Schonning, Daniel, authorBeachy-Quick, Dan, advisorDungy, Camille T., advisorFletcher, Harrison Candelaria, committee memberHarrow, Del, committee member2020-09-072022-09-022020https://hdl.handle.net/10217/212035Mechanisms Light and Miraculous is a work concerned with form. From abecedarians to long stretches of terza rima, to the innovated "Little Box," each poem in the collection is beholden to a set of constraints that intimately informs the direction in which it grows. These containers are all derived, in varied ways, from the alphabet and the base unit of the letter. This gesture owes its metaphysical spine to such texts as the Sefer Yetzirah, which offers—in a Jewish mystic framework—a precise and profound relationship between the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet and world that they inhabit. In all its component pieces, Mechanisms Light and Miraculous aims to apprentice its poems to the essential medium of letters, to listen to and learn from the systems and symmetries found therein. Yellowred, though similar in some respects, operates via utterly different terms. Yellowred, to borrow from the language of the work itself, is concerned with "the cold white distance between object and eye," or—perhaps more so—the distance between eye and mind, between mind and that object made anew. Before the word for "orange," it was not a color unto itself except in the imagination. Before the word for "sky" or "soul" or "self," Yellowred might posit, those things likewise did not exist—there was only the amalgamated whole. This manuscript means to understand and deconstruct those basest forms of making.born digitalmasters thesesengCopyright and other restrictions may apply. User is responsible for compliance with all applicable laws. For information about copyright law, please see https://libguides.colostate.edu/copyright.creative nonfictionlyric essayabecedarianpoetryformalTextAccess is limited to the Colorado State University community only.