Losing the Audience: A Poetry Collection
Abstract
A collection of 35 poems in forms as varied as lengthy dialogical poems to swift lyrics and leisurely narratives, including several prose poems, illuminate a personal history of a poetic relationship with the audience of poetry. The Preface to the collection notes that the act of voicing from the past into the present and aiming at the future (audience) is elegiac in nature, with the poem a type of monument to the poet’s process and voice, and for this reason the trope of audience is enjoined to the genre of the elegy in the collection. Drawing on the theories of Paul Celan, Li Young-Lee, Alice Notley, and Jena Genette, the poems enact moments of the past as they intersect with the present poetic moment and encounter the poet’s reluctance to “let go” of the poetic utterance, not only as a sense that the poem is never really a complete utterance, but from a sense that the audience of poetry is often fickle and untrustworthy. The poems “Effigy” and “Comber” were accepted for publication by Cape Rock (2019) and Windward Review (2022) , respectively.
Subject Area
Creative writing|Fine arts
Recommended Citation
Latimer, Robin Marcelle, "Losing the Audience: A Poetry Collection" (2022). ETD Collection for University of Texas, El Paso. AAI29170230.
https://scholarworks.utep.edu/dissertations/AAI29170230