DREAMS AND OTHER THINGS

SAMANTHA M. WYNN

Bachelor of Arts in Women’s Studies

Bowling Green State University

May 2010

submitted in partial fulfillment of requirements for the degree

MASTER OF ARTS IN ENGLISH

at the

CLEVELAND STATE UNIVERSITY

May 2014 We hereby approve this thesis

For

SAMANTHA M. WYNN

Candidate for the Master of Arts in English degree for the

Department of ENGLISH

and the CLEVELAND STATE UNIVERSITY’S

College of Graduate Studies by

______Thesis Chairperson, Dr. Ted Lardner

______Department & Date

______Thesis Committee Member Dr. Michael Geither

______Department & Date

______Thesis Committee Member Dr. Imad Rahman

______Department & Date

Student’s Date of Defense: May 6, 2014

DREAMS AND OTHER THINGS

SAMANTHA M. WYNN

ABSTRACT

In this collection you will find culmination of both dreams and actualities. I have presented pieces of my imagination here for consumption. In some poems, I discuss the murky yet beautiful waters of love. In others, I pontificate on race and its debates. This collection has been a beautiful disturbance. Writing it was sometimes a dream and sometimes other things. This collection is all that I am. A person stuck in a sometimes unfortunate reality and at other times, a beautiful fantasy. I became louder in this collection. I am no longer living in silence.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS Page

ABSTRACT……………………………………………………………………………...iii

CHAPTER

I. INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………...1

II. LOVE IS A BAYOU……………………………………………………….....13

He was my first…………………………………………………….….….14

The Cycle…………………………………………………………….…...15

The Haunting (Part 1)…………………………………………………….16

The Haunting (Part 2)………………………………………………….....17

The Haunting (Part 3)………………………………….…………………18

You Have Two Loves…………………………………………………….19

The Splits……………………………………………………………….....21

Short Plead to Love………………………………………………………..22

The Thing I Will Never Say in a Text to My Sister………………………………23

Why I Will Always Owe Her……………………………………………...24

III. NO ONE IS COLORBLIND………………………………………………...25

Burningham……………………………………………………………..…26

Burningham……………………………………………………………..…28

Soapbox…………………………………………………………………....29

That Time a White Woman Asked Me What Part of Africa I Was From...30

We, too………………………………………………………………….....33

The Manifesto of a Young Black Womanist……………………………...34

Playlist:Motown…………………………………………………………...35

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Restless Summers………………………………………………………....36

IV. MY DREAMS ARE NIGHTMARES…………………………………….…37

Lavender Heaven…………………….…………………………………....38

Envy……………………………………………………………………….40

The Brave Die Young…………………………………………………...... 41

I Think You’ve Lost It/I was Over the Rainbow……………..………...... 42

What Marie Laveau Thinks About When She Gets Drunk……………….44

Walking Backwards…………………………………………………….....45

Black Magic…………………………………………………………….....46

Horsehide……………………………………………………………….....47

397 Words……………………………………………………………..…..48

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INTRODUCTION

To put into words how I write or why I write has been a difficult task for me. It’s not really something that I think about, but something that just happens somewhat naturally. I have always loved to write because it allowed me, an intensely shy child, to express myself even if my works were private. My parents always encouraged me to speak loudly and with conviction, but there was always something that prevented me from asserting myself like I knew that I could. Writing has allowed me to overcome and excel in many areas in my life and poetry, in particular, has really allowed me to experiment with my thoughts, feelings, and emotions in ways that I would never have dreamed about as a very timid girl. My parents never pushed me to read a lot of books as a young child, but never discouraged me. My love for writing came from encouragement from teachers and professors who praised me for my works. Those were the times that I felt validated and worthy. I was never the loudest, but the idea that I could be the brightest really allowed me to discover and explore a new side of myself that was unafraid to express. The very first poem that I remember reading as a child was a prayer that hung upon my wall, titled “ I Lay Me Down to Sleep.”

Now I lay me down to sleep,

I pray the Lord my soul to keep,

If I shall die before I wake,

I pray the Lord my soul to take

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This classic 18th century prayer wasn’t exactly a poem, but it was the only one I knew as a child and could recite at any moment. Even today I am comforted by the sound of these words and poetry is so much about sound and evoking emotions. This was my first substantial experience with the way words could come together to make something larger and more meaningful.

I believe that I wrote my first real poem when I was about 11 or 12. The age isn’t as significant as the experience. I sat down and cried as I wrote a piece about my mother’s miscarriage. That hope and love that comes with preparing to welcome a new life into your family and then losing is it is an unparalleled experience and for me as child, I had difficulty understanding the idea of mortality and writing that poem allowed me to let go of some things that I probably didn’t even know I was harboring. One of the things that draws me to writing poetry is its ability to aid in healing, not that I have really suffered too many major tragedies in my life at this point, but sometimes even the little things like an argument with my sister can be reimagined in the pieces that I create.

The first time that I had to recite a poem was in the seventh grade and it was “A

Dream Deferred” by Langston Hughes, a poem that is eternally burned into my brain until always. My early encounters with Hughes’ were really the first time I was able to begin to understand the gravity what poetry meant to the world. Hughes works go beyond just stories about his life. He tells the truth of an entire race of people, or at least the truth as he saw it. I am drawn to poetry because allows me to tell my truth as well as recreate history in a way that only I can. Poetry can be both individual and communal. I love poetry because of its possibilities.

