AN ELEMENT OF [BLANK]

Abstract

First, I think I need to be transparent...what you’re holding in your hands isn’t really the Thesis Manuscript proper, the way I see it. I promise the manuscript attached is the most up-to-date, formal draft assembled thus far, and it fully reflects what I intend to put forward to the Graduate School. But what I mean is truthfully, to understand An Element of [Blank], I need to tell you about the binder (Figure 1). It started as a final project for Professor Camille Dungy’s “Literary Mapping” course; we spent the semester discussing how to write about real places. I knew I wanted to use this class as an opportunity to write about what I’ve often thought of as simply, “The Forest”—an archetypal space. But the more I tried to fill in The Forest, I found it only receded from me into blankness.As of spring 2026, this “Map to the Thesis” has evolved into a version of the manuscript that can’t be replicated by my Word Processing software—plastic sleeves with three-hole punch confetti, as well as cut-out, layered pages in which some of the “blanks” in erasure poems have been physically cut out from the page. All of this speaks to the experimental, material “soul” of the manuscript as a project concerned with form—one that can’t be severed from its concern with this forest as a made-place, too. In Susan Howe’s preface to The Gorgeous Nothings, I found what struck me as an uncannily relevant suggestion: “Does form envelop everything? Can a thought hear itself see?. . .Is there any correct way to clear this entangled primal paper forest? Is there an unwritable, unknown poem that exceeds anything the technique of writing can do?” This quote almost felt directive to me on a strangely personal level; that perhaps my own imagined forest could be closer to one of my closest literary ancestors, Dickinson. Though, maybe I want not to “clear” the forest, but propagate it, too. An Element of [Blank] takes its title from a poem by Emily Dickinson, F760A, “Pain has an Element of Blank,” which appears as an epigraph in the manuscript as well. Though I hope “Blank” can act as an opening for meaning able to fit multiple readings, I do intend it to gesture to the formal moves of the manuscript: the erasures, collage, cut-up, and other hybrid assemblages of poems rooted in material/visual expression. The erasures, collage, cut-ups, and other formal experiments often seek to reveal the ghosts and “afterlife” embedded in all language, taking the collection’s other epigraph from Peter Gizzi’s Fierce Elegy as perhaps another directive: “Cut a hole in the poem to play peekaboo with the afterlife.” I’m interested in how poetry and language indeed are thought made material; I seek to try to inhabit the language of my literary “ancestors” to try to also inhabit their thinking. In doing so, I think I’m asking larger questions about our relationship to reading and language as a kind of escape, too. In the Preface “A Narrative,” (an erasure of Susan Howe’s “Personal Narrative,” from Souls of the Labadie Tract), the speaker confesses “I read / to escape / to release beginning at the / mouth, some / coming dark age,” (11). Moreover, as an epigraph, F760A suggests there is “pain” preceding the manuscript’s formal “blanks.” Though perhaps pain “cannot recollect / When it began,” I think there’s something to the manuscript’s formal investigations that seeks to probe and remember the beginnings of the uncollectable. There’s absolutely a playfulness to the formal experiments here—but there’s a sinister sarcasm to Gizzi’s “peekaboo,” to my ear that reminds me: we’re talking about cutting poems and afterlives, how violent! And isn’t that act a kind of extension or mirror of the violent force of lyric sight, perhaps? I genuinely mean this as a question, because I think it’s posed as one in the manuscript. Isn’t there always something or someone erased, obscured, or otherwise embedded/collaged into whatever we say? Drawing from both lyric and hybrid poetic forms, I intend to include work that blends traditional lineated poetry with visual/archival approaches, extending from prior experiments with cut-ups, erasures, and typographic play. Language, scans of fragmented material, and free-use images are digitally and physically collaged to create visual artifacts, influenced by the work of Susan Howe and Anne Carson. For example, in the section “A Map to the Forest,” an earlier poem (“No Bottom”), along with various source texts from Shakespeare and Keats to earlier, now-lost drafts of original poems were burned, cut-up, and reassembled to try to navigate the resulting terrain of fragmented thought. Ultimately, An Element of [Blank] is also about belief, what happens when maybe you make something as haunted, as human and oddly material, full of immaterial mess as language, or poetry, your God. There is a belief that there are other, older ways of knowing embedded in our language and in the nonhuman, natural world: that trees and their mycelial roots contain a “canon” just as worthy of deep devotion as English literature. As the poem “Enter [ ] / Foresters” (an erasure from As You Like It) puts it, An Element of [Blank]’s speaker seeks “a go d in everything.”