2 research outputs found
Mirrors and entrances
This thesis is a collection of thirty poems written primarily over the seven-month span from September 1967 through March 1968. The poems here represent for me not only a conscious turning away from the formal metrics which had characterized my verse, but also a concentrated effort to view one central problem from various angles. The collection is divided into three parts. The second and third sections are loose in their connections, serving to bring together poems which might be termed respectively 'poems of learning' and 'songs and dances.' The major part of the thesis, however, deals with the problem of self-definition. Assuming that everything is either "me" or "not-me," the mirror tells half the story, while entrance into other forms of life tells the other half. The title poem explores both of these possibilities. The first part of this poem, as well as other mirror poems, suggests that man's face appears in almost every imaginable circumstance. It often springs up when least expected, as in "From a Boat, Face Down." But, as the epigraph of the title poem states, man is best-loved when ne is unseen: thus, the entrances. By imagining myself into the skin of animals or into the veins of leaves, I lose the human quality and identify with something more basic in nature. Total identification with animals, such as in "One Raccoon Fiendishly Murdered by a fixture of Salt and Cement," or with growing plants, as in "Metastasis," expands the human consciousness beyond its normal bounds. It seems to me that what is lovable in man is not his humanity; but, despite his ritual concern with himself, his power to sense unity with other natural forms