Mountain Scholar :: Browsing by Author "Steensen, Sasha, committee member"

Browsing by Author "Steensen, Sasha, committee member"

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Aleph
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2013) Goldenberg, Tirzah, author; Beachy-Quick, Dan, advisor; Steensen, Sasha, committee member; Moseman, Eleanor, committee member
The manuscript begins with poems sifted from the language of the Dead Sea Scrolls--poems pre-written, gathered into new song. The "speaker" (collective anonymity, a sect) seems to speak from the ruins of the scriptorium, from the archaeological site, from the caves, from the jars within the caves. The physicality of the scrolls, their furled and unfurled form, their being hidden, the remainder that is read out of the absence from which it came, finds parallel meaning in the Kabbalistic notion of the simultaneously revealed and concealed Godhead, or Thou, the addressed. These poems (siftings) are the roots, and the pages that make up the second half of the manuscript are grown from them, rooted in pre-written song--words are imagined as artifacts, ostraca, signatures with roots in the hereafter.
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Auricle
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2012) Knapp, Caroline, author; Beachy-Quick, Dan, advisor; Steensen, Sasha, committee member; Lunkenheimer, Erika, committee member
To view the abstract, please see the full text of the document.
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Blue sail come cover
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2020) Lodge-Rigal, Susannah, author; Beachy-Quick, Dan, advisor; Steensen, Sasha, committee member; Little, Ann, committee member
Blue Sail Come Cover is a study of love—an investigation of care blurred by fear and gratitude, a searching for sign in world and word, both. These poems explore conditions of loss and fear, and within those wounds, the necessity of love and its manifestations—patience and care. This manuscript's central personas, a lyric I and a lyric you, encounter omen, song, and the sky's changeable weather, ever in search and in awe of a more companionable world. As they move through geographies of memory, grief, fear, and the American Midwest in search of a kinder ontology, they discover a means by which to stay. While explicit internal and external landscapes remain legible throughout, these poems are rooted most by their assertions of how care can keep us. As the I and you transform across the three sections, they attend to silence and song within themselves and in their environment, eventually discovering a more welcoming world. This manuscript explores how attention—to the world, each other, and the lyric—can enact the sort of faith that helps people stay. In Blue Sail Come Cover, the objective isn't to solve life's big questions, but to learn how to live with them. It is a book of discovery, slowly uncovering its own ethos for living and dwelling, for caring for one another through every joy, sorrow, and ordinary day. It is my hope, then, that these poems are first and foremost companionable—that the I and you who occupy these pages are participants in the very world we live in. In this project, I am interested in troubling the I/thou tradition and seeing what these pronouns can accomplish when freed from static identities. These pages formally and substantively probe lyric tropes—I/thou, sky, birds, song—in an attempt to unearth larger questions surrounding the trouble and necessity of a lyric voice.
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But not this book
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2013) Pieplow, Sarah Louise, author; Beachy-Quick, Dan, advisor; Steensen, Sasha, committee member; Dicesare, Catherine, committee member
The following book of poems explores the Persian/Urdu ghazal form, as interpreted into an American English-language context.
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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.
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Commedia
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2012) Jordan, Kirstin Britt, author; Beachy-Quick, Dan, advisor; Steensen, Sasha, committee member; Moseman, Eleanor, committee member
"Commedia" is a poetry manuscript focused on etymology and cosmogony viewed through stock characters from traditional Commedia dell'arte improvisational theater. The text focuses on the characters ability to dream a new world into reality, pulling from the traditions of several ancient creation myths (Welsh, Norse, Greek, and Roman, among others) as well as the tactics of visual and literary Magical Realism. These poems are carefully focused on the dream-space as "real," in the sense of Slavoj Žižek's philosophy of the real, rather than dreams as an interpretive space (Freud, Lacan).
