Browsing by Author "Dungy, Camille, committee member"
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Item Restricted All at once, just once(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2018) Peats, Ryann, author; Beachy-Quick, Dan, advisor; Dungy, Camille, committee member; Souza, Caridad, committee memberAll at Once, Just Once is a collection of poems structured to reflect the cyclical nature of the calendar year as someone who identifies as queer. The first and last sections introduce & explore themes of grief, coming out, defining the self in familial, interpersonal & domestic spaces, and tracing violence in the world. The three center sections include poems of a quieter and concise register that work through explorations of the feminine, nurturance, definitions of "woman," the multiplicity of queer bodies, being in a love relationship, and exploring violence against queer bodies in moments of crisis and healing.Item Restricted Burnley: for the noumuns(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2021) McCallum, Alick, author; Cooperman, Matthew, advisor; Dungy, Camille, committee member; Lehene, Marius, committee memberBURNLEY: for the noumuns, excavates the history of Burnley—a deindustrialised town in Lancashire in the North West of England. As a poetic rendering of autoethnography with ecopoetic leanings, the collection attempts to situate Burnley's present moment in relation to the town's geologic and anthropologic past. The North of England has been described by Neal Alexander as a hypercomplex "social space," "a meeting place" where "borders are porous and shifting." BURNLEY: for the noumuns interrogates the history of the town's hypercomplex cultural experience and asks how heterogenous cultures of Burnley's past intersect, produce, and re-emerge in the town's present world.Item Restricted Dive(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2019) Shively, Christa, author; Cooperman, Matthew, advisor; Dungy, Camille, committee member; Alexander, Ruth, committee memberThis manuscript investigates the ways in which themes such as motherhood, family history, American history, illness, addiction, ecology, war and manual labor might all be threaded together. The desire was to incorporate all of these areas of research and interest into a project that explores how these things are intertwined and part of the same body. The connections we have to others in life, as well as the connection we have with our own identity always intersects at the body. Dive a compilation of documents (found, inherited and created), poems inspired by World War II, and recorded interviews with family. There are also the oral stories, which are another kind of inheritance passed down through generations. These poems retell the stories, but also recognize the other kinds of family histories that get passed from one generation to the next, such as hereditary illnesses, addiction and national traumas (i.e. Columbine and 9/11.) The body is ultimately the place where private and public grief intersects.Item Open Access Even flowers can grow out of a mound of shit(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2018) Singer, Kyle Vincent, author; Ryan, Ajean, advisor; Osborne, Erika, committee member; Plastini, Johnny, committee member; Dungy, Camille, committee memberIn this paper, I attempt to explore the importance of flaws, trauma, and repression within the artistic process. I assert the need for self-scrutiny and cathartic expression of my inner struggles. Using surrealist methodologies, I flip the interior and exterior evoking concepts of the unconscious, abjection, and the Lacanian "real." By asserting the need for positive coping mechanisms, I employ chance operations, bricolage, and an obsessive vocabulary of line work to sublimate these flaws. I am in the midst of cultivating a poetic openness within my work divorced from an ultimate definition. Confronting my desire for absolution, I contest that art becomes the only answer to make the world bearable. I encourage the pursuit of a personal becoming no matter how vulnerable and unfamiliar that outcome may prove.Item Restricted How to dress a fish(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2016) Kerstetter, Abigail, author; Beachy-Quick, Dan, advisor; Dungy, Camille, committee member; Swensen, Thomas, committee memberIn 1901, my great-grandfather, Michael Chabitnoy, an orphan and full-blooded Aleut, was sent to the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania, far removed from his Alaska Native heritage. He died shortly after my grandfather was born, and as a result, my family grew up knowing very little about the history and culture of the Aleut, though we’ve benefited from the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act. This practice of boarding schools and displacement was common in the early twentieth century, but is glossed over in American history, as are the effects of this history on Natives today. As a result of early and brutal contact and relocation practices, much Aleut culture has been lost. This work seeks to redefine history through family, Aleut culture, and story to address questions of the relationship of culture, place, and the individual. In these poems I combine research into early encounters of the Russians with the natives of the Aleutian Islands, Aleut culture and traditional stories, and archived student records of my great-grandfather from the Carlisle Indian School with influence by the work of contemporary poets, native and non-native, that I have read closely while at CSU to explore family history and the Aleut culture as well as questions of the relationship of culture, place, and the individual and how language can reflect and remake experience and meaning. Heavily influenced by research and documentary poetics, this work seeks to provide witness to and understanding of the Aleut. This work is significant because it attempts to realize the potential effectiveness of using poetry as an act of witness and tool for social change. It demonstrates how