Katie Fuller

Date of Award

5-2013

Level of Access Assigned by Author

Campus-Only Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

English

Advisor

Jennifer J. Moxley

Second Committee Member

Tony Brinkley

Third Committee Member

Steven R. Evans

Abstract

Against Ephemera is a manuscript of poetry completed over two years and beginning upon the author’s arrival in Orono in August of 2011. The poems contained are aware of the lyric tradition, particularly as it stems from an Orphic poetic lineage. They employ a number of literary allusions and a poetic cast in dialogue with both traditional figures and the “contemporary.” The poems are concerned with a number of binaries—those presented by the ideas of body and soul, man and woman, self and other—and employ various pronouns to engage the lyric “I,” though the figure of a “she” emerges as a framing device therein. Most of the poems also move away from themselves by way of stanzas stemming out of the more traditionally aligned stanzas hugging the left side of the page. While many of the poems could be construed as belonging to the genre of the “love poem,” the author was aware of the body proper— the politics of gender even under the auspice of romance.

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