Open Access
Cut with your eyes, glue with 'em too
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2016) Ruff, Colin, author; Lehene, Marius, advisor; Kokoska, Mary-Ann, advisor; Osborne, Erika, committee member; Moore, Emily, committee member; Steensen, Sasha, committee member
In the mode of postmodernism, my work attempts to create a meta-narrative by using elements of the larger, grander, and delusional narrative of our American experience. I am interested in exploring the effects of experience (things that happen to us and to objects) on our perception and creation of reality through my artwork. Experiences in general are communicated through signs, symbols, and configurations. These configurations, especially through media, can become a screen preventing direct access to experience. They also can act as a block supplanting real experience with a form of mitigated experience. By deconstructing and reconfiguring symbols and iconography of American mass media from the 1940’s - 1970’s my collages become a vehicle of communication that seek to destabilize the original intent and message behind many of these source images. Through this process, I hope to create a dialogue of the collective experience. I do this through the physical aspects of the work, through the social implications brought in by the fragments, as well as through personally relevant meanings and associations that I deploy in a satirical way.
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Entropy and cycles
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2010) Mills, Bartow, author; Yust, David E., advisor; Sullivan, Patrice M., advisor; Lehene, Marius, committee member; Steensen, Sasha, committee member
This body of works subject and focus point is the cyclical nature of matter and the forces therein. There have been explorations of this concept on all fronts including metaphysical philosophy, science, and art. It is the recurring realization of matter as a cyclical form being driven by unseen forces that leads me to believe the subject is of utmost importance. Through the use of a specific set of marks, surfaces, symbols, and imagery I am attempting to conjure this realization and come to a better understanding of the concept, and to ultimately echo a similar response in an audience.
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Flowers, endless figures
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2013) Orme, Timothy David, author; Beachy-Quick, Dan, advisor; Steensen, Sasha, committee member; Luft, Gregory, committee member
Flowers, Endless Figures is a book-length collection of poetry that works from a space of increasing doubt into a space of song (lyricism). This project is divided into five sections, the first three of which work directly through doubt via meditations on the flower. The final two sections make up a different, concluding section of the project, a space of walking and singing. Three short experimental films are also a part of this project, two of which were made with paint on paper, one that was an erasure of 35mm film.
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Girl descends asunder
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2019) Indermaur, Katherine, author; Cooperman, Matthew, advisor; Steensen, Sasha, committee member; Osborne, Erika, committee member
To view the abstract, please see the full text of the document.
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If the garden
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2012) Eddington, Cassandra, author; Beachy-Quick, Dan, advisor; Steensen, Sasha, committee member; Moseman, Eleanor, committee member
Within this manuscript, the crisis of the self's development--existentially, phenomenologically, beginning in the inner psychology of childhood--and larger societal cultural forces and narratives is constant. Like the fairy tales my manuscript is in conversation with, there is a necessary knowledge my poems wish to uncover. As foraging in the forest, this process of identification is urgent: it means death or survival. But this knowledge is not readily accessible--it must be found among the understory: language's mutation, memory's woodpile, the dark, domestic corners of memory, imagination's borders. This crisis of survival is a feminine crisis that requires an uncovering of histories that bind. And the detritus comes with a stutter; we must listen to language's mutation. We find ourselves in the darkest parts of the forest, of the self--where we must. Alongside foraging and uncovering run concerns of the self at a sprinting pace, the knowledge that to desire is to be hunted, that the erosion of the self's borders is inevitable within the erotic. And yet the desire to distinguish the self is rabid. What may be the paradoxical prayer of my poems is the desire "to disappear as deer/ to be held and not// carve a name not/ be still in scar."
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Immeasurable mouth of night
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2024) Seebeck, Tashiana, author; Beachy-Quick, Dan, advisor; Steensen, Sasha, committee member; DiCesare, Catherine, committee member
This thesis is a collection of poetry concerned with the unconscious interior: dreams, nightmares, memories, and the liminal space between. The poems are committed to a necessary logic of surreality and formal experimentation.
