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

Available for download on Saturday, March 23, 2222

Included in

Poetry Commons

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