Toward a Different Way of Knowing/Being/Speaking: Poetic Openings and Feminist Praxis in Contemporary Works

Abstract

This dissertation looks at feminist and antiracist interventions in contemporary literature and culture and the ways in which poetry and the concept of poiesis can be taken up to imagine more equitable political praxis. My first chapter offers a sustained close reading of Diane di Prima’s Loba and its mythical, feminist intervention within “open field” poetry, a movement associated with the Black Mountain poets. The remainder of the dissertation extends my analysis of poetic “opening” into other contexts, advocating for newly imagined forms of care in the worlds of poetry, academic and online discourses, collective protest movements, and popular music. My project examines “poetry” not just as a particular genre or medium, but as a mode of thinking and being in the world. I turn to poetry for the tools it has the capacity to give us: the ability to read closely and carefully; the understanding that “meaning” can be layered, subjective, and even contradictory; the desire to inwardly reflect and reach outside of ourselves, simultaneously; a call to witness. Poetry offers a way of writing, but also a way of reading, interpreting, and responding. In this spirit, I include “Interludes” that offer pauses, spaces for reflection, and bridges between the major contexts and concepts of different chapters; these Interludes, as well as my Introduction and Conclusion, each contain an original poem and encourage the interrelationship between scholarly and creative modes of writing.