Graduation Term

Summer 2026

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

Department of English

Committee Chair

Gabriel Gudding

Committee Member

Duriel E Harris

Abstract

This thesis is a poem; it records fourteen consecutive months of the poet’s life through rigorous, daily typing habits with nonoptimal tools and material: a typewriter and 600 feet of receipt paper. Through the adoption of these conditions, and through the dailiness of the habit, this thesis crips and deploys a poetics of chronic impediment for accessing constraint and its role in making. This thesis includes a critical preface which explores some of the poet’s specific relationships to chronic pain, both physical and emotional; forgetfulness and dissociation; and disruption by remembering a decade-long flare of chronic illness and abuse. With analysis of A.R. Ammons’s Tape for the Turn of the Year, the thesis considers tape-writing practices as opportunities to reconsider one’s tools and embodied limitations as ways to inform rather than restrict one’s writing. The thesis concludes with two creative chapters, two of the twelve fifty-foot rolls of paper, “Tape 2” and “Tape 5.” These sections employ a poetics of chronic impediment as sites of generative constraint in order to make available, then obvious, the poet at work rather than foreground the work of the poet.

Access Type

Thesis-Open Access

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Poetry Commons

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