Tiger's Eye & Twine, with Sails in Flame: A Triptych

This thesis is a triptych of poetic sequences on queer reckoning—queer as an identity, a community, and a strategy of engaging with the world. Progressing further into interiority as the triptych progresses, the poems first confront contemporary politics, utilizing news sources, hearing transcripts, and other found text to interrogate the language with which we interact in our everyday lives, challenging the violence inherent in hegemonic rhetorics and recognizing its negative effect on the body/bodies. The second section, a single fifteen-sonnet poem, focuses more intensely on questions of queerness raised in the previous section, constructing a working theory of gender as a liberating and intentional construction of self and queer community, entering into a queer literary tradition to imagine potentials and multiplicities of being. The final section, a series of cubist self-portraits, bears witness to a particular interiority in a multi-modal project to understand the self through shifting, associative, disorienting lenses. The poems are simultaneously concerned with urgent questions of language, genre, and limitation that follow a lineage of experimental poetics, inclusive of visual, sonic, and formal constructions. They argue that these latter components of craft are as important as the language and equally able to generate meaning, often that which engages logics of feeling and embodiedness that disrupt (ir)rational hegemonic logics. In doing so, the poems knowingly risk difficulty in order to search for languages outside of normative power structures and toward a more realized queer possibility.

Name thesis:degree_name

M.F.A. (Master of Fine Arts)

Level thesis:degree_level

Masters

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Creative Writing and Media Arts (UMKC)

Grantor

University of Missouri--Kansas City

Year dc:date.issued

2020

Author dc:creator

• Schultz, Dennison Ty

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Hodgen, Christie, 1974-

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/10355/73991

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:mospace.umsystem.edu:10355/73991