Publication Date

8-2013

Advisor(s) - Committee Chair

Tom Hunley (Director), Kelly Reames, Dale Rigby

Degree Program

Department of English

Degree Type

Master of Arts

Abstract

This creative thesis, History Has the Voice of a Bird-Filled Tree, is a collection of poems about the communal, familial, and physical landscapes we grow up in. The manuscript explores the accidental body of knowledge we accumulate over a lifetime: those lessons we do not actively seek to learn and that no one sets out to teach us, but that mark us, and make us who we are. The landscape of this manuscript is not an exact replication of an existing town or existing family, but what the poet Richard Hugo refers to as a “triggering town.” This removal frees the internal biographer and historian to write openly about experiences without guilt or sanitization of a symbolic past. The narrative is mostly true with just enough fibbery to protect both the innocent and guilty alike.

Disciplines

Creative Writing | Poetry

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