| The ensuing creative dissertation operates, essentially, as a book of poems. As such, it demonstrates my most up to date engagement with poetry and poetics, although many poems have been discarded during my stay at UNLV. One of the weaknesses of my outlook on poetry as I entered school here was the hodgepodge of received opinions which, when mixed with a kind of individualized vision of writing, operated in place of "theory," and under the sign of "poetics." In short, what I most needed to develop was some sort of critical/theoretical apparatus, in terms of reading and writing.;But poets are always doing this, it seems; disavowing their earlier authorial selves in the service of their latest developments. I am not nearly so positive-minded. I believe that many of the poems that ended up in my "Recycle Bin" helped me to develop more as a poet than many of the poems that have been included in this manuscript. And so I acknowledge them here, just as I acknowledge my first manuscript,_light, as that manuscript which demonstrated to me that I could write a book, and The River Series, a manuscript that I have vowed never to remove from my shelf again. Without The River Series, this manuscript, the lyric subject, would never have been written, and, at the risk of sounding maudlin, it is entirely possible I would have stopped writing altogether.;It is, of course, impossible to "introduce" the lyric subject, and disadvantageous to do so anyhow. I have completed as much of an introduction as I am willing to complete in the preface, "forgetfulness as work/(the work of forgetfulness)." Instead, I conclude with these words from William Carlos Williams: "Fools have big wombs. For the rest?---here is pennyroyal if one knows how to use it.". |