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Lush the cradle
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2019) Macintyre, Kristin, author; Beachy-Quick, Dan, advisor; Steensen, Sasha, committee member; Harrow, Del, committee member
Lush the Cradle posits a mind for its speaker. In a formal sense, the collection is a mind. It cycles through six different logics, each section wholly its own and each, too, deeply connected to the others. Respectively, the sections are concerned with dream, memory, the addicted or endangered mind, the mind reborn, the desiring mind, and vision (of the prophetic kind). In each section, the poems relocate the I, pull it from the depths of itself further into the world. In order to recover, by which I mean in order to be, the I must find itself again beneath the sky. It must be warmed, it must be nourished there. It must be a part of the whole. In order to achieve this, the collection cycles through patterns, borrows images across and throughout its poems, and uses the line as a device to think, to reveal, and to elicit wonder.
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Of
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2010) Bohn, Jerrod E., author; Beachy-Quick, Dan, advisor; Steensen, Sasha, committee member; Cooperman, Matthew, committee member; Prince, Eric, committee member
My thesis manuscript entitled Of is a book-length collection of poems broken into five sections. Over the course of the book, the poems move from concerns over the nature of the erotic to an examination of how consummation of the flesh can give rise to a creation. In this case, what is created or birthed is the hymn or song that names the world. Along with this naming comes an anxiety over language’s relationship to the natural world: by affixing names and “meaning” to natural objects are we allowing words and phrases to replace the actual objects themselves? Moreover, does language risk misnaming an object which, in a sense, causes damage to that object’s integrity that can be difficult to repair or recover? Drawing on Classical Greek and Roman poetry, ritual, and mythology as well as Judeo-Christian cosmology and iconography as source material, Of attempts to break down and reunite dichotomous ideas that ancient cultures viewed as harmonious rather than opposed. These dichotomies include: the Apollonian / the Dionysian, male / female, erotic / spiritual, song (poetry) / meaning (naming), and language / natural objects. The book remembers that the preposition “of’ is relational, that all things are always “of” or “emanated from” something else.
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Recite
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2011) Giamo, Thomas Crane, author; Beachy-Quick, Dan, advisor; Steensen, Sasha, committee member
This poem evolved in slow stutters after I had returned to Colorado from India and Kashmir last summer and started transcribing two, small notebooks of language fragments collected over the two month visit--transliterations of conversations overheard in foreign languages, scattered impressions, lists (dear human), articulations of single words on single pages, fundamental and simple words in English (okay, thank you) to remind myself that I'd retained the traces of a language among an alien syllabary. It felt like some of the writing recorded in these notebooks had captured the speed and emotional registers of the visit: one intense and draining month in Srinagar, Kashmir filming a "guerrilla" documentary with my brother about human rights abuses against the Kashmiri people by Indian security forces occupying the Valley, another month by myself rattling around on trains and walking cities in a narcotic daze through walls of white heat in the desert region of Rajasthan, with a detour to Varanasi, one of the oldest and continuously settled sites of humankind where bodies are always burning on the shore of the river Ganges. What I transcribed from the notebooks was the residue of whatever fleeing voices had come to populate my own voice through India and Kashmir (there are human beings everywhere). And so the poem arose out of a writing process which was from the very beginning a recitation. I didn't feel the need to expand the writing once the notebooks were transcribed, by inscribing within them a writing from a different time and place, by developing these original annunciations (what is your good name / your own far country) from the place of the my new present, Colorado. I thought instead to use the next months to write within these fragments, executing a writing distilled from the present but curtailed and structured by these recordings from the past--stole away cargo from an ocean and more away--allowing not the present to recuperate the past but the past to push apart the shifting contours of the present writing going forward.
