Document Type

Honors Project - Open Access

Abstract

Each of the poems in Blueprints explores questions of creation: artistic and interpersonal, religious and scientific. As a writer whose work has often been based in performance, and thus explicitly focused on the relationship between author and text, i have long been fascinated by these questions: where does my voice end and the poem's begin? How do they influence each other? How does a creation, artistic or otherwise, shape its creator? Working on the page during this Honors Project has given me the opportunity to explore these questions in a more nuanced light. Many of the poems in Blueprints inform and interact with their own writing process. In the Lovers series, the characters within the poems actively create, shape and comment on the language of the poems themselves. In the Inventor poems, I explore the direct interplay between creator and creation, often giving the creation the stronger voice of the two, elevating its perception of the creator rather than the other way around. Other poems, such as Generation-- and The Familiar Names in the Credits/Undress the City Streets experiment with visual forms that force the reader to reconsider and recontextualize the language and structure of the poem each time they read it. Still others, such as Inheritance and Integration, work within more narrative forms and explore questions of creation through the progression of those narratives. My exploration of these questions was primarily aided by studying the work of a variety of contemporary page and performance poets, including Matthea Harvey, Jeffrey McDaniel, Karyn McGlynn, Anis Mojgani, and Sam Cook, all of whom have focused on similar questions in their own writing. McDaniel, for example, often uses his metaphors to comment on his own position as poet and creator. Mojgani utilizes shifting speakers to explore the relationship between himself, his characters, and his language. This project has been the culmination of four years of study at Macalester. I have drawn on experience not only from my Creative Writing and English classes, but also from my involvement in other academic departments and extracurricular opportunities made possible by the college. I look forward to continuing these explorations in my post-graduation work.

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