Browsing by Author "Dungy, Camille, advisor"
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Item Restricted Chasing the sound(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2023) O'Tierney, Bryce M., author; Dungy, Camille, advisor; Steensen, Sasha, committee member; Pippen, John, committee member"Chasing the sound" has been a direction in my mind from the moment I first heard a violin played. My primary relationship with the instrument has been fundamental to the shaping of my relationship with my body and with other bodies. I have been humbled by the process of writing these poems, allowing them to arrive, tuning their forms, sequencing and re-sequencing their positions, and identifying guide notes and echoes, toward orchestrating a coherent whole. The MS writes into interwoven questions concerning identity, connection, and belonging, representative of a particular stage of my becoming as woman and artist. These poems have taught me how to better read myself, have shown me ways toward a re-integration of Self, in the context of intergenerational trauma, mental illness, relational complexity, and queer identity. To me, this collection embodies an ecology with a basis in sound and sounding(-out). If asked to describe this poetry collection in two words, I would respond: inheritance, desire. I feel these poems traveling the contours of longing and loss, harmony and dissonance. I find that they reflect a process of healing off-the-page with respect to disentangling the relationship of the body with the instrument from: the relationship of the body with nourishment from: the relationship of the body with a beloved. Perhaps most striking to me is the way these poems have opened me toward a forward-movement of my body, how reaching or "walking" back toward points of origin has offered an embrace of creativity that includes the possibility of future motherhood. An early and abiding intention of the manuscript has been to bring the embodied experience of musicmaking to the page. In my first workshop here, I found myself taking up a work of uncovering/recovering Indigenous heritage on my mother's side, a conversation begun years prior at my grandmother's kitchen table. At the center of my inquiry was the interlinkage of bodies across four generations through the life of an instrument (my great-grandmother Orleta's fiddle). I am the sole violin-player today across both maternal and paternal (Irish American) bloodlines. I have felt drawn to bring musicmaking to the page as a site of intergenerational encounter. I encounter a poetic form as an inheritance of the body, the body in turn an inheritance of the surrounding world/landscape (of dimensions both corporeal and spiritual). Through my time in this program, the field of the page has further opened to me and the poems, allowing for more fully embodied forms, projective of both identity and place. The heightened participation of white space in the musical scoring of a poem has also propelled my coming-into a more intentional gestural logic of punctuation, in particular, use of the colon, with the parenthesis and em dash especially behaving in dynamic relation. The colon feels vital to transformative possibility within and across poems, as threshold, entryway, opening, movement between manifest and unmanifest. Dimensionality and directionality, parataxis and hypotaxis, centrifugal and centripetal motion—sculptural shape has been teaching me how to write narratively without plot, and, to enact a generative tension between feeling and understanding. Composing along multiple axes has expanded my repertoire for enacting multiplicity/multivocality. The forms of these poems feel more authentically aligned with my lifeway as a musician, scored through exchange between nonverbal and verbal, human and greater-than-human, the improvised and composed. Inclinations to speak/not speak or reveal/conceal guide holding of silences and absences relative to inheritance—musicmaking, maternal lineage, epigenetics, human: greater-than-human interactivity. There is variation in the way these poems engage in spatial mapping of the proprioceptive, as well as, and in contrast with, showing a process of thinking on the page, which feels both vulnerable and gratifying. A significant development through this writing process has been diversifying the relationship between syntax and the line, elongating breath and cognitive movement through cumulative sentence structure, experimenting with inversion and the provisional. The prose poems, as well as the series of compressed untitled poems (marked by ~), represent a shift from open field to portraying movement of the mind within bounded form—the need for a kind of structured improvisation. I'm interested in the way form can variously hold content—to protect, expose, declare, recall. I experience form participating in contours of grace and mercy—allowing space or enclosure for processing, healing, dialogue, with self and with others, past, present, and future. The compilation of these poems has charged me with pushing synesthesia within my work, e.g., in the form of rhyming images, in play with aural refrain. Additionally, I have become more conscientious about how section breaks can serve to clarify scene/simultaneity/boundary/ threshold. Each of these aspects feels aligned with an embrace of fluidity, in one sense, a search for relinquishing repressive forms of (self-)control, and