At Home, In Kansas City

Abstract

The poems that make up the substantive portion of this dissertation have been organized into a sequence made up of two large sets of poems. The poems of the first set, called "Essays," neither describe nor evaluate the objects, individuals, actions, or events of their titles: rather, each poem presents an attempt to make sense of them and of my response to them, as one attempts to makes sense of any novel experience and of one's response to it. In this way, the poems are involved in both (self)observation and (self)examination; they take the measure of what it is that one sees, just as they evince an awareness of one's own disposition and sensibility in the measuring. This first set opens up into the second set, entitled "Poems," composed ostensibly of the generalizations, universal or otherwise, with which the inductive method culminates. And yet, these generalizations cannot quite participate in a reification of that method, for they are not bound, nor do they mark or trace their binding, to the experiences and the responses that precede them. They are generalizations, they may be said to "say something," but to arrive at that saying, they have had to veer away, to find some space where the intractable complexities of the world itself and the objects, events, actions, individuals that constitute it may be held in abeyance. Ultimately, as the reader moves from one poem to the next, from one set to the other, he or she may come to experience a narrative, of the poet trying to find something to say about the world and his experience of it, that provides some context for a realization of the possibility and productivity of a critique of the conventional. The poems frustrate the application of conventional frames just as they use them as points of reference, providing the reader with a mechanism for assimilating the poems to some point of view while compelling him or her to work away from any conventional construal to something more novel, yet nevertheless meaningful.