In Fugue: Well-Tempered Poetry

Abstract

While each poem here has grown organically out of a personal experience, emotion, or love of language, each sequence has been tempered through an intense artistic process by the application of musical and psychiatric traditions of fugue. Formally, this work is most immediately indebted to the works of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams. Following Pound's cross-disciplinary, fugal Cantos and Williams's cross-genre Spring and All and Paterson, I have incorporated autobiography with critical literary theory, literary history, and composition and rhetorical scholarship in critical/creative, prose-verse combinations, each fugue representing a highly tempered body of work linked by subject and sequence.