Mountain Scholar :: Browsing by Author "Steensen, Sasha, advisor"

Browsing by Author "Steensen, Sasha, advisor"

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Between sound metal and dross
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2011) Irmen, Kelley Diane, author; Steensen, Sasha, advisor; Beachy-Quick, Dan, 1973-, committee member; Lindsay, James E., 1957-, committee member
Here is my fourth version of the book and this one directs itself and tells me to stop being confessional and to save my divulgence for another manuscript. This manuscript focuses on the relationship between the Vorarephile and the Exile - because he is no prophet, he is a wanderer who has been cut off from roaming. I continue the organization by eons, epochs, and theories, gaps in time, extinctions, and fossilization. As the book progresses, I bring in "the People" and I begin experimenting with the pronoun "I." Because for me, it is necessary that the "I" be fractured and in pieces, which means I, the author, am every era, character, place, or idea represented in this series. Initially, I was identifying with the Vorarephile, but as I continued in my re-ordering, I realized I am my exile, I caused my exile, and I've been exiled from exiling. Trust me; this makes sense, especially if you view exile as wandering, wandering as a way to escape, and then anxiety halting your fallback. So, let's say a person uses exploring the landscape in a nomadic-type fashion and suddenly is boxed in by all of the open space. Before, this space was a comfort and now, it is only a road and more roads and more roads, none of which I can ever turn of off.
Open Access
Constellations
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2023) Todd, Michael, author; Steensen, Sasha, advisor; Lehene, Marius, committee member; Candelaria Fletcher, Harrison, committee member
Constellations is a researched book-length lyric essay concerning notions of faith and belief weighed against science and the bodily experience, of layers of meaning, of personal truth. The piece takes the form of "constellations" of text in place of stars. The text appears on 4x6" cards against a black background with speckled white to indicate "space"; white lines suggest an assembly which corresponds to a map with instructions. However, the same instructions encourage user agency in how to assemble and navigate the work—flipping through the cards in a numbered sequence, or in a random sequence, or assembling them according to the map, or assembling them as they, the audience, see fit.
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Falling unfolded silhouette: a poem
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2011) Moore, Richard Owen, author; Beachy-Quick, Dan, advisor; Steensen, Sasha, advisor; Lehene, Marius, committee member
The work of my thesis seeks to formally enact my poetic. My poetry is a way of interrelating awareness, language and nature. The trajectory of my thesis is an amorphous vision that develops the language in which I think, and in turn speak of the environments in which I've been. It is a vision of the dynamic force between things. It interweaves by creating relationships--it is meditation that is also mediation. It is a poetry that seeks to strengthen the fabric of interdependency. It recognizes the existence of non-human things and their ineluctable value. It is a poetic that attempts to enact an amorphous form of awareness--one that shifts as it speaks, and thus lives--in a language that is aware of itself as the unique utterance of a universal tone. Thus, a collection of poems.
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Gather me
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2012) Bailey, Daniel, author; Steensen, Sasha, advisor; Cooperman, Matthew, committee member; Diffrient, David Scott, committee member
The poems in GATHER ME oscillate between the holy and the profane while seeking to deconstruct God and create a new system of belief. The poems also deal with a universal you and an I that can be split infinitely and regathered into a new being.
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|Harm harness harmony|
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2014) Kenny, Michael, author; Beachy-Quick, Dan, advisor; Steensen, Sasha, advisor; Fassnacht, Steven, committee member
A single agent perceiver explores the arctic self via four elemental forms.
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In small rooms
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2016) Naughton, Kathleen, author; Steensen, Sasha, advisor; Beachy-Quick, Dan, committee member; Lehene, Marius, committee member
The form the language of these poems takes is linked and cannot be separate from how it means to mean. In some ways, the poems are "about" the language used to talk about the most mundane and universal human experiences—love, loss, aging, death, the passage of time, the interaction with place, the persistent idea, if not presence, of the sacred or ineffable, constructions of the self and how the relationships with those closest to us, with place, with age the passing of time, become a part of that sense of who we are. The sonnet-poems are the core work of the manuscript, and that they don't want to pause at all to explain themselves, to focus themselves. They refuse to consider where they're coming from and where they're going, they refuse narrative, they try (impossibly) to contain everything each time in each 14 lines, over and over, and always fail. This compression feels necessary to getting every everything up next to each other consistently; it also feels necessary to let myself as poet know that it will all be over soon, which is probably also important to the reader. Important because the poems are dizzying and stressful to read and it seems necessary for the sanity of all involved that we know that our engagement will be a limited one; important, too, because these poems are terrified by time, mortality, what happens at the end, and the series of small poems gives the work an opportunity to practice the end over and over and over. And practice beginning over and over and over. I don't think these poems are about reincarnation, but perhaps they are about the many deaths and rebirths within a single human life, and about the human on an ecological scale, in which one human lifetime is just one start and end in a series of continuous starts and ends.
