Date of Award

6-2015

Document Type

Project

Degree Name

Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing

Department

English

First Reader/Committee Chair

Paegle, Julie

Abstract

Glass Shoulders is a collection of poems that embody events from my life which have served as catalysts in the process of integrating myself emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually. In the poetry, the speaker searches for spiritual knowledge, and is guided toward meditation of Spirit as an internal reality to find healing. The narrative of the manuscript portrays the speaker’s deep introspection of self, exploring loss and resiliency through challenges surrounding grief, unrecovered abuses, and mood disorders. The inspiration for these poems arose from my contemplations on the incongruities between fate and free will, and how behaviors are influenced by the attitude of each. The poems explore her innermost conflicts as she contemplates whether she is director of her own destiny, or subject to a predestined fate, and seek to illumine how these differences effect her choices, behaviors, and attitude towards Spirit. The speaker is bipolar, and the paradox of the book debates whether the union of her polar selves is the ingredient to healing her phobias and disconnections, granting Spirit integration, or do her fractured selves support greater sensory experience that enhance her perceptions of self and Spirit toward new levels of recognition. