Sewanee: School of Letters Theses 2019

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A Tiny, Eternal Continent
(2019-05) Swift , Jacquelyn
My collection of poems discusses the process of growing, grieving, and the desire to come of age gracefully even as life changes. In some poems the growth process takes the form of learning to mourn and overcome obstacles that would otherwise seem insurmountable. Other poems are both emotional and critical in discussing topics of blackness, feminism, identity, and marriage. Although the range of growth takes on a variety of forms in my collection, it is the tone of pessimism in juxtaposition with the fierce need to “make lemons into lemonade” that anchors these poems to a common thread throughout these pages. What I am most proud of when it comes to the writing process is what I’ve learned from an ultimate failure I experienced almost immediately after writing what I thought would be the first successful poem of my thesis work. It was called “Florida Authorities Consider Possibility of Super Snake in Everglades.” This was a novelty poem that was supposed to examine feminism with a warning of women rising up against oppression in an organized way that would reproduce itself from generation to generation of women. I had been inspired by an interesting news article about snakes and I made the best connections I thought possible between one and the other. This poem failed because it was not specific and grounded enough into its emotional truth. It was a political poem that was trying to be too abstract instead of bringing it home to specific examples of what I was criticizing in a misogynistic society. I have a habit of flooding poems like these with sensory detail and abstraction in place of narrative and concrete specifics. What made matters worse with this poem was that I was already into a heavy extended metaphor that used the “Super-snake” (the product of procreating Burmese and Indian Pythons) who’d been expected to viciously eat its way through the Everglades, as women who are tired of being mistreated in society. These women would “eat” their way through the patriarchal nonsense. A metaphor like this needs to be supported by concrete specifics more than abstracted lyric. I was not telling my truth or a truth I had come to know intimately enough to write effectively about. I realized this only after I looked at my poetry as if I were seeing it for the first time. Would I care about what this poet has to say on this topic? Does this poem hold a universal emotional truth that helps me understand myself, my situation, and my world better? Even though I am the writer, my answer to both of these questions was no. In the first stage of my writing process, I used my earliest poems to test the emotional core and the honesty of my new poems. If I saw I was hitting ineffective notes I stopped. I reevaluated the subject matter, asked myself why I cared about it, and began piecing together the message I was trying to bring to the surface through the vessel of that poem. Specifically, the biggest change was understanding each poem’s unique conceit and writing carefully towards it. In poems like “Crisis at a Poetry Slam,” I was expressing the shame the speaker felt when surrounded by performance poets who had pieces that were more “important” than hers. This poem challenges the conception that it doesn’t matter what you write about on open mic night as long as you share. I am highlighting what it feels to like to be the only one in the room with a love poem in the midst of all the political poetry. The speaker demonstrates her awareness of “larger” issues while holding on to the fact that she has no immediate urge to write about these things, and that makes her feel like less of a poet. Earlier versions of this poem fell flat in communicating this in a plainspoken way that would help readers relate to this sentiment. There were four poets I consistently looked to for a push of inspiration as well as different approaches on finding my way into a poem. Ocean Vuong’s collection of poetry, The Night Sky with Exit Wounds, informed the experimental forms I used to work my way into the section of my book that deals with death and sickness. Like Vuong’s poem “The Seventh Circle of Earth” my poem, “Pancreas and the Brick Duplex on Bonny Oaks Drive,” plays with the different ways a narrative can be stated clearly in a poem without losing the music or lyrical quality. I use footnotes to tell the story that the poem on the main portion of the page merely elevated. This experiment with form was helpful in my struggles with marrying narrative to abstraction. When writing about death, I am concerned about being able to stay close and courageous enough to look my subject in its face and do it justice. Vuong’s poems similarly handle topics dealing with loss, coming of age as a gay male, and processing hate. I studied how he refused to let his readers look away from any of his subject matter. iii From harvesting his sexual freedom from the “wet grass of the baseball field behind the dugout” to the plainspoken confessional quality his work brings with every piece, I learned so much about how to keep my eyes open even as I submerge myself beneath tears, blood, spit, or any other fluid with which these poems brim with. I still have room to get uglier and to dig further into these wounds. My next stage of revisions will be dedicated to cutting everything open even more. Patricia Smith, Caludia Rankine, and Danez Smith all contributed to helping me learn to write my blackness in a way that felt as authentic to me as wearing my own skin. I always get self-conscious in how to occupy literary spaces with the right amount of blackness and the right amount of womanhood. The notion that a choice must be made has been an ongoing struggle for me as well as its own inspiration source. Citizen, Incendiary