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Let light eat the spine and Speaker for bones
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2019) Weber, Kelly, author; Steensen, Sasha, advisor; Candelaria Fletcher, Harrison, advisor; Beachy-Quick, Dan, committee member; Lehene, Marius, committee member
My multi-part thesis, Let Light Eat the Spine and Speaker for Bones, reflect different methods of creating lyric corporality and different manifestations of my concern with vulnerability. The poetry portion considers the body as a site of connection between chronic illness and the Anthropocene, using poetry's sonic and imagistic qualities to produce a bodily response in the reader that's an alternative to the harmful language of the contract and the law. It is one book-length poem made of several smaller poems, a body of text tearing itself apart. By contrast, the creative nonfiction portion explores a constellation of concerns around gaze and bodily exposure in several stand-alone essays. Both manuscripts center a body-driven ecopoetics of thought and feeling.
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Letters to empress
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2012) Klingbeil, Christopher, author; Steensen, Sasha, advisor; Beachy-Quick, Dan, committee member; Lehene, Marius, committee member
To view the abstract, please see the full text of the document.
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Little mercy
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2021) Walter, Robin, author; Beachy-Quick, Dan, advisor; Steensen, Sasha, advisor; Harrow, Del, committee member
Little Mercy is an exercise in interrogating the natural and exploring the intimately personal. Set in a cabin in the foothills of the Bighorns of Wyoming, the manuscript hopes to reach towards the universal through attending to the particular. This work engages the human and more-than-human worlds as equal partners in pursuing otherwise inaccessible truths. Engaging in multitude of forms derived from a variety of poetic traditions, Little Mercy hopes foremost to make its own language anew. The ethic of this work is grounded in a belief in the reciprocity of attention, attunement, and care.
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Melissa untitled
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2016) Hohl, Melissa, author; Steensen, Sasha, advisor; Cooperman, Matthew, committee member; Moseman, Eleanor, committee member
The poems in Melissa untitled investigate the name and the act of naming as they relate to identity and imagination. The name is an indicator of the person or the place, of course. Further, though, the name constitutes a part of the individual (person or place), for the name can stimulate one to conjure (or can help one in conjuring) an image of (and thought about and feeling towards) the individual. Thus, the name informs image, thought, and feeling (in both 'reality' and the imagination). How far can one write into, and out of, the name? The name, then, is a threshold of public and private space, of inside and outside; it is permeable and a place of division within the language of proximity, of togetherness. However, the name is not foolproof; indeed, it falls short. It does so because it is permeable. That which is permeable is by definition not fixed, not stable. The poems in Melissa untitled reflect this instability through and throughout their language. In the writing process, many poems let mistakes lead them. What I mean by this is, for example, in the second poem in the collection, "A deep sunflower god-yellow," the final line reads, "all of them were god" (4). In fact, what the poet actually intended to write was, "all of them were good," but because she forgot the extra "o" that is necessary to make "good," she was left with "god"—and she liked it. There's something a little bit off balance, both in the head and off the tongue, when one reads the final two lines of that poem—"The first and last 25 minutes of my life / all of them were god" (4). One can feel the tongue being pulled towards "god" and "good" at once. This is a kind of confrontation one must have with the language and oneself in Melissa untitled. It’s familiar in a strange way. The form of many of the poems echoes an off-balance-ness as they work with atypical—albeit organic unto themselves—stanza shapes. They also play with and perhaps even agitate the space on the page. They do this in part to call attention to movement as part of the modern landscape, which therefore makes it a part of the modern identity. The poems disorient to reorient. Moreover, the fragmentation (of thought, of distance) that occurs between stanzas and in some cases from line to line is, I suspect, a way of evoking imbalance and perhaps revealing it as a place of potential fertility. Whether the speaker in the poems is navigating a physical, linguistic, or psychological landscape—real or imagined—it is helpful to have at hand the four-pointed star to indicate and remind the wanderer of the four cardinal directions. The four cardinal directions act as a reminder of intention amid imagination. In Melissa untitled, the four-pointed star signifies a break—a breath—in the text.
