Dirt Amendment
Date of Award
6-2020
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Organizational Unit
College of Arts Humanities and Social Sciences, English and Literary Arts
First Advisor
Bin Ramke
Second Advisor
Graham Foust
Third Advisor
Selah Saterstorm
Fourth Advisor
Hava Gordon
Keywords
Creative writing, Poetry
Abstract
This creative dissertation leverages poetics of storytelling and world-building as a way to carve out room for lesbian gaze, speakership, and personhood. Comprised of four heroic crowns of sonnets, this work is both formal and experimental, ranging from lyric romantic and familial narrative to blank verse of reconfigured found text pulled from financial newsletter emails. These crowns place the speaker in sociopolitical, geographically- and ecologically-rooted contexts. Moreover, this work pursues the implications of national political identity with an intersectional awareness that interrogates complicity in late-stage capitalism, drone warfare, the election of Donald Trump, gay poetry lineage, regionalism, familial kinships structures, environmental degradation, and mental health. As is the case in lived experience, these treacheries fade in and out of focus as intimacy, heartbreak, travel, eroticism, joy, and quotidian happenings offer character and momentum across non-linear narrative arcs.
The critical apparatus enters the vibrant conversation in queer studies about futurity and death drive by calling both temporal orientations into question in the context of Covid-19. This essay stakes out the necessity of reconciling with the present—even a quarantined present—as a therapeutic tactic of literary criticism. Drawing on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s concept of reparative reading, I turn to contemporary lesbian poetry written in the year preceding the global Covid-19 crisis and temporally queer this body of literature by anachronistically reading traces of the pandemic into the texts. Specifically, I offer close readings of work from eight new full-length collections by Natalie Diaz, Carmen Giménez Smith, Etel Adnan, Shira Erlichman, Stephanie Burt, Franny Choi, t’ai freedom ford, and Keetje Kuipers with and against José Esteban Muñoz, Lee Edelman, Allyson Mitchell, and Sedgwick to transcend pandemic paranoia and denial. I argue that when read in quarantine, these pandemic moments in lesbian poetry offer the reader a mode of accessing present trauma that acknowledges a rupture in temporal expectations and the grief therein, while dissolving the construct of futurity.
Publication Statement
Copyright is held by the author. Permanently suppressed.
Rights Holder
Alicia Mountain
Provenance
Received from author
File Format
application/pdf
Language
en
File Size
113 pgs
Recommended Citation
Mountain, Alicia, "Dirt Amendment" (2020). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 2194.
https://digitalcommons.du.edu/etd/2194
Copyright date
2020
Discipline
Creative writing