Art, and Don’t Call Us Dead demonstrated to me how to write about myself as if I am my own story. I learned that my life, my skin, and even my smallest interactions/occurrences are often deeply connected to a larger dialogue that I can engage in, make sense of, and help other readers (especially those that have similar experiences) do the same. I wrote this journey in “Mama Used to Tell Me.” As I was revising this one, I thought about the conversational micro-aggressions I experienced when going relaxerfree in 2010. Most of these interactions were small, but heavy with a larger conversation about black womanhood and feminism. The revision for this poem involved unpacking this dialogue. Understanding conceptual/word association and interconnectivity was the most important part of gaining perspective on how to get into a poem, learn what it wants to say, and get out of it gracefully. Classroom experience at Sewanee was instrumental in my understanding of the revision process. In Chris Bachelder’s Forms of Fiction class and Kelly Carlisle’s Non-Fiction workshop, we read samples of original texts and compared them to their revised versions. This gave me insight on how to shave down and only keep what is absolutely necessary in my poetry, making every word count. In Jamie Quatro’s fiction workshop, we discussed how to carve our stories out of all the fluff by doing imitations from the fiction in literary journals and understanding how they work in their concise forms. In Nickole Brown’s two poetry workshops everything came together for me. She developed a list of ten poetry guidelines to use during the revision stage. It was a reminder to check my poem’s title, shape, linebreaks, verbs, point-of- view, tone, punctuation, economy of language, emotional core, and solidified ending before calling it finished. Each of these poems are only the best possible lines from a slew of sloppy earlier versions of themselves.
Faulkner’s Folly Views on the Future of Race Relations From a “Liberal” Southerner
(University of the South, 2019-03) Jones Archibald, Laura
Scholars agree that William Faulkner’s novels are groundbreaking in their representation of race relations. While Faulkner was indeed ahead of his time, among white writers, in his willingness to confront the atrocities of the past, ultimately his approach to race was limited. Despite Faulkner’s efforts to portray race as a social construction, his sympathies consistently fell on the white side of the color line. “Faulkner’s Folly; Views on the Future of Race Relations From a ‘Liberal’ Southerner” attempts to closely examine the mulatto landscape Faulkner presents in his fictional Yoknapatawpha County. Through this examination the central struggle in Faulkner’s life and work becomes clear. In trying to make sense of the South’s approach to the color line, Faulkner reveals his own inability to fully accept the inevitable solution of integration and full social justice; instead he envisions a future where the problems surrounding race relations will eventually work themselves out organically. Faulkner’s solution to race relations in the South, as he expresses in his fiction as well as in his own personal statements, is that eventually the African American population will “bleach out,” or cease to exist through interracial relations. This thesis begins with an overview of the history that inspired Faulkner’s works. Part 1, “Fertile Soil,” begins by looking at American history after reconstruction and traces the mentality of the white population towards the newly freed black population and how that mentality led to the legalization of segregation. It focuses on images formed by the white population, like the mammy and the black beast rapist, and how the propagation of these images led to atrocious acts, such as lynchings. The general history is followed by Faulkner’s personal history and examines how his upbringing in the South influenced his writings. This section ends with the comparison of real-life history to images and scenes found in Faulkner’s novels. Part 2, “The Genius of Faulkner,” focuses on the more brilliant aspects of Faulkner’s novels. This part begins with scholars who were Faulkner’s contemporaries and notes how the racial aspects of Faulkner’s work alluded them. This leads into the examination of the many critics who do write about race in Faulkner’s work in sophisticated and demanding ways, and focuses on the mulatto landscape that Faulkner conceives in Light In August, Absalom, Absalom!, and Go Down, Moses. The scholarship leads into theory, focusing on Charles Mills’ The Racial Contract and this section ends with a close look at some of the more vivid images that Faulkner conjures within his novels. In the third part, “Faulkner’s Folly,” the focus turns to the inherent problems found in these novels. This part begins examining what scholars have to say about Faulkner’s marginalization of his black characters which leads to my primary argument. Faulkner’s use of the words “bleach out” in both Light In August and Absalom, Absalom! are closely examined, followed by a look at Isaac McCaslin’s refrain of “not now” found in Go Down, Moses. These phrases are compared to Faulkner’s statements in speeches and interviews where he repeatedly tells the black population to “go slow” in their pursuit of integration and he brazenly claims that, “In the long view, the Negro race will vanish in three hundred years by intermarriage.” The conclusion states the importance of not overlooking either Faulkner’s accomplishments or his failures of vision, for his genius is undeniable, but, instead, to examine and learn from his shortcomings. This thesis attempts to illustrate that in understanding the missteps of the past we may find a clearer path for the future. In examining the flaws in Faulkner’s writing we can better understand the mindset of the present.
