Anfechtung

Abstract

This thesis is a collection of poetry that explores the relationships between time, memory, identity, freedom, and meaning within the context of a shifting and unsteady world. The collection is organized along a trajectory not unlike that of Dante's Divine Comedy, moving through inner and outer landscapes of uncertainty and anxiety before emerging in more ambiguous, subtle spaces. Allusion is used to suggest the continuity and fragmentariness of a tradition (similar to T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land"), reformation and response to a tradition (as in Nets by Jen Bevin), and the chancy contingencies of personal experience. Formally, the poems use a wide variety of strategies and forms including erasure and non-traditional lineation to suggest various states of being ranging from the hypnagogic and nightmarish to the nostalgic and wistful, and ultimately to something like hope. The poems also range from highly confessional modes to more abstract, imagistic modes to similarly suggest motion and change.