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"Of a vale"
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2017) Rice, Kylan, author; Beachy-Quick, Dan, advisor; Steensen, Sasha, advisor; Harrow, Del, committee member
Of a Vale uses the form of the poetic Bildungsroman to account for the formation of a poetic and a subjectivity, all while staying aware of the stakes, limits, and implications of the generic framework that it operates within, as well as the ways that all frameworks become generic, genetic. In five parts, each containing narratives of the development of a speaking subject, of a poetic consciousness, and of an erotogenic body, this manuscript tries to engage with and subvert mythic accounts of the "I." As Dan Beachy-Quick once noted of Of a Vale, this book traces "a coming into consciousness in the medium of that consciousness." Becoming conscious of its medium, this book takes the media of consciousness to be pre-given; that is, it takes the media of consciousness to be the word, the world, and the body. Each of these entities is constructive of, but wholly exterior to, the Self. Thus, the medium of consciousness lies outside the consciousness. Here, in Of a Vale, I seek some way to think my way back into feeling, back into a "global nonverbal experience." Here, I try to think past thinking. I try to hold out a living hand. I try to hold a living hand.
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Ours the experiment
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2012) Lozeau, Adam, author; Steensen, Sasha, advisor; Cooperman, Matthew, committee member; Howkins, Adrian, committee member
Ours the Experiment is a poetry manuscript that examines topics of love, war, spirituality, and otherness. Consisting of five series, Ours the Experiment begins with the allegorical telling of the story of a nineteenth-century lynching. Its second series deals with love, loss, and loneliness, while also formally examining the influence of song and music on memory and storytelling. Its third series is an epithalamion, telling the history of a love that culminates in marriage and the story of the other loves nurturing and surrounding that relationship. Its fourth section examines the remnants of common biblical stories in both Western culture and in an individual mind, and its fourth section, "Going," is a single long poem chronicling a life-long friendship challenged by one man's choice to go to war. A poetic introduction and a collection of annotations of works influential in the writing of this manuscript are also included in this thesis.
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Picnic in the abattoir
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2019) Hyche, Emma Catherine, author; Steensen, Sasha, advisor; Beachy-Quick, Dan, committee member; McKee, Patrick, committee member
Picnic in the Abattoir is a collection investigating the negotiation of self amid a myriad of antagonistic forces. These forces include pop cultural products (particularly horror films), violence against women and its depiction in media, viewership and the gaze, etc. The collection is structured in three sections, or "Acts", supplemented with a "Postscript". This structure is intended to mimic, but ultimately subvert, the traditional three-act structure of narrative fiction and film. These poems not only serve as a continuation of my work in the past two years within horror tropes and ontologies of "victimhood," but also broach new topics for me, like the influence of film on ways of seeing and understanding the world and the paradoxical intertwining of fascination and aversion within the viewing experience.
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:Plainspeak, WY:
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2013) Doxey, Joanna B., author; Steensen, Sasha, advisor; Cooperman, Matthew, committee member; Lehene, Marius, committee member
This manuscript is a work of poetry.
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Press
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2011) Nolte, Andrew, author; Steensen, Sasha, advisor; Moseman, Eleanor, committee member; Cooperman, Matthew, committee member; Didier, John C., committee member
Press is a poetic manuscript and symbolic ode to the author's complex relationships with his beloved and the design element of typography. Titled Press in part for the definition of typography as well as the action of early letterpresses, Press has two distinct sections. Part one explores the rush of newness and exploration within any creative relationship, while part two looks at the domestic and comforting warmth of the familiar. Both sections deal with a physical, emotional, and psychological space shared with the beloved and the page from the reader's perspective. The poems within each section represent the building of for mentioned relationships and are broken up by fragments, which represent the particles floating in between each print of a letterpress, with each print representing a poem, and the fragments slightly changing and distressing them to make them honest, original, and real.