in another, a deepening in the queering of erotics in the work. I'm interested in how this collection might articulate those moments of living double, where grief and hope/joy are two sides of one fold, and self a continuum of becoming through interrelation. It has been a fulfilling process to get my arms around these poems as a body entire, puzzling out the sectioning and ordering of the collection, given the number and range of poems. The 83 poems collected here represent a passage across: ground of being in relationship with music/the violin; to origin through my maternal line, writing into questions of Seminole heritage and inheritance; to a navigation of beloved relationships; to an intertwining of these facets in a final section that re-situates the speaker in community. My greatest challenge in bringing these poems together has been to make more legible the interplay between pronouns. I am satisfied in where I've arrived in terms of distinguishing for the reader the meaning of the "she" and "i" with respect to the estrangement from Self I experience when in a depressed state/depressive episode. The "she" in the manuscript also works on the level of engaging the gifts of depression, particularly depression as a threshold of access to ancestral experience and re-connection. Beginning last semester, I have been engaged in an independent study of movement/dance alongside the writing practice, which has deeply re-informed my own bodily understanding of this multiplicity of self. Furthermore, I needed to find a balance in making evident the various beloveds in the "chasing the sound" section, approaching this via gender, while also allowing for fluidity of experience. Finding a three-part movement across this section allowed me to situate a beloved "you" that affirms where I am in my current lived experience as a bisexual woman, affirming attraction and romantic love as being not about the gender, but about the person. Additional valences of "you" include the primacy of relation between myself and the violin, and myself and my twin sister.Item Restricted Drift(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2022) Delfino, Annmarie, author; Dungy, Camille, advisor; Beachy-Quick, Dan, advisor; Lehene, Marius, committee memberThe poems in Drift explore cyclical, nonlinear ways of experiencing and viewing time and our relationship to the natural world. Centered in the coastal landscapes of Southern California, these poems examine how ecology shifts over time. Interspersed throughout the collection are poems from the point of view of a young speaker as she revisits her childhood memories, connects them to the present day, and imagines how her present self might evolve in the future. Both the landscape-centered and human-centered poems question what appears stable and fixed, exploring the ways memory and landscape are malleable, fluid, and interconnected.Item Restricted Mosaic disturbance(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2017) Brant, Cedar, author; Beachy-Quick, Dan, advisor; Dungy, Camille, advisor; Harrow, Del, committee member; Cooperman, Matthew, committee memberIn ecology, the most resilient landscapes are ones that experience a mosaic of disturbance. This means small swaths of windfall, wildfire, and beetle kill across a landscape that create a patchwork of forest dynamics. A mosaic of disturbance increases diversity, making the land more resilient to larger, potentially-catastrophic disturbance. These poems I trace the lineages of damage in the world and in the individual. What kinds of damage open us to the world in ways that become essential to our understanding of ourselves and others? These lines often lead back to an idea of home. These poems ask how one makes a home, even as those places—physical, emotional, ecological—are always in a mosaic of damage and change. These poems accrue as an inventory, using science, myth, and symbol as organizational nets to trace patterns of disturbance and regeneration across the boundaries between self and the rest of the world.Item Restricted Of tender archives(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2017) Jarrott, Denise, author; Beachy-Quick, Dan, advisor; Dungy, Camille, advisor; Lindenbaum, John, committee memberThe following collection of poems is a meditation on the archive of the human life by using texts, both real and imagined, as its vehicle. Of Tender Archives is divided into four sections: A Partial Alphabet, or a collection of sonnets that includes both archaic and contemporary letters, Anatomy for Artists, a series on visual art and the body, Lectures on Love and Architecture, a series on spaces and the ancient Greek concept of eros, and lastly, Endnotes on Restoration, or A Small Personal Matter, a long poem of an imagined destroyed journal of my great-great grandfather. These poems take their forms from drawing manuals, architectural guides, historical records and other archival material. Using this fragmentary physicality as a vehicle, these poems exist as complete and incomplete variations on memory, eros and anxiety that form the human psyche.Item Restricted Rupture(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2024) Bucheli Peñafiel, Carolina, author; Ausubel, Ramona, advisor; Dungy, Camille, advisor; McConigley, Nina, committee member; Martin Quijada, Carmen, committee memberThis collection of short stories is tied together by the genre known as