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Tales We Long to Tell: A collection of poems. (Original writing);
Abstract
This collection of poems explores the cycles of one woman's grief, healing, renewal and celebration, through lyric and narrative poems, in a mixture of traditional and free verse forms. Though most of the content arises from my own life experiences, the poems are not strictly autobiographical. The poems draw on imagery and narratives from nature, the domestic, and family heritage, and explore relationships between people, between the persona and her past, between human beings and the landscape. The first section focuses primarily on the interior psychological world of the persona; the second focuses more on the persona as she actively moves through her life and through the world. The final section explores how folk-tale type narratives reflect back on the persona's own experiences and meaning-making. Each section moves from poems of loss, sadness, or despair to poems of healing and celebration. Poems which bring to vivid life the world of everyday human experience, and which offer me entrance into keener awareness of that experience, its meanings, its possible integration into my being and nature, those are the poems which excite me the most. Poems which also discover and heighten the music of speech, especially colloquial and informal speech, also attract me. I agree with Philip Levine, that the language in a poem should be transparent to the content, rather than a distraction from it. Because these elements are what I seek as a reader, they are also the goals which have guided my writing of this collection.
Subject Area
American literature
Recommended Citation
Ports, Kimberly Lynn, "Tales We Long to Tell: A collection of poems. (Original writing);" (1995). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI9538651.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI9538651