UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI Date: 25-May-2010 I, Erica G Dawson , hereby submit this original work as part of the requirements for the degree of: Doctor of Philosophy in English & Comparative Literature It is entitled: Cottontail Student Signature: Erica G Dawson This work and its defense approved by: Committee Chair: Donald Bogen, PhD Donald Bogen, PhD 6/6/2010 851 Cottontail A dissertation submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Cincinnati in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in the Department of English and Comparative Literatures of the McMicken College of Arts and Sciences May 2010 by Erica Gloria Dawson B.A., The Johns Hopkins University, 2001 M.F.A., The Ohio State University, 2006 Committee Chair: Dr. Don Bogen Abstract: Cottontail presents a collection of poems informed by Early Modern British Literature and American Poetry since 1900, focusing on their definitions of self-fashioning discourse and authorship while highlighting respective important themes and popular poetics, revealing the ways in which the Early Modern period is a foundation for today’s poetry. The Early Modern poets, in their attempts to define the Self vs. Other (attempts mediated by changing perceptions of public and private space as mid-17th century bourgeois society increasingly places the body within the confines of cozy, candle-lit chambers), initialize the search for a more complex understanding of experience dependent on subjectivity and predicated on interactions with others. These poets expressed these shifting perceptions within the poetic restrictiveness of traditional forms; these forms, however, prove generative as each author becomes a kind of idolatrous iconoclast: preserving the traditions of the past while generating new traditions of their own. The modern voices of Cottontail display a contemporary author’s writing of the self, utilizing theories of a Neoplatonic World Soul, popular with Early Modern poets, where the intellectual realm is very much linked to the material realm. The poems also employ Foucault’s theory of an author whose writing does not obliterate the self but rather builds it. The voices of Cottontail create a compilation of a marginalized self (a poet, black and female), reliant on the careful manipulation of language in a specific, transformative, and present historical moment in our country’s narrative. iii iv Acknowledgments I want to thank the editors of the following journals where these poems (some under different titles and in different versions) first appeared: “Five Minutes from the River,” “Tar Baby,” Raintown Review, Spring 2010 “Go ‘Head Girl, Go ‘Head Get Down,” “Repossessed,” “Stasimon,” Avatar Review, Spring 2010 “A Monkey and a Man,” The Nervous Breakdown, January 2010 “Freakshow,” The Country Dog Review, Spring 2009 “One Fish Two Fish,” Verse Daily, Spring 2009 “Mojo like a Mofo,” Verse Daily, Spring 2009 “I’ve Got Anima-Soul and I’m Superbad,” “Mean Ol’ Wind Died Down,” “Mojo like a Mofo,” The Harvard Review, Winter 2009 “One Fish Two Fish,” Raintown Review, Winter 2009 “For Astrophil,” Alehouse Review, No. 3, Fall 2008 “Intermission,” The Warwick Review, Fall 2008 “As It Were,” Sewanee Theological Review, Vol. 51: 4, Fall 2008 “Little Black Boy Heads,” Iron Horse Literary Review, Spring 2008 I want to extend enormous thanks to the University of Cincinnati, Professors Jon Kamholtz, John Drury, and especially Don Bogen; and, the Albert C. Yates Foundation and Charles Phelps Taft Research Center. Thank you to Dr. Evans, Dr. Webel, Dr. Leonard and Dr. Brady for saving me. To the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Greg Williamson, and the inimitable Caki Wilkinson, Juliana Gray, Isabel Galbraith, thank you. Finally, with all my heart, I give eternal gratitude and love to Mandy, Frank, Dad, and Mom. v Table of Contents I. Repossessed 4 Rock Me, Mama 6 Go ‘Head Girl, Go ‘Head Get Down 7 I Got Anima-Soul and I’m Superbad 7 Front Matter 9 Stasimon 10 A Monkey and a Man 11 Night of the Lepus (It Should Be a Bald Eagle-Like National Treasure) 15 Iguanas Fall from Trees 17 Aerial 18 II. MoJo like a MoFo 21 Little Black Boy Heads 22 Freakshow 23 Tar Baby 25 Mid-Matter Mother Nature 27 One Fish, Two Fish 28 Mother Knowledge 29 Spanking the Arils from a Pomegranate 30 She’s Got It. Yeah Baby, She’s Got It. 31 A Poem That’s Not a Song or Set in the South 32 III. Intermission 34 Night of the Lepus (It’s Ok If You Don’t Want a Remake) 