Andean gothic which fuses the indigenous and mestizo cosmovision, myths, symbols, believes, worldviews, legends, and imaginaries of the Ecuadorian geographic area, with the realities of Ecuadorians' everyday lives. Rupture is a collection of eight short stories that center around these realities in terms of gender, power dynamics, self-discovery, the paranormal, religion, culture, race, politics, gender, loss of innocence, migration, and dislocation. In addition, they circle around mysteries detonated by these intersections, realities, and sometimes even around violence and horror. The title comes from the concept of capturing decisive moments in all the characters in this story collection life, where something about their worldview got disrupted, and they had to move out of their zone of familiarity (not necessarily comfort). All of them are traversing the known into the unknown and are learning lessons from the world that surrounds them. All of the stories border a tangible world, an internal space, and oftentimes a paranormal space as well. I didn't make the distinction of whether or not an otherworld or a paranormal world exists or if it's a product of the character's minds and beliefs, since that is not precisely the point of the stories. The point is on how they shape and intersect with the lives of the characters. I wanted to pay homage to the stories I grew up hearing where all these elements mixed in a natural unquestionable way, where they are not mutually exclusive.Item Restricted Still, the West(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2018) Mucklow, David, author; Dungy, Camille, advisor; Cooperman, Matthew, committee member; Fernandez-Gimenez, Maria, committee memberStill, the West is a collection of poems organized in two sections. The first section centers around the history of barbed wire, mending fences, and a familiarity with the place of Northwest Colorado. The second section deals with displacement, centering around poems exploring Eastern Colorado plains towns, and prairie landscapes. As a whole, the collection examines the place of the American West in work, landscape, and place.Item Restricted The family contracts(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2021) Wernsing, Sarah, author; Dungy, Camille, advisor; Cooperman, Matthew, committee member; Fernandez-Gimenez, Maria, committee memberThe family contracts is a manuscript of poetry that explores the nexus of motherhood, family history, and place, particularly the suburbs as the site of the family home. It is a work at once expansive in its reach toward the past and also incredibly insular in its exploration of the construct of the suburbs and their place in American life and motherhood. It interrogates the demands of motherhood and the ways in which motherhood is shaped by family inheritance. The manuscript attempt to marry ecopoetics with a feminist perspective to recognize the damage that American suburban life inflicts upon women as well as the land around us. The manuscript is divided into four sections, the first and third of which are section-length poems and the second and fourth of which are a collection of multiple poems put together. The first section brings into conversation the life cycle of plant with the movement of generations of mothers and daughters. The second section focuses more on epistolary poetry that explores family inheritance and what motherhood means within the speaker's particular family context. The third section moves back and forth in time and place between William Bradford's Of Plimouth Plantation, the speaker's grandmother's life, and the interactions between speaker and daughter. The fourth section issues out of the personal and family history of the first three sections. It is entitled "suburban georgic" and follows the georgic tradition of recording the season changes, attempts at farming, and instruction on living in a particular location within a particular climate.Item Restricted The firing end of a miracle(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2022) Eldredge, Luke James, author; Dungy, Camille, advisor; Beachy-Quick, Dan, committee member; Emani, Sanam, committee memberI eat to stay alive. But it is impossibly more than simple sustenance. It is community. It is pleasure. It is shame. It is spirituality. It is life and death, nurture and harm. Food, its production, its consumption, and the ethics it both creates and dismantles is one we literally embody. Without examination and thoughtful investigation that requires the risk of making errors, the implications of eating are both deadly and consuming. I use lyrical, confessional, narrative, and experimental poetry to deconstruct what it means to participate in an economy that is inescapably reciprocal, while fully acknowledging the ways I am complicit in both giving and receiving harm. The implications and consequences of universal infrastructures can only be recognized through the acute particular. In the need to explore the ideologies of food, I must also explore the framework for that initial concern—growing up male in the American West as well as family-of-origin. My thinking around food and eating is inextricably linked to my family's and my local culture's thinking around food, both in the ways that I respect it and in the ways I push away from it. Food, family, and growing up male in the American West triangulate into the thesis's central concern.