Mitchell, Susan

“Midsummer Night’s Poems”—as the thesis’ title suggests—is based on Shakespeare’s play, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” The thesis’ poems reflect a very dream-like state of progression, starting with overall harmony in terms of relationships and followed by the consequences resulting from immature love’s fickle nature. The poems, however, are not meant to be read as grave or humorless even though their tone is sometimes overdramatized. The poems’ tone is lighthearted, while engaging the suffering of love’s hardships. It keeps the reader’s perspective comparable to Bottom’s. The thesis’ message is that we should not take ourselves so seriously. Finally, the thesis’ poems act as a mirror to Shakespeare’s play since common themes emerge in both. In sum, the thesis’ tone shadows the lightheartedness of the play’s and yet conveys that while “The course of true love never did run smooth,” true love always finds a way to bring us peace.

The thesis consists of a novella and five short stories, all narrated from the perspective of a mute diasporic narrator who chronicles several returns to a nameless Caribbean village. Against a rich intertextual backdrop, these texts predominantly explore issues of mutism, the relationship between language and a sense of place, intricacies of translation, and the orality-literacy spectrum.

As humans, we walk through this world hauling remnants of all our individual and collective experiences. We are composites of the things we have seen, been through, the things that have touched our lives and marked us permanently. We are, ourselves, residues of the things that shape the worlds we inhabit and the worlds that inhabit us. On a collective level, people of the Caribbean, particularly those of African descent, are residues of a colonial past that was fraught with violence on every level and a successive local legislature that continues to perpetuate much of the exploitative practices of colonialism. On a personal or individual level, most of us have suffered injury to our psyche and to our bodies that have rendered us what we are today. We are, in a sense, residue (what-lefts) hauling residue, carrying the twin load of what Paula Morgan describes in her book, The Terror and the Time, as “violence and trauma induced by the outworking of [historical and] structural inequalities” along with dust we accrue in our personal walk through this world (2). And whether we admit it or not, the lives we now live, the relationships we sustain or fail to sustain, and the lives we impact are touched by the residue of experiences we carry with us into those spheres.

The creative idea of this thesis did not start with a definitive theme. Instead, an
appreciation of the modern Irish poets inspired the process. A creative endeavor has
translated a bricolage of unconscious memories into a dream like flow of language. The
visualization of dreams and the exploration of language measured in words, has become
my muse. I like to let language shape itself from a visual realization inside the creative
process and to whittle through words to breathe life into the asynchronous sound of
dreams. Most of this reconstruction is drawn from dormant memories. The journey has
allowed me to dig down as if in an archeological site (of the mind) and use language in
arbitrary words that come to express a subjective meaning. Transposing this to a more
objective meaning will often result in an analytic conclusion. These conclusions are
personal observations stemming from the root of the first flash of memory.
The title suggests movement in a slow pattern that is often the way dreams
occur. The result makes the journey that more imperative to reach a conclusion. At
moments there is a repetition of the words, and that is what gives the bricolage
substance if not theme. The journey has offered me a personal gift of time to slow down
and grasp the essence of life. It is my hope that the reader will join my metaphorical
caravan to find a dig of one's own in this creative language.

Through the worlds of cause and effect, forms, and formlessness, echoing the structure
of the shrine Borobudur, this work explores these convergences: Paul Oppenheimer's
argument that the best origin of sonnet is sonitus, the music of the spheres perceived in
this world as a deafening; the experience of Borobudur 's rectangular stone reliefs within
a structure that looks angular but is circular; and a deaf woman's observation that vowel
sounds conflate on faces under the duress of pleasure or pain. The attempt, as the sonnet
moves through the volume, interrupted four times by poems of other types, is to
experience what seems, like stone or path, a most syllogistic of forms, as mandala.
Throughout, the relationship between sight and sound is explored, using homophones,
syntax working with and against parts of speech and lineation, hearkening to words that
keep as unresolved as possible the vowel sounds, as brogues do, and tonal languages.

Otway is a verse collection that explores the journey of the self in isolation. The
collection commences with the narrator's inability to make sense of involuntary isolation.
The subsequent melancholia prompts the narrator's journey of self-exploration, which
progresses outward into the natural world. This journey is signified through the
narrator's travels, which bring her into direct contact with the numinous (nature).
Consequently, both narrator and numen become integrated, leading to the transformation
of solitude as "undesirable" space into "sacred" space, one in which self-discovery can
occur.

"The Light That Calls Them Back" is a collection of 23 poems completed during my
three years of graduate studies. The poems in this collection are memory based and rely
on the use of metaphor to convey emotion. These writings were compiled to demonstrate
a range of poetic styles and subject matter. Most importantly, each poem in some way
deals with the poet's relationship to different places and the memories (often hazy or
inaccurate) associated with certain settings. Additional themes present throughout these
works are the loss that comes with both death and abandonment and the relationship
among visual art and images and poetry. The voice in these poems represents the poet in
different stages of life. Many of the poems appear to deal with mystical or fantastical
elements. These represent the poet's imagination and belief in the unexplained. Some are
meant to be taken literally, while others become metaphors or evidence of the poet's
desire to escape the ordinary world.

Jorie Graham and Alice Fulton's poetries are distinguished by their styles of maximalist excess. They depict the superabundance of the world, including fragmentary contemporary culture, scientific phenomena, and the mind in its process of apprehending. Both poets use idiosyncratic non-verbal devices to account for variables and unworded concepts. Graham's style is verbally and linearly expansive, resisting closure in its long circumlocutions. She weaves contraries and complements into a seamless whole that incorporates loose threads, "failures," and multiple subjectivities. Fulton's style is compressive, embedding heterogeneous subjects and exposing paradox linguistically and by means of satire. She employs wide ranges of diction and alludes to and parodies other written and spoken genres.

Robert Hass's poems address the emptiness found between the word and what it signifies, between imagination and experience, and between language and reality. In Field Guide, his first book of poetry, he discovers this void as he focuses on the power of words and names. In his next book, Praise, he directly explores the emptiness and how it reveals the word as elegy to what it represents. In Human Wishes, his third book of poetry, he redefines imagination, reality, and the ubiquitous emptiness through a process of simplification that uses common nouns and plainer intentions. His desire to constantly address this theme of emptiness throughout his poetry has led to a style of writing that continuously upends the reader's expectations.

The poems of this thesis take the reader to primal places of the mind, body, and soul, often considered better left unspoken or unseen. These places are no doubt dark and full of strange dreams. Here, relationships have a lack of resolution and, of course, are engineered by pleasure and pain. Pain is fire, ice, or reflection. Pleasure is also pain. It is all an eternal dance. Pain gives pleasure meaning and vice versa, like violence and passion. There is a pleasure in the heat rising from a red bottom, and a beauty in that image. I challenge social customs and emotional aversions with my imagery. I utilize rhyme and a lack of punctuation to disturb boundaries as dreams do, or other malleable states of living. I focus on the intangible trauma of self-destruction in the pursuit of creativity, intimacy, and expression. In simpler terms, the poems of this thesis have been caught having a threesome with sex and death. Tempted to peek?