language is capable of shaping one’s experience of the world, and how language can thus ultimately reshape one’s understanding of that experience. Through poetry, it examines the history and culture of a specific people, the Aleut of Alaska, as well as the history of the Native American experience on a more inclusive level through examining the history and experience of the Carlisle Indian School and modern complexities of Native identity. By incorporating excerpts from my great-grandfather’s student records, borrowing language from early ethnologies, and engaging with traditional Unangan storytelling motifs, it engages with documentary poetics to give witness not only to the treatment this people has already endured, but also through the incorporation of the Alutiiq language and traditions to give testimony to a people that persists today. Its interrogation of history and identity emphasizes the complexities of race and the politics behind every telling of history. This work is personally significant as a gesture of gratitude and act of reuniting with my ancestral culture.Item Restricted Keepers: a novel(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2023) Carey, Patrick, author; Ausubel, Ramona, advisor; Dungy, Camille, committee member; Emami, Sanam, committee memberKeepers is a novel told through the rotating first-person perspectives of three lighthouse keepers on an island in northern Lake Michigan around twenty-five years from now, in the midst of the Second Great Depression. It takes place during a weeklong visit by one keeper's son, who forces them to reassess their pasts and return to the present. By foregrounding backstory and digging for the differences within repetitions, the novel traces a gradual accrual of emotional and spiritual mass even as individual events seem to blend like raindrops in a puddle.Item Restricted Musician (lost at sea)(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2023) Kneisley, John, author; Beachy-Quick, Dan, advisor; Dungy, Camille, committee member; Harrow, Del, committee memberIn Musician (Lost at Sea), I am trying to understand poetry as a mode of caregiving and companionship for those crossing over from life to death. Inspired by the Ancient Greek role of the psychopomp – a mythic guide accompanying souls to the afterlife – my poems attempt both to show and to traverse the mysterious boundary between life and whatever might follow. In doing so, rather than considering death only as an occasion for grief or loss (yet no less removed from them), my poems allow death the potential to be warm, accompanied, and a space that could give way to new life. Almost all of my poems cannot help but establish themselves in the natural world: a place where death and life are so clear in their conjunction, the way a forest fire's ashes feed new plants, or the way a rabbit's body sustains an owl. Ultimately, these poems might make a seemingly impossible claim, as the Greek philosopher Thales first did, that life and death are strangely the same thing, and that to die might also be an opportunity for the soul, or other forms of life, to continue to live or grow. The speaker of many of these poems bears witness to the transitional space between life and death, observing those close to dying or already dead. From the collection's onset, the poems remain sensitive to this space's mystery, careful not to prescribe death with any one outcome, offering instead companionship and thought to the rich change occurring. In the opening poem/prelude, "Lost Graveyard in the Appalachians," the speaker walks among gravestones made illegible with age, lichen and moss growing over their names, before saying "this place / seems no longer / for my knowing." These lines, rather than simply dismissing a human way of knowing, open up both spiritual and natural possibilities for knowing the dead, which the collection will carry forward. "This place" might not be for "my knowing," but perhaps for the lichen's instead, or perhaps also for the psychopomp guiding those buried underground elsewhere ("each grave that vanishes / vanishes / as if opening / somewhere"). The collection creates space for the speaker, the reader, and even more deeply, each poem, to be just such a psychopomp: a figure that accompanies the dead on this journey elsewhere, and in doing so, gives care. Many of the poems adopt the second person "you," a pronoun that is both self-referential of the speaker and also inviting of the reader to take part in witnessing or walking with the dead. This "you" carries a strange intimacy, allowing empathy for an occasion that is universal and familiar (death) while also one that is completely unknowable to the living. The poems give the reader close access to this occasion and to the imaginative spaces beyond it, guiding them through various beings' deaths while maintaining the same careful and warm presence befitting a caregiver. Grief and loss are no less aspects of death here, as they always are, and yet they are understood more as parts of a larger journeying process, one that affects the dead just as much as the living who feel their absence. In the poem "Planting a Future Elegy in a Holloway," for example, the "you" allows both the speaker and reader to step into an imagined landscape and manner of grieving. The speaker finds themselves in a holloway, a woodland road caved in from its surrounding land, circular in shape, formed from erosion and centuries of travel. In planting a "future elegy," "you" have come to try to "orient a grief / you have not found / a language for / yet hold / and press / in older earth," the holloway providing an ancient space with which to shelter a poem that does not know its specific purpose yet, but does know that it will grieve. To plant a future elegy here, among "an exposure of roots, / moss, and quiet / mushrooms," a "rabbit's / bones," and "a worm / looping in and out / of loam" signals, like "Lost Graveyard in the Appalachians," a passing of understanding to the natural world, the land itself perhaps a more fitting agent