Earth Unlidded
Semester
Spring
Date of Graduation
2008
Document Type
MFA Creative Writing Thesis
Degree Type
MFA
College
Eberly College of Arts and Sciences
Department
English
Committee Chair
James Harms.
Committee Co-Chair
Mary Ann Samyn
Committee Member
Richard Montgomery
Abstract
Earth Unlidded aims to animate its readers into their unfettered experience of the world's multifarious expressions, to encourage them to re-member their creative powers as creators of their creation, and inspire them join others of the tribe in dances of fertile abandon at the center of the crossing point. Here the reader will find a "Wunderkabinet" of voices, dictions, personae, modalities, and discourses. These poems array themselves in different places across several poetic axes: the axis of private/pubic utterance; the realistic/surreal axis; the transparently narrative/fractal language, anti-narrative axis. By refusing to maintain a stable voice or node on these axes, this collection of poems invites the reader to inhabit that fertile place M. C. Richards calls "the crossing point"---the layer of plant cells, neither root nor shoot, from which the plant delves down into the earth and up into the sun. This continual movement between inner and outer spaces echoes the generative, creative tension in all our lives between our private language and our public discourse. By choosing to inhabit the crossing point, Richards says, "we find our aloneness and our connectedness and affirm them, helping to stir up possibilities."
Recommended Citation
Banta, Constance Bostwick, "Earth Unlidded" (2008). Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports. 843.
https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/etd/843
Embargo Reason
Permanent Embargo – MFA Creative Writing