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(Said • I • meant)
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2012) Larson, Haley, author; Steensen, Sasha, advisor; Beachy-Quick, Dan, committee member; Sommer, Peter, committee member
This project began out of a struggle with spatial anxiety, as a project in boundaries of ecotones and memory. This gradually and rather elaborately evolved into an investigation of boundary definition, specifically those of a Self or an I, and the anxious instability inherent in recognizing those boundaries, consciously and unconsciously, breaking them or redefining their divided matter. In the realm of boundaries, the I lives in a physical body, necessarily preoccupied with its soundings, often its echoing or dissolving against its reaches. At some point, it seemed unreasonable to continue announcing "I anything" without pressuring the self that is suggested by an "I" to the edges of its boundaries, seeing if those boundaries hold or further contain or consume. Specifically, my practice up to this project grew increasingly uncomfortable in the assertion of "I," or at least in its assertion without a more sustained examination of what it is to utter an I that suggests wholeness. The written I became nervous for the body that tried to contain it. The written I became nervous for the voice that uttered in ownership its relation to the world. Its singularity and suggestion of lens, its singular apparatus of seeing, continued to unearth the impossibility of singularity, or at the very least, to urge a teasing of the multiplicity inherent in any being. I've previously likened this project to an investigation of awareness--awareness of one as a whole self and as a part, where the construction of parts completes a larger self (even an us) or where the destruction of self diminishes into smaller and smaller selves, even selves of particular music or earth. With that, this project aims to explore not just the boundaries but also what the spaces between these fractures and deconstructions allow--simplicity, music, truth, or identity. These poems ask questions of definition and wholeness, whether one is inherent in the other, whether either is possible.
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Shadow through hours
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2014) Greenhaw, Lincoln, author; Beachy-Quick, Dan, advisor; Steensen, Sasha, advisor; Switzer, Jamie, committee member
This manuscript of poems explores the possibility of constructing a relationship with another person via the experience of aesthetic fascination. Throughout the course of this manuscript, the initial gaze onto a beloved other necessarily rebounds on the self, deconstructing the intentional self until an aesthetic common ground opens between the manuscript's two characters. As its own depth of being opens up, one self becomes capable of more fully registering the existence of another. The manuscript progresses in four sections, beginning with a kernel of fascination that begins to starch into the comprehension of a self as it tests the boundaries and similarities between self and world. This section is followed by a second section in which the double existence of the self as the world gives rise to a psychological shadow that the idea of self casts wherever it goes on its worldly aspect. In the next section, the rings of a hunted, drowned self spread out as ripples of identity on an oceanic image of being. The manuscript concludes with two lovers half-asleep in an apartment, echoing the mythic repose of Vishnu and Lakshmi as they drift together on the unknowable water while dreaming the world.
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Slow motion iterations of all my whereabouts ever
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2018) Konopka, Cole, author; Steensen, Sasha, advisor; Beachy-Quick, Dan, committee member; Jones, Laura, committee member
Slow motion iterations of all my whereabouts ever charts the development of an unnamed speaker as they explore different relationships with the self, often represented by the first-person pronoun, the I. The manuscript progresses from a confusion over the self through a resistance to it, followed by an abundance of self, a lapse of the self, and finally a plurality of self. These transitions take place in form, as well as in the context of the poems themselves, which contemplate the macabre in life.
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Sung ritual
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2024) Culbertson, C., author; Beachy-Quick, Dan, advisor; Steensen, Sasha, advisor; Lehene, Marius, committee member
Sung Ritual is an ecstatic record of the queer, neurodivergent poet's coming-to, as if waking to the present from an oracular dream made up of repeated memories of the past. Part confessional and part self-reckoning, this collection tries to account for the facts of one's life and how those facts come to shape present-day relationships with the world and others. The tradition of the ode after Whitman becomes a ritual in which the poems form a chorus resolved by taking-up of the proper pronoun "I" only in the collection's final pages. The song there formed anticipates future(s) wisdom informs cannot be imagined without the poet's attending to living's antecedents.