Wonderful Suffering
(University of the South, 2019) Elliott, Alissa
When I began the MFA program at the Sewanee School of Letters, I wasn’t sure which genre I would write in, but I knew what story I wanted to tell. I was struggling through the onset of Bipolar II as a college sophomore when I learned of Robert Schumann’s mental illness and his wife’s close and lasting friendship with their friend and fellow-composer Johannes Brahms. While I am only an amateur choral singer, my grandmother played the piano well, and she especially liked Schumann. The spring I entered the Schumanns’ circle, my grandmother bought a piano to replace the one her husband had sold to a drinking buddy, saying “Nobody plays this old thing.” She grieved when he died, when I was six, but she took great pleasure in returning to music and played “Traumerei” from Schumann’s Carnaval and “Claire de Lune” over and over well into her 80s. Both of my grandmother’s children, my mother and uncle, had serious mental health problems, like Clara Schumann’s husband and son, and this parallel led me to explore the intersections between artistic creativity, romantic love, and mental illness in my own life. Deeply affected by the bipolar psychiatrist Kay Redfield Jamison’s Touched With Fire, a study of bipolar illness and the artistic temperament, and Setting the River on Fire her clinical biography of Robert Lowell, I wanted to bring the historical and personal together in a cycle of poems inspired by the letters, compositions, household books, and flower diaries of Clara and Robert Schumann and Johannes Brahms. As my research deepened each summer, certain questions arose again and again. Does compulsive attention to a particular form, such as fugue, for Robert Schumann, or iambic pentameter for Lowell, exacerbate or help mental illness? What are the demands on the mind and the body of indulging the connection to something beyond daily life? What is the cost of a life that seeks to do more than live, and how is that cost born by the body, the mind, and the family of the artist? I draw consolation from Clara’s exacting standards, from her resolution not to compromise, and I hoped to write my way into some of the strength that allowed her to endure the deaths of her husband and three of her children, the depression and chronic pain she suffered as she persevered to perform hundreds of the finest piano performances of her time. My advisor Nickole Brown introduced us to a set of habits around observation and composition that will likely be the most lasting effect of the program. We read longer, looser poems by Larry Levis and Ross Gay that documented the poets’ lived experience and impressions of their immediate surroundings and practiced imitations of their work. I found this very difficult, partly because, like many mentally ill people, my outer senses are often dull or inaccurate. Cultivating habits of attentiveness and gratitude led me to a fuller understanding of what poetry could do. Imitating Nick Flynn’s poems in Some Ether about his mother’s mental illness and suicide offered opportunities to approach similar content from my own experience. The next summer, our workshop group walked on moss with our eyes closed, listened to music, free wrote at length, and read, among others, Patricia Smith, whose use of form explored traumatic, shared memory in Blood Dazzler. I was also inspired by Natasha Trethewey’s illumination of the experience of a mixed-race sex worker in New Orleans at the turn of the century in Bellocq’s Ophelia. Clara Schumann described her career as a virtuoso as an obligation to her own talent, but quit composing in midlife, after writing 70 compositions, because she “had not known a woman to do it.” Hadn’t she done it herself? Perhaps that wasn’t enough. Between summer sessions, I began to study German for reading knowledge and dug deeper into biographical details the broader record obscured, including the birth of a daughter to Schumann by a domestic worker, and Clara Schumann’s awareness of this relationship. I listened to the music of all three composers constantly, particularly Helene Grimaud’s recording of Brahms’ first piano concerto, which Clara Schumann performed three times in her life, despite the damage the technically demanding piece did to her hands and arms. I read Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain and Joseph and his Brothers in English and practiced my own translations of Rilke, Heine, and Holderlin poems the composers had set to music. I had studied German Romanticism in a previous graduate program and returned to the works of Jean Paul and Novalis to understand the intellectual context for the Schumann’s relationship with Brahms, whom Schumann entrusted with his considerable library. Many of these works emphasize the significance of “pure” music that does not tell a story or draw on historical or personal content, but rather transports the artist and the listener to a realm beyond that of earthly experience. In search of further assistance in structuring my work, I turned to Jessica Jacobs’ Pelvis with Distance, a biography-in-poems of Georgia O’Keefe’s relationship with Alfred Stieglitz supported by a frame narrative charting the author’s personal and creative investment in the project. In a telephone conversation, Jacobs emphasized the poet’s responsibility to create and manage an experience for the reader, something she manages in Pelvis with Distance through controlling the balance of pieces in each voice or perspective and allowing extracts of the O’Keefe correspondence to stand alone as found poems. As a result, I winnowed down my many epigraphs and quotations to focus on the Brahms-Clara letters and imposed a three-part structure modeled on the form of the first piano concerto.
