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UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI Date:___________________ I, _________________________________________________________, hereby submit this work as part of the requirements for the degree of: in: It is entitled: This work and its defense approved by: Chair: _______________________________ _______________________________ _______________________________ _______________________________ _______________________________ Nothing Fatal A dissertation submitted to the Division of Research and Advanced Studies of the University of Cincinnati in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTORATE OF PHILOSOPHY (Ph.D.) in the Department of English and Comparative Literature of the College of Arts and Sciences 2006 by Sarah Beth Perrier B.A., Ohio University, 1996 M.F.A., George Mason University, 2000 Committee Chair: Dr. Don Bogen ABSTRACT Nothing Fatal, a dissertation by Sarah Perrier, consists of two complementary pieces: a book length collection of poems and a scholarly essay. Both pieces are grounded in my interest in Romantic, feminist, and confessional poetic traditions at the start of the twenty- first century. The epigraph to this collection, “Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous,” is the bargain proposed by Frankenstein’s monster when he asks for a mate. Like the monster, the speaker in these poems hopes to strike a deal that will stave off loneliness, or at least be incentive to virtue. And just as the monster’s courting of his mate would surely be unconventional, the poems in Nothing Fatal also approach courtship unconventionally. These poems strive for the satisfaction that all creative work—including love—can provide. In these poems, conventional romantic roles (lover and beloved) bump up against and resist the roles provided for poets and readers by our literary Romantic legacy. The dissonance provided by these two partially compatible paradigms enables the poems in Nothing Fatal to grapple with questions of lyric sincerity. Introducing the manuscript is “What Do They Teach You in That School, Anyhow?: Redefining the Confessional Paradigm in Contemporary American Poetry,” an essay that reviews the reception of confessional poetry, and concludes that no balanced critical discussion of it has offered a clear delineation of its constituent parts, its value and role for contemporary writers and readers, or its relationship to other poetic traditions that emerged during the 1950s and 1960s. Rather, connotative meanings of “confessional poetry,” which have been mostly pejorative, have dwarfed the denotative ones. This unbalanced treatment of confessional writing has had particular consequences for the work of women poets writing in the wake of second-wave feminism, and so I also suggest that our current discussions of a confessional school of poetry should acknowledge how women writers have tried to write around the narrowest conceptions of confessional poetry. Using the poetry of Lisa Lewis and Lynn Emanuel, I demonstrate two ways that contemporary women writers use, in order to subvert, traditional confessional paradigms. © Sarah Perrier 2006 All Rights Reserved Acknowledgements Grateful acknowledgement is made to the editors and readers at the following journals where some of the poems included in this manuscript first appeared, sometimes in slightly different versions. The Cimarron Review: “Ass,” “Generosity,” “Meeting You: A Definitive Plan,” and “Porch With No Swing”; The Cream City Review: “Patience” and “The Dog, The Yard, The Water, The Problem” (as “The Empathy Kit: How to Be Eight”); The GSU Review: “Notes of First Kisses”; Hotel Amerika: “Aubade: Easy Mistake” and “In the Manner of Folklore” (forthcoming); The Journal: “My Fortress of Solitude”; The Ledge: “How Not to Sleep Around”; Mid-American Review: “Rattle Bones”; Phoebe: “Fresh”; Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing: “Near Misses”; POOL: “Poem in Which I Fail to Appear”; and River Oak Review: “Translation.” Certain of these poems also appeared in a chapbook, Just One of Those Things (Kent State University Press, 2003). Thank you to Maggie Anderson at the Wick Poetry Center for her attention to my work, and to everyone at KSU Press and the Wick program for the work that they do. The epigraph to the collection of poems included here is taken from Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein. 1 What Do They Teach You in That School, Anyhow?: Redefining the Confessional Paradigm in Contemporary American Poetry ...................................................................................................3 Meeting You: A Definitive Plan.......................................................................................................47 Porch With No Swing .......................................................................................................................48 Poem in Which I Fail to Appear......................................................................................................49 In the Manner of Folklore................................................................................................................50 The Dog, the Yard, the Water, the Problem..................................................................................51 Flirt.......................................................................................................................................................52 The Queen of Snakes ........................................................................................................................53 Rattle Bones........................................................................................................................................54 How Not to Sleep Around ...............................................................................................................55 Too Darn Hot ....................................................................................................................................56 Aubade: Easy Mistake .......................................................................................................................57 Generosity...........................................................................................................................................58 Listless..................................................................................................................................................59 Sexy French Underwear....................................................................................................................60 My Fortress of Solitude.....................................................................................................................61 Dreadful Sorry....................................................................................................................................62 Lesser Beasts.......................................................................................................................................63 Carnivalesque......................................................................................................................................64 Fresh.....................................................................................................................................................65 On the Principle of Pairing in Nature.............................................................................................70 z A Version of the Ark.........................................................................................................................72 Water Speaks to Our Subconscious Selves ....................................................................................73 Academic Affairs................................................................................................................................74 Sweet Nothings ..................................................................................................................................75 By the Time this Poem is Over........................................................................................................76 Temptation Is No Apple...................................................................................................................77 Near Misses.........................................................................................................................................78 Domestic Bliss....................................................................................................................................79 Welcome..............................................................................................................................................80 Texas ....................................................................................................................................................81 Translation ..........................................................................................................................................82 Notes on First Kisses ........................................................................................................................83 The Confessional Mode....................................................................................................................84 Ass........................................................................................................................................................85 Personal Poem....................................................................................................................................87