Poetry, Language, and Embodied Subjectivities

University of Louisville ThinkIR: The University of Louisville's Institutional Repository Electronic Theses and Dissertations 12-2011 That terrifying center : poetry, language, and embodied subjectivities. Yalonda J. D. Green 1980- University of Louisville Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.library.louisville.edu/etd Recommended Citation Green, Yalonda J. D. 1980-, "That terrifying center : poetry, language, and embodied subjectivities." (2011). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. Paper 528. https://doi.org/10.18297/etd/528 This Doctoral Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by ThinkIR: The University of Louisville's Institutional Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ThinkIR: The University of Louisville's Institutional Repository. This title appears here courtesy of the author, who has retained all other copyrights. For more information, please contact [email protected]. THAT TERRIFYING CENTER: POETRY, LANGUAGE, AND EMBODIED SUBJECTIVITIES By Yalonda JD Green BA, Kentucky State University, 2002 MA, Wake Forest University, 2004 A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences of the University of Louisville in Partial FulfiJJment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Humanities University of Louisville Louisville, Kentucky December 2011 THAT TERRIFYING CENTER: POETRY, LANGUAGE, AND EMBODIED SUBJECTIVITIES By Yalonda JD Green B.A., Kentucky State University, 2002 M.A., Wake Forest University, 2004 A Dissertation Approved on November 22, 2011 By the following Dissertation Committee: Karen Chandler Dissertation Director Alan Golding Simona Bertacco Nancy M. Theriot ii DEDICATION To those damned poets, straggling bands, junkies never quite touching the earth anti-gravity verses in their pockets disguised as holes From another damn junkie, one more itinerant ne'er-do- well/squatter/loiterer casing conversations ransacking the lexicon rooting for truth poems like grubs under layers of said & meant ordinary green rummaging derelict metaphors tinkering a fix iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Without the loving support of my husband, AJ Green, this project would simply not be. Whether he meant to or not, whether he liked me or not, whether he knew it or not, he shared with me daily the practical magic of grace. My daddy, my puppies, my coUeagues, my kindred, and my kin-I am thankful to God for them all. Deepest thanks to my dissertation committee for allowing me the room to play in these pages, while keeping me honest in my poetry and my prose. To Dr. Nancy Theriot-for embracing my work and managing to make my committee even more amazing; To Dr. Alan Golding-for having the perfect book ever in reach, and double for adding my manuscript to the maze. Triple for introducing me to Harvest and Harryette Mullen. And bacon flavored everything; To Dr. Simona-for the space to consider what bodies, and language, and M. NourbeSe Philip, what pain and poem can mean; To Dr. Estella-for adding me to your constellation, for showing me how to live and shine and the ten and the five; To Dr. Karen-for sticking with me, for checking on me, for letting me talk out the madness of this dissertation, then making me write it out, for your painstaking comments, for your kindness, and your presence; To Ma-for dreaming me up and teaching me to believe my own stories: Thank you. iv ABSTRACT THAT TERRIFYING CENTER: POETRY, LANGUAGE, AND EMBODIED SUBJECTIVITIES Yalonda JD Green November 22, 2011 That Terrifying Center is a creative and philosophical experiment in the transmission of corporeal experiences and socio-cultural knowledge through poetry. I am bringing together the seemingly disparate threads of my studies into one creative-theoretical project: a collection of original poems exploring the development of multiple subjectivities, the terror of self-examination, and the scrutiny of memory; it is also a collection of poems that bear witness, that simply tell stories. These are poems that talk about what it's like to live in a body; they ask questions and translate answers related to becoming woman, demystifying fear, investigating genealogies of pain, and narrating family histories. As the title of the project suggests, That Terrifying Center's creative synthesis is fearsome work and the discursive chapters of this project are also part of the experiment. My poems interrogate language and somatic realities, this is not just what the body says-or how it is read by outsiders- but how it interprets, interacts with space, location, and geography. I see the body as a repository of memory and possibility. Consciously, I want to cultivate a poetics of hybridity-experimentation with language and form, while keeping a narrative voice (or voices) telling the story, using absences, space, shifts in time, and memory to translate and even reproduce the sensations of being human. The creative dissertation consists of a critical introduction and two conceptual halves. The first half is a collection of original poetry, divided into the following sections: The Bottom line, Absurdity, Conjure Woman, and Sunterblooms Ik Tew. The second half of the project consists of four discursive v chapters. Chapter one presents the cultural and creative framework(s) that prefigure my treatment of "many-selvedness," and black women's embodiment as they draw from M. NourbeSe Philip's concepts "s/place," "dis place" and "bodymemory." This chapter also considers "writing the body" and the reconceptualization of creativity in the poetry and essays of Audre Lorde. Chapter two presents my work as an in-process, prismatic poetics (of parallels and intersection, of reflection) -of language and sounds, but also of space and embodied experimentation that uses poetry as an epistemological tool. Taking a cue from poet Barbara Henning's statement that Mullen adopts a kind of "verbal scat" in her poetry, I consider how the vocal scat in jazz is a particularly resonant metaphor for considering improvisation, language, and the role of "sound image" in the discussion of poetic experimentation in work by Harryette Mullen and others. Chapter three retraces the process of locating the thematic, formal and conceptual centers of the poetry manuscript. This chapter also presents some of the challenges involved in writing critically about my own poetry. In particular, I explore my desire for a poetics of hybridity and the conflicting pull to write conventional criticism and to write creatively in the discursive parts of That Terrifying Center, while considering the genesis and overall design of the creative-theoretical project. Chapter four is a lyric essay that meditates on my personal interaction with these poems, speaking frankly about the ways in which grief, illness, and memory informed the earliest conceptions of this project, its shifts and its detours. In this final chapter, I reflect on the nature of my project: the poignancy of what it has meant to translate the language of my innermost selves, to plumb my own memories, to offer up the flesh and wonder of my own terrifying poems. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS DEDICATION ............................................................................................................................................................................... iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ............................................................................................................................................................. iv ABSTRACT ..................................................................................................................................................................................... v UST OF FIGURES ...................................................................................................................................................................... viii CRITICAL INTRODUCTION That Terrifying Center: Poetry, Language, and Embodied Subjectivities .............................................. 1 POEMS ........................................................................................................................................................................................... 9 The Bottom Line ..................................................................................................................................................... 10 Absurdity ...................................................................................................................................................................45 Conjure Woman .................................................................................................................................................... 73 Sunterblooms Ik Tew ......................................................................................................................................... 104 CHAPTERS I. TRANSLATIONS: SjPlace, Embodiment, and That Terrifying Center ................................................................................................... 125 D. RIFFING: Hand-Me-Down Hybridity, Sensuality, and Poetic Strategy .................................................................................. 139 m. LANGSCAPES: Minding the Gaps and Mapping That Terrifying Center........................................................................................ 162 IV. SHIF11NG: Getting from There to Here; Or, Weird Women: A Meditation ..........................................................................

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