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Terminator: poems
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2024) Roth, Laura, author; Steensen, Sasha, advisor; Beachy-Quick, Dan, committee member; Osborn, Erika, committee member
Fittingly, the first seed of Terminator is rooted in an ending. Before I knew "terminator" as the line of separation between the illuminated and unilluminated parts of the Earth, before I knew that I wanted to pursue an MFA in writing, I found myself split by the sudden loss of the hearing in my left ear and the resulting onset of my chronic tinnitus. This event, which took place years prior to any inkling of these poems, feels like an important place to begin. Unexpected and inexplicable, partial deafness was a "little-a apocalypse," one that revealed much to me about the subjectivity of perception, the body's volatility, and my own mortality. Perhaps this is why when, in the first semester of my master's degree, I stumbled upon the astronomical definition of a "terminator," a shock of recognition bolted through me. Like a planet, my body understood what it was to exist continuously in the space between two different qualities of light, what it was to live past the boundary of my reality. Though I didn't immediately latch onto the "terminator" as the structuring metaphor of my thesis, the poems I wrote for workshop naturally grew out of questions about the gray areas within my own being— between self and other, subject and object, subconscious mind and waking mind, human and more-than-human. These concerns are reflected not only in the content of my poems but also in their formal experimentation, which often approaches the page as an illustrative canvas where the black text can flow into organic shapes or trace stark boundaries. For the permission to be explorative in my composition, I am indebted to Charles Olson's "Projective Verse" and Lyn Hejinian's "The Rejection of Closure" as well as the countless poets who have laid their own foundations in "field poetics." Through the reading I've done in this program, my concept of the "terminator" has also taken on more sociopolitical dimensions. In particular, the pre-Socratic philosophers, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen's Prismatic Ecology, Timothy Morton's Hyperobjects, and the work of Dipesh Chakrabarty have helped me to see this project as a lens through which to think about human induced climate change and all the "endings" (and beginnings) it entails. At the same time, Terminator continues to be extremely personal to me. During my third semester of the program, my own world ended and renewed once more as I came into my queerness, a shift that continues to transform my close relationships, my embodiment, my value system, my orientation to the past and the future, my creative ethos. Affirming my gender and sexuality after a lifetime of suppressing them has opened fresh inquiry into my "shadow selves"— what parts of my identity do I allow myself and others to perceive? What parts are concealed? How are these unilluminated aspects of myself stored in the body? Once again, the terminator has come to represent an internal boundary for me, between who I believed myself to be and who I am becoming. As a result of these changes, I have had to reconsider how to situate myself in my world and, therefore, in my poems. In the past year, my poetic practice has expanded to encompass more intuitive and playful components, ones that honor pieces of myself that I'm not fully conscious of. When I find language by drawing words from a bowl, performing an erasure, or making a kind of "mad lib" out of a poem's syntactic structure, I am often surprised by my own instinctual knowing. "Origin of Blue," "Frequency," and "Worries" are all examples of poems that have emerged from these kinds of procedures. Despite the progress I've made, what you'll find in this manuscript is, as of yet, incomplete. As a recovering perfectionist, that's something I'm proud of. I'm excited to continue learning on the "terminator," to continue realizing some of the themes that interlace through this collection. In the immediate future, I plan to travel to Cleveland, Ohio in order to witness the last total solar eclipse that will pass through this part of the world during our lifetimes. I can't say exactly what will come out of this experience, though I admit I'm nursing a poem— a long one, perhaps bound by formal or temporal constraints (thinking about Alice Oswald's "Tithonus: 46 Minutes in the Life of the Dawn"), that might divide this collection down its center. That would seem very right to me. My hope is that Terminator can offer a space where macrocosm and microcosm intersect. Like the Fibonacci spiral, which represents at once a seashell and the shape of our galaxy, I intend for this collection to touch deeply human concerns and deepen them still by contextualizing them within the reality that we live in a universe, a universe that moves in cycles that are both predictable and beyond comprehension. Humans have invented all sorts of explanations for our improbable existence— mythologies, religions, political regimes. No matter how advanced our technology or grandiose our scripture, all the intricacies of human and non-human life are conditional on something entirely out of our control: a cosmic agency that brings both light and dark, summer and winter to the face of this planet. We don't get to choose when or how the sun rises and sets. We don't get to choose our bodies, how they change, how they age, how they die. And maybe that's a good thing. It might be the one experience that we all have in common.