Date of Award

5-2020

Document Type

Campus Access Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Fine Arts (MFA)

Department

English/Creative Writing

First Advisor

Lillian-Yvonne Bertram

Second Advisor

Lloyd Schwartz

Third Advisor

Askold Melnyczuk

Abstract

How Much Does a Memory Weigh is a collection of poetry, divided into three sections, concerned with political-economics, everyday lived life, and the creation of self, and the roles aesthetics and historical remembrance play in our interaction with these interior and exterior spaces. Section one places us in Dolorempolis, the fictionalized city of interior self, a depleted rural landscape the directionless narrator occupies and aspires to leave. Section two is a longer poem composed primarily through sonically minded peripatetic poetics. Titled Dorchester Dance, the piece attempts Olsonian formal theories to emulate a walk through the neighborhood of Dorchester as a means of thinking and being in the world, much in the way music is. Section three finds the narrator living in Boston, trying to locale oneself within the national and civic history of its people and geography. This work’s larger purpose attempts to bring the thinking poet into the material world, and through this thinking, come to understand and situate oneself within a landscape. Here, I’ve constructed two cities in which the narrator may walk and contemplate in the roving traditions of old.

Comments

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