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I became a poet simply because I loved poetry. Certain writers had a huge impact on me and my transformation into womanhood and I feel a kind of kinship with these writers because they spoke to my soul and settled my being. They made me feel validated in my emotions as well as in my experiences. When I was a child, my mother would read

Terry McMillan books, which I wasn’t really allowed to read, but I did anyway and even as a child I felt a connection with her work. There’s a feeling of familiarity in her novels and in the way she uses language. Diction is an essential in creating and maintaining a connection with the author and the characters and McMillan’s use of diction felt like . It almost mirrored the way my mother and aunts spoke as well as the things that they spoke about. Building some sort of connection with the person whose work that I am reading somehow makes the experience of reading more fulfilling. It’s that need that has come to settle within over time to be included that drew me to her and so many other writers. I could imagine myself or my mother or anyone in my family in her stories because they were familiar. Maya Angelou once said “I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made feel.” I have some books that I have read multiple times like “There Eyes

Were Watching God” by Zora Neale Hurston and I can’t give direct quotes or tell someone every detail of what happened in the novel, but I remember how I felt the first time I read that book. I felt like I was reading her soul. Like she had let me in on secret that no one else knew. I felt like I understood what it was like to be Janie and she understood what it was like to be me. Our Blackness brought together. Our womanhood connected us. I connect with and am inspired by those poets who mirror who

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I am as well as hold up a mirror allowing me to have moments of reflection and transformation.

Some of the poets that I flock to include Audre Lorde, Nikki Giovanni, Langston

Hughes, Maya Angelou, and Ntozake Shange. I have been inspired by these great poets because of a commitment they had to writing about their revolutions and willingness to making their personal lives political. Our content isn’t exactly the same, but what I believe that I share with these poets is a desire to be heard. The writers that I consider to be inspirations are individuals who were creating during revolutions. They are and were people who understood the need to fight for something and how important it was to write down the unpopular opinions. One of the very first pieces of poetry that ever impacted me in a way that made me reconsider the power and purpose of poetry was Langston

Hughes’, “I, Too.” This is a piece about the struggle to be seen equally American and

Black in a nation that historically excludes African Americans. I read this piece at a time in my life when I was finally starting to understand how cruel, unfair, and uncomfortable life could be for people who weren’t afforded certain opportunities. I was lucky enough to grow up in a very loving and financially stable household, but there was a time when I became aware that there were people that had access to more and they only thing that really separated me from those fortunate individuals were a few blocks and Black skin.

That poem was written in 1945 during a time when the landscape of America was drastically different from the 1990s and 2000s, which was when I was growing up, but the message still had the same impact. Poetry is a timeless art form. I can sit a read works from Ntozake Shange from the early 1970s and not only have awareness of the issues that she was facing, but also have some shared experiences.

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I consider myself to be a poet, who tells stories and I am who really appreciate elements of narrative poetry. A poet who, like many of those who I look up to, is fighting to tell her truth, but also loves fantasy. Thematically, I am very drawn to dreamscapes. I often straddle the line between what is actual and what fantastical and that is something that can especially be seen in my piece, “I think you’re crazy/I was over the rainbow.”

This piece is literally about an argument between the characters from the classic story

“The Wizard of Oz”, Dorothy and Auntie Em. The poem questions the reliability of

Dorothy as a character and the absurdity of her story. Was she really in a magical land or was it all a figment of her imagination? The conclusion is unclear, but I love the idea of questioning those things that we consider to be truth. I think one of the things that I appreciate about poets like Harryette Mullen, who is a more contemporary poet that I have come to greatly admire, is her ability to set a scene for the reader and experiment with form and content. Mullen has become a favorite of mine, partly because she is an

African American female poet who is unafraid to explore the possibilities of language and poetics. While I greatly appreciate the greats of the Black Arts movement, Mullen opened up an entirely new world to me. I had to really ask myself, how do I take this reader on a journey and transport them into another time or place, even those places that only exist in one’s mind and how do I do it in a way that excites the reader? In a way that experiments with language and its possibilities? I have a couple of pieces in the collection that are replacement pieces. Pieces that started as one thing and became something totally different using algorithm techniques like N+7, an Oulipian constraint, which helped me change meaning in an amazing powerful way. One of the results of this technique is the piece included in my collection, “Horsehide”, a completely nonsensical yet beautiful

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collection of words that somehow come together to make a ridiculous story of ice and sheep, stating, “There’s no such third world as magnesium./That’s what ice once told my motion sickness./Sheep laughed and her eyelet became black like coastlines.” I have been inspired by Mullen’s willingness to experiment with the traditional conventions of poetry.

This collection includes an array of themes, but in particular I have this fascination with discussing race and impacts of racism. My piece, “Burningham” displays my interest in both the retelling of stories as well as the importance of honoring historical events. The poem references the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in 1963, which took place in Birmingham, an event that was really the catalyst for the start of the Civil

Rights movement in America. I am inspired by those things that have changed the face of our nation and impacted the lives of many. This is a really important piece in the collection and there are two versions of this piece. One version is a concrete piece that experiments with the way the words look on the page and how that is connected to the actual events of that day. The other is a traditional version with four line stanza that simply tells the story without the complications of having to navigate through a complex visual form. I love both pieces because they express my need to understand the complicated past of our country and the way we are all affected by certain events and how those events changed the conversation in America. There are also pieces in this collection that focus on race and particularly my experience understanding the important role that race has in my life. “That Time a White Woman Asked Me What Part of Africa

I Was From” is a piece that really uncovers the complications of being both Black and

American and trying to really navigate an identity in a nation that has a complicated history. It’s a kind of double consciousness that is often explored and expressed in pieces

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by Hughes. According to the poem, “She asked where I was from./I wanted to say we were once kings and qu