35 U-G-L-Y, you ain’t got no alibi, you… 37 For Astrophil 44 For Aphra Behn as I in Oroonoko 45 For Tamburlaine 46 New NASA Missions Rendezvous with Moon I. Pre-launch 47 II. Contact 48 III. A hit? 49 IV. A hit 50 V. Houston… 51 VI. …we have a problem 52 VII. Re-entry 53 IV. Back Matter 55 vi Night of the Lepus (Fin) 58 Five Minutes from the River 60 As It Were Right Now 61 Probably Not 62 Or Rather 63 Perhaps 64 And Yet 65 Nevertheless 67 Another View 68 Be That As It May 70 Critical Essay: The Fictive Who: Abjection, Authorship, and the Assertion of Selfhood in Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella 71 vii For Smokey 1 . n g(x) = fn x n=1 The sequence grows obsessive. One, one, two, three, five.... Infinity will prove expressive. Bred en bawn in a brier-patch! The rabbits never die. after Leonardo Fibonacci and Joel Chandler Harris The stark lucidity of a future recollection. Vladimir Nabokov 2 I. Before mine eyes in opposition John Milton 3 Repossessed It is the blackout of 2008. News radio gives it a title so It is the blackout of 2008. Falling like white girl hair while hurricane Strength winds inflate without the leaden rain, I’m up, then down. Late Ike, from Texas, low, Among the Mason stalks, lurks, and goes Aloft to pitch the tarped-pool deck of 4th and Plum. A tree obstructs the crest of Eden (My avenue), not snapped in half—a great Quarter, instead, steadfast; and, in the street’s Three-fourths, its fragments figure into mulch. In park, I charge my phone. Two children bowl A tire that stops at nothing but a plate Of metal. Pick-up games run ragged. I Can’t hear the Nikes’ rubbers crush and sop Up jimmies, broken glass, the CORRYVILLE Sign scrambled, O gone as the L and L Hang loose. They, hinging, roll like windmills when I joke, alone, today is Armageddon. The newsman, on the radio, says, don’t Touch unfamiliar cables. He’s a fool. I want to see a spark and watch its tail So my eyes shape it into happening: Moths twinkle, bugs someone should basket for The new museum’s God Made Creation Fest. It’s on all summer long. The dj starts. Fik-it, fik-it—Fire: Adam and Eve, The sea and all that’s in the firmament Could use a star that isn’t painted on The mural (Stay in School) that borders Taft At Highland. I try to stay up on water. A wonder there’s no curfew set; we all Know what could happen when a group of black, Swift-moving cumuli cuts up the moon: Infinite, white stitches thread a needled sky. The stuffing oozes at its seams. It seems It’s warmer than September could be, storms, Humidity, hail heading for the yellow lines, 4 The EPA’s harsh, generated light. Big moon. Black moon. The car is on my breath. It’s 1 a.m.: night’s ended middle. News: Duke Energy has called on crews from North Carolina…Red Cross has shelters stocked. It is the outage of 2008. It is, for sure, an expletive construction. It isn’t safe to be a girl outside But if this evening escalates to less, I may just purge my uvula. The air, Stagnant then sinking, smokes with charcoal grills; And, all it needs is salt, a wave to topple Big Boy’s Frisch and Staggerlee’s liquor, the kitsch…. True fact: a hurricane sans rain can’t make A flood. The hypothetical, the blue Midnight just like a person who’s a man In silhouette, black pleonasm—here, big Black moon can’t melt the butter. What to keep And what to pitch, the water soiled, town out Of power? Police tape surrounds the Eden stump. Across the street, a gold-base floor lamp, clothes, And TV with wood lie on the grass. Some things’ Descriptions serve as benedictions, worse For words. The dj’s chants wear soft as swaddle. He spins the record raw, its hand-scratched throat Sput-sputtering. I swear to God the moon Goes blue all over Voulez-vous coucher. When Patti reaches for the hey, he begs Us all for More. Ungh. Yeah. And another one. Tomorrow’s earlier. A Pinscher’s brown. Another one. A basketball returns To no good hands. Ike sneaks away as if Embarrassed. There is no eviction note Tacked on the door. It’s not a ghost town. It’s The present absence of a nightmare’s clown. How sly the evening and the morning are; How sly the relatively up and down. It is the evening and the morning. Now The evening and the morning are the first. 5 Rock me, Mama I-65 has stalled. The spokes Of Old Crow’s “Wagon Wheel” have spun The road enough. The singer tokes And hopes to God he’ll see his one True baby tonight. The saga, sign— The fatal bus crash in the ‘80s— I’m not far from the Buckeye line.