Fitting Infinity on the Page: A Calculus of Verse and Nights I Let The Tiger Get You (poems)

Fitting Infinity on the Page: A Calculus of Verse probes the poetry of both the Early Modern age and the contemporary "information" age in search of the infinite. The preoccupation with infinity---both mathematically and phenomenologically---crops up at regular intervals in verse; as a mode of writing obsessed with limits and boundaries, with rules and measure, poetry offers an especially fraught space for writers with infinity on their minds. A close examination of this relationship between stanzas and science prompts some fascinating questions: In what ways did Early Modern poets use form to parallel or anticipate the mathematical procedures necessary to harness infinity? How do today's poets situate themselves in the new cosmos---in a multiverse, for example, instead of a universe? How does poetry understand the space of the page with regards to the space that lies beyond our atmosphere and within our bodies? This dissertation's three chapters each loosely "pair" an Early Modern poet with a contemporary one: William Shakespeare with Jack Spicer, Lady Mary Wroth with Anne Carson, and Edmund Spenser with Christian Bok. Other important figures---John Donne, Margaret Cavendish, and Marcel Duchamp---pop up along the way. In an interdisciplinary (or, perhaps, undisciplinary) manner, Fitting Infinity on the Page opens itself to both historical and structural cross-pollination. It examines the intersections of chaos theory and poetry in a chaotic manner, and illuminates connections between quantum mechanics and sonnet sequences by accelerating the particles of verse, watching them smash into each other, and analyzing what strange new entities they produce.;Nights I Let The Tiger Get You is a collection of poems that, like the critical section of this dissertation, deals with the way the unknowable and the unquantifiable is constantly rearing its head in the course of our everyday lives. The manuscript is a neurotic journey through the surreal deja vu of recurring dreams and the disorienting patterns of our own personal histories. The collection's poems view the failures of a family's internal structure through the distorted lens of the subconscious---but the language's twists and turns ultimately open the narrator's world to hope.