Searches for Truth in the Age of Lies
(University of the South, 2019) Hight, Gordon
As rapidly as technology has spurred the creation, assimilation, and distribution of information, so too have Americans grown more polarized, more apt to choose ideology over facts, and more resistant to constructive dialogue. The speed and volume of our consumption have accelerated as well, with our preference of food, entertainment, and news all at our algorithmic beck and call. With this transactional mindset, we’ve begun to commoditize the ways we learn, interact, and relate to others. More and more we express value in dollar terms, instead of appreciating factuality, historical significance, or beauty. The more I considered and grew frustrated by these social patterns, the more I thought about the underlying problem—the irrational avoidance of truth. Anything that conflicts with our preferences we’ve come to call “fake.” Painful realities nonetheless exist. Sometimes we don’t win, sometimes others get what we want, sometimes our self interest negatively impacts others. But we don’t want to accept anything that conflicts with how we want the world to be, so we disregard the truth, or assault it altogether, en route to solidifying misguided opinions. What’s worse, we act on that misinformation by voting with our ballots and our dollars in ways that often run counter to our own best interest. It’s easy to see and criticize this flawed behavior in others, and the more I found myself doing exactly that, the more I saw those very faults in myself. The three essays that follow grew from my need to respond to this revelation. The Lies We Call the Truth is the personal story of my trip to the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in December of 2016. The essay describes the internal struggles I went through as much as it details the history of the Dakota Access Pipeline conflict itself. I came face-to-face with my own whiteness and cowered at the glimpses of what my life would be like without privilege. Grasping for my bubble of safety, I allowed those fears to cut my time at Standing Rock short, leaving after just one night, mere hours from the water protectors’ victory, when the Obama Administration blocked construction, though the stay was ultimately temporary. While the trip was brief, my awareness about how I see and interact with the world has grown much clearer, my sense of humanity more humble and inclusive, and my mind more open. A Study of Feminine Beauty explores the constrictive definition of what the modern world considers beautiful about women and how I grapple with that limited notion as a male fashion and portrait photographer. From the history of standardizing women’s clothing sizes to the catastrophic impacts the fashion industry’s commercialism had on the health and happiness of models and the women who wanted to look like them, the essay explains how such a narrow definition of feminine beauty took root and where there are signs of positive change. The Dark Side of Whiteness uncovers the truth about the history of the Confederacy and its white supremacist underpinnings that sill drive racism today, most notably seen in the August 2017 riots in Charlottesville, Virginia. My study included my own family’s culpability in the slave-owning South as well as the broader political motivations that created and sustained the Lost Cause mythology—misbegotten tenets that have repeatedly prevented social healing in America and continue to drive the wedge ever deeper. Through historical research, interviews with University of Virginia professors, and a personal homecoming to my alma mater in Charlottesville, this essay untangles the debate over the fate of Confederate monuments in America by analyzing the conditions under which they were raised in the first place.
