DOI
https://doi.org/10.25772/B5BC-9A61
Defense Date
2022
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Fine Arts
Department
English
First Advisor
Kathleen Graber
Second Advisor
David Wojahn
Third Advisor
Dr. Meryl "Mimi" Winick
Abstract
The poems in Cyanometer work together as a meditation on the epistemological questions at the core of our everyday experience. They ask what it means to know a place, to call it home, and then, to leave it. Landscape and environment are central to these poems, as is the explicitly philosophical. Engaging in formal variety, everyday experience is placed alongside the work of philosophers like Gaston Bachelard and Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose philosophical ideas and theories lead these poems to interrogate the limits of what we cannot know about the world around us and ourselves, and what exactly we might do in response when we truly accept this conclusion. In the face of such uncertainty, these poems also interrogate moments of joy and the sublime, and ultimately, the wonder of a natural world we want so deeply to understand, and by extension, love.
Rights
© The Author
Is Part Of
VCU University Archives
Is Part Of
VCU Theses and Dissertations
Date of Submission
5-10-2022