loved ones populate, cultivate, and dismantle the physical and psychological landscapes at hand. “Grocery List for Bob & Gladys,” for example, pays homage to the speaker’s grandparents and “Meantime” is dedicated to the speaker’s late aunt.

As noted, the first part of the collection asks what the winding journey away from and then toward a home environment can teach a careful observer. How do the open, often unforgiving, though physically stunning spaces of the American West speak to those Midwestern spaces that wait for the traveler at the end of the first movement? The second section, then, builds another world in conversation with the first: named people from the speaker’s life, real spaces, Midwestern environments, and the body are a few forces that illuminate the personal tensions driving the speaker’s questioning. These lines meditate on unstable familiar environments while cautiously moving through them. Then, in the third section, a sense of dissatisfaction with the uprooted nature of Midwestern home spaces fuels wonder. How does one rebuild in the aftermath of crisis? How does one create art out of bad memories? Out of grief? What ruins? What restores? What, ultimately, doesn’t need mending? New forms of seeing expand in the summer sun, a season that threads throughout this section. Finally, the winter sun persists in the collection’s concluding movement, a brief, three-poem farewell that takes inspiration from Julian of Norwich’s near-death experience.

Ultimately, these poems provide a walk through what Bachelard may call “the hallways of the mind” in an elegiac framework. This collection is concerned with what can be held and what can be lost in the wake of personal, geographical, and ecological shifting: a search for place where touch and the body can be realized.

Access Setting

Dissertation-Abstract Only

Restricted to Campus until

12-1-2034

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