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Shuffle and draw
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2009) Dial, Tabitha, author; Beachy-Quick, Dan, 1973-, advisor; Steensen, Sasha, committee member; Lehene, Marius, committee member
Using my own worn Universal-Waite Tarot deck, I wrote a large number of poems while an MFA candidate at Colorado State University. "Five of Pentacles". "The Hanged Man" and "The Empress" are ekphrastic and attempt to verbalize Tarot cards of the same names. Storylines within this thesis began with the Arms suit, a suit created after reading Barbara Walker's study of her Tarot, The Secrets o/the Tarot: Origins. History, and Symbolism. Each of her suits developed myths and symbols, using a direction I wanted to take, after straight ekphrasis of most of the 78 cards produced interesting writing, but poems that were not full and provocative. I came to produce my own versions of-other major arcana cards while studying Walker and others. Only one Cups poem emerges in this thesis. Because the Cups represent the emotions, the implication might be that Tarot-interpretations of emotional maturity are stunted in my collection because there is only one Cup cards/poem. But the poem remains true to the original ekphrastic spirit of my work. The creation of my own poems/suits, some that address the poem reader/Tarot reader, fill in for Cups psyche.
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Some dark matter
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2011) Martinez, Susan Rebecca, author; Cooperman, Matthew, advisor; Steensen, Sasha, committee member; Bernasek, Alexandra, committee member
This book of poems is characterized by postmodern lyric, experimentation and exploration of forms, and a braided, if at times frayed, narrative. Some Dark Matter has as its subjects: violence against women and global violence, dark and atomic matter, and the archetypical narrative structure of 'overcoming the monster.' It exists within the period of rebuilding after trauma, as eight female characters look to each other for support after rape, abuse, periodic substance abuse, self harm and mental illness. It pulls dark matter and atomic matter, especially the formation of the atomic bomb during the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, New Mexico, into the braid, investigating the nature and forms of violence, matter, and the violence of matter. Formally, the poems manifest across a wide spectrum (as do methods for recovery from trauma), from received forms such as the sonnet, sestina, and pantoum to free verse, procedural, litany, and epistolary forms. Movements from 'victim' to 'survivor', from 'home violence' to 'global violence,' and from 'hero' to 'villain' are the primary explorations of this book.
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The junipers
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2020) McCarthy, Geneva, author; Beachy-Quick, Dan, advisor; Steensen, Sasha, committee member; Moseman, Eleanor, committee member
The poems in Geneva McCarthy's thesis, The Junipers, explore intersectionality as a function of sentience-based epistemological and ontological concerns. The pieces explicitly seek to engage the world in terms of connectivity and as a liminal being not exclusively as an existence of isolate cognition. That is to say, that the poems seek to be permeable. In many cases, the poems attempt to be both receptor and resonance: they listen as much as they look. They aspire to feel and not just witness, to think, as it were, through their skin. The work hopes, via these means, to desegregate I and other and increase conversation not solely by speaking, or via themselves as declarative speech acts (as a demonstration of "knowing"), but also by privileging curiosity and actively listening.
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The somatic wager
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2015) George Bagdanov, Kristin, author; Cooperman, Matthew, advisor; Steensen, Sasha, committee member; MacKenzie, Matt, committee member
This collection of poems explores what it means to be a body in the Anthropocene.
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Thresh / hold
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2014) Brown, Rachel Linnea, author; Beachy-Quick, Dan, advisor; Steensen, Sasha, committee member; Fiege, Mark, committee member
Thresh / Hold, largely autobiographical, embodies the emotional fracture of leaving my childhood home, but ultimately progresses toward acceptance of a present self. In other words, I seek what "I can assemble / whole" via poems. Such mending necessitates exploring memory as a means of both preservation and declaration—Here is what I was, I know who I am. While only "Mystic" specifically addresses ancestry in Thresh / Hold, familial sensibilities inform my entire thesis—after all, looking back exposes layers of meaning. This depth (artifacts or truths revealed if one only digs in the right places or uses the right diction) yields tunnels hidden within tunnels, photographs under paintings, bewildering holes, and newfound windows. I thus privilege objects seen vividly and thoughts felt profoundly, capturing the essence and emotional impact of beloved beings and scenes. Simple images recur, including familiar trees (oak, pine, maple, or sycamore) and stars, which are so bright and spangled at home. These repeated images capture both what is and was while also recognizing life's inherent changes. Damages or fractures—losses—do not always debilitate, as Thresh / Hold concludes. Clocks turn on—that is normal—and fine.