Shifting
(University of the South, 2019) Singletary, Ione Michele
This collection of poems is about love and loss. It spans over 35 years, from the death of my father to the death of my mother 33 years later, and much in between. As I age and experience more and more loss, I have learned to look at each loss as a shift—not an ending, just a slight shift in context. Loss seems so final, so done. A shift has no bad connotation, no dire consequences; it’s simply a change, not good, not bad, just different. That is what life has become about—shifting to new circumstances. Therefore, I have titled this collection Shifting. As a poet I have been shifting as well. I am finding my process, my style, and my voice. I tend to work in stages: first free-writing in journals, and then drafting which includes time for it to settle, be it days, weeks, months, or even years. Over the past four summers studying in Sewanee, I have finally learned how to revise. I really had no tools before then for what revision really meant. Now I know that is where the real work is done. I always thought poetry was a gift—either you had it or you didn’t. Now I know that for me, poetry comes alive in the revision stage. I finally know what I am supposed to do in revision—well, mostly, some of the time at least. The magic has to be coaxed out, but with direction and purpose in the revision stage, I have learned to lasso it. I think of the revision stage as having two parts: crafting and polishing. This helps me to play and experiment where I used to be too attached to my first drafts, therefore reluctant to take chances. The term crafting has an experimental fun connotation to it, leaving me to feel at ease and curious. That first stage of revision is discovery for me, playing with possibilities, breaking the rules. It’s where I may turn the poem upside down; or delete the whole last stanza; or change the point of view; or cut everything but one stanza which then gives birth to a whole new poem. I have learned to let go in the playful crafting stage, cutting every unnecessary word. This is where I separate from the poem, looking at it through the eyes of a reader to identify the jewel in the rough. Then I move on to part two, polishing. That is where the line by line work happens, the questioning of every word, looking for muscular verbs, inspecting each punctuation mark, each line break, the shape and white spaces. This is where the nitpicky work is done, the slow grueling chisel work.While I can see how far I have come in these last five years, I also am aware of where I need more work. I tend to start off with too much explanation and not enough trust in my reader, especially at the end, often making the poems fall flat. I know most of the time I over-expose in early drafts, so I’m learning to pull back, to leave inspection and mystery for the reader. I also know I still need to reach for stronger imagery and find the flow that comes from stringing image to image, phrase to phrase, sound to sound. While I am strong in narrative, I am pushing to add more lyrical and musical qualities to my work. I need to work on embodying my writing, and by that I mean writing through the body, really striving to use all the senses. I can get to that place where the writing has taken me somewhere else, beyond my temporal experience, but I long to learn to get to that level of writing more often and more easily. I am working on these aspects of my poetry, but still have lots of room for improvement.Numerous poets and writers have influenced me in the development of this thesis. At Sewanee I have had the opportunity to work with a variety of mentors and some determined blooming writers like myself willing to push through the difficult work. They have been gracious and inspiring, and with their help, I have found my way here. Classroom activities from the in-depth study of Robert Frost and Elizabeth Bishop in Danny Anderson’s class, to working on form and structure with Charles Martin, and finally to two years of working on imitation and revision with Nickole Brown, have stretched and pushed me further than I could have ever imagined and more than I could ever find a way to thank them. My own studies of Walt Whitman, Anne Sexton, and Sharon Olds expanded my horizons of what poetry could do. An early workshop experience with Dorianne Laux inspired my determination to pursue this passion. Numerous books have added to my education from craft books like Structure & Surprise by Michael Theune and Sin and Syntax by Constance Hale, to poetry collections by Ross Gay, Nick Flynn, Matthew Olzmann, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Patricia Smith, and Brigit Pegeen Kelly that have shown me how it is done. Every one of these people, and many more, have helped me develop and shift into this new role of poet. After completing this thesis project, I intend to pursue my new goal, that of publication. I am lucky to have developed connections with other Sewanee MFA candidates and graduates here in Nashville. We have a writing group that meets monthly, and one colleague is very active with The Porch, a local writing community, and I plan to attend some of their workshops and events in the next year. I also will be attending at least one writer’s conference or residence a year, and I plan on becoming an active participant in the writing community through social media and attendance at various readings and poetry events around town and the surrounding area. I will start the process of submitting to journals and contests, using Poets and Writers, The Writer’s Chronicle, and “Submishmash Weekly” from Submittable, in an attempt to gain publication credentials. I will also work on a chapbook, which will hopefully lead to my first book of poetry. I know I still have a lot of work to do, but the shift from my dream of being a poet to the reality has begun.

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