Kissing a rancher's son

Abstract

This book's unique structure is tied closely to its subject matter. Within the general themes of intimacy, language, sexuality, history and landscape, I use techniques and forms that embody the complex and cyclical nature of female sexuality. For example, through the overall structure of the book, sections are transformed into cycles, and the poems make revolutions within each cycle. Not only does the book as a whole make a progressive spiral, but so also does each revolution and even individual poems. Specifically, these techniques include: a non-linear structure in some poems; a circular or spiraling logic that leads not to one truth or meaning, but to many; and the contradictory nature of subject matter and tone within and between poems. Many poems have a conversational-like beginning, and employ humor and/or slang to pull the reader into the language. These techniques can be seen most clearly in the string of "Between Selves" poems which thread their way through the book. These letters create a sometimes painful dialogue between two voices. Coming from two very different sources, S and Y have moments of rage, passion, fear and tenderness, and their dialog explores the inner landscape, becoming a map for the steps towards mutual forgiveness and reconciliation. By the book's end, the voices gain distinction, but also a realization of their own interdependence. Language gives me the space to create. It allows a kind of neutral zone in which the rendering of the "original" experience (i.e. the experience one is trying to model in the writing) creates a new freedom, a distance from whatever is being reflected or explored. It is in this perspective on experience that writing transforms into a perspective on self. The language used is simultaneously the medium and the source for the recreation of self, and can re-make the self, and that self’s perspective, again and again. For this book, language acts as an accomplice in the art of the re-creation. Land as a theme is one reality for these poems. If language is a cultural creation, then land takes on a significant silence that is beyond culture and beyond language. Land is woven throughout the words, and speakers find insights in the varied landscapes--from the remote high country outside Ft. Collins, to the landmarks out of Steamboat Springs, to the cliffs of Lake Powell and the salt flats of Salt Lake, back to a small cemetery in Bellvue, Colorado. The poems use landscape as a departure point; the land becomes an airstrip for the intellectual and emotional psyche. Once launched, these psyches join and produce insights for the reader's landing. The natural environment is an alternative to the dense milieu of names and naming, an alternative to metaphors that can't capture the vastness, the simple solitude and the calm this western perspective provides. My theory of language is informed by the critical works of Michel Foucault, Frederick Nietzsche, and Helene Cixous, among others, with Saussaure's theory of signs acting as a foundation. He argues that the relationship between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary, that there is no necessary or logical correlation between the thing named and the name itself. If language is arbitrary, then it must ultimately fail at revealing a Truth or essential-ness; what language instead reveals is not only the shadowy non-system by which things are created and named, but more importantly, the multiplicituous nature of reality. Nietzsche and Foucault refute the "one Truth" doctrine, as well as supplying a genealogy for institutions that claim Truth. My poetry works at refuting "one Truth," by offering alternatives. This theory gets played out not only in the structure of the book, but also in the subject matter and writing techniques. Cixous is particularly influential to my work. Taking the "many truths" theory a step further, she writes "from the body," and provides a "female truth." In my poems, too, I am trying to challenge patriarchal assumptions by producing an alternative. Poems like "Kissing a Rancher's Son," "Garden Poem," and "Between Selves: Black Widow" ask questions about the meaning of "female" in a male world, and about maintaining integrity while gaining respect from the men those speakers work with, play with, grew up with and love. My poetics of feminine multiplicity, then, rise out of the language's inability to reveal a Truth, and its ability to create many. This is the world of poetry after Modernism: not a refutation of any one given poetics, but the emergence of a multiple poetics, where boundaries are elastic in nature-stretched, reformed, and resilient. The poems in this book embody a full range of speakers facing different situations, from the threat of violence from a loved one, to a close friend's miscarriage, to a personal land-tied history. The speakers work with the difficulties of emotional intimacy: daily power struggles, a kind of love-claustrophobia, and sexual identity, among other problems. The redeeming factor in the constant battle of intimacy is found in the very continuation of that struggle. Within language, this writer finds herself wielding its power. Writing with perspective on many truths and realities is part of my own map of atonement.