Border patrol: Textual, linguistic, and visual boundaries in Douglas Barbour's translational poetry

This thesis examines the notion of boundaries in Douglas Barbour's translational poetry. As an avant-garde, language-oriented poet, Barbour's interest lies in identifying the boundaries of language, questioning the way language is constructed, exploring the relationship between its elemental parts, and experimenting with the way in which language appears on the page of a text. Thus, his poetry is often visually captivating, as he plays with visual devices such as slashes, brackets, and white space in order to foreground language and form and to visually articulate his pushing and pulling of linguistic boundaries, conventional ideas about poetics, language, and textual structure.; Of Barbour's extensive poetic oeuvre, this thesis focuses on his work with homolinguistic translation, a poetic mode in which a poet takes a source text, a piece of writing by another individual, responds to it in a variety of possible ways, and creates a new text with these responses, a "translation." Because the poet must dip in and out of the source text, lifting content and meaning and moving it into a new translative space, Barbour's work with homolinguistic translation becomes germane to a discussion of linguistic and textual poetic boundaries.; Building upon existing scholarship on homolinguistic translation, this thesis examines the way Barbour theorizes the notion of boundaries in his translations, particularly through the three fundamental, interdependent aspects of the mode: movement, inner/outer spaces, and dialogue. Further, the relationship between these aspects is examined as it functions within the form/content relationship in Barbour's poetry: the idea that the way a text is written is just as important as what is written.; These three aspects are apparent in each of the chapters of this thesis. Chapter one explores Barbour's theorization of boundaries through the body, a trope common in much of Barbour's poetry to date. The body, like language and homolinguistic translation, is shown as able to morph, mutate, and shape-shift. Thus, textual and linguistic boundaries are not fixed, but malleable, meant to be played with and reworked. In chapter two, Barbour's theorization of boundaries takes place within a boundary, as he writes within the commonly accepted conventions of the lyric mode, testing and questioning the limits of convention, while at the same time rethinking and reworking the lyric to make it his own. The third chapter examines the self-reflexive nature of Barbour's translations in terms of boundaries, as Barbour appears to step outside of the poem he is creating, taking on the dual role of poet and reader. The content of these poems reflects this outward movement, as the poetry is about writing poetry and the process of translation.; Barbour insists through his poetry that poetic writing and translation is indeed a process, that homolinguistic translation resists fixedness and closure. He illustrates this through the form and content of his poetry, through various manifestations of movement, inner/outer spaces, and dialogue, in order to emphasize the boundless and malleable nature of language. Barbour's innovative poetry presents an exciting challenge to his reader, simultaneously pushing the limits of the text and the reader by openly encouraging varied interpretation and interaction.