for knowing and holding the dead. Further, by appearing at the collection's beginning, this poem suggests that the future elegy, perhaps a metaphor for understanding grief and death in general, bears out as the book progresses: an undeveloped seed that will take root in landscape, silence, and antiquity, as subsequent poems will reflect. In terms of subject matter, these poems, most of which adopt a narrative quality in describing a death or those already dead, range from the ancient to the contemporary. This variance accentuates the collection's larger motion – that of moving across narratives as a psychopomp moves alongside the dead – eventually transcending time and space despite frequently relying on Greek mythology. As the book moves, we move alongside figures like Baucis and Philemon, an elderly couple from Ovid's Metamorphoses who turn into trees; a singing fisherman who drowns at sea, two ants carrying the dead body of another ant, Orpheus's head floating down a river, patients at an Alzheimer's unit mourning their daughter, an astronomer buried on another planet, and still others. These deaths, despite being distinct, each demonstrate a continuation of a life in one way or another, the poems acting as psychopomps in carrying the souls they house elsewhere. What happens after death may still be unknowable, but the poems at least hold that death is more a transition than a fixed end point, even if that transition is a human decomposing underground while providing nutrients to grow a flower. A much smaller group of poems, placed throughout the collection, use the first person "I" to speak from the point of view of the dead. These persona poems, most of which are titled "Gravewhisper," allow the reader intimate, albeit imagined, access to voices beyond the grave. The language and syntax of these short poems (the word "whisper" capturing both their quietness and brevity), are purposefully unconventional, suggesting that speech and language, even though decipherable, function differently in the afterlife. These "Gravewhisper" poems each appear directly after more traditional narrative poems featuring a death (from which stems the "I's" identity), the proximity allowing for the living and the dead to be in conversation with one another, even though neither may know they are doing so from their vantage point. Two related poems, each titled "Whispergrave," further accentuate language that might befit the afterlife, each of them adjusted to the right margin rather than the left, formally reflecting a "Gravewhisper" on the opposite page. Together, these poems invite the reader into acts of deep listening, bringing them closer to wherever the dead may now reside, and attuning them to how a being might speak after they have died. Although different from the "Gravewhisper" poems, there is a similar strand of communication to be found in the realm of dreaming and in the unconscious mind throughout the manuscript. In the poems "Experiment in Dreaming" and "The Obsolescent Clocks," for example, the speaker (or a "you") enters dreams in which strangers, both realistic and fantastical, speak about death. In the first case, "you" dream of a fishing village, and meet a peddler selling clay vessels by the sea who mentions a drowned bird. In the second, "you" dream of an abandoned clock shop where clocks can speak, each broken and spinning according to its own, chaotic time, and labeled with the identity of someone who has died ("A grandfather clock is named / 'musician lost at sea' / while a watch, spinning violently / is 'a burned ash tree'"). Both poems suggest, by way of their playfulness in attempting dream-like thought patterns, that there is something about the unconscious mind that bring us closer to death (or to the dead), even while temporarily asleep. The space of a dream might then also be a realm in which the psychopomp can thrive, each dream perhaps a kind of spirit guide in itself, journeying us elsewhere, where language, image, and narrative operate on a level buried below our normal span of thinking. Finally, my collection's title, Musician (Lost at Sea), taken from the line referenced above in "The Obsolescent Clocks," acknowledges these layers of movement between life and death the psychopomp traverses. The title can read like an epitaph thanks to the parentheses, naming a musician and their cause of death, allowing us to conceive of the collection itself as a kind of grave marker for one who has passed into an afterlife. The word "musician," beyond denoting a musical occupation, perhaps more simply alerts us to a role being played, the poetic spirit behind the collection able to function as a musician telling a story (or many stories), adrift in uncharted waters of a kind (the idea of imagining an afterlife). Perhaps the psychopomp, at once book, speaker, and reader, is a kind of musician too (or muse), guiding us toward a poetic, and therefore musical, understanding of the dead, and what it might mean to accompany them elsewhere, a place that cannot help but be "lost" because of its intrinsic unknowability.Item Open Access The process of proliferating change(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2018) Bisbee, Taylor Lee, author; Plastini, Johnny, advisor; Dormer, James, advisor; Dungy, Camille, committee member; Moore, Emily, committee memberMy research focuses on the relationship between self, community, and the environment. How through direct experience with the processes of nature and printmaking, a better understanding of existing harmoniously with the world can be accomplished. A phenomenological experience can be transmitted through this direct contact with process, in which the viewer might reflect on their being in the world. The process that is best suited for the work of art is used to have the least impact on the environment. This action creates prints that keep the community and environment in mind and perpetuates a harmonious existence that informs the content. Humans can create a harmonious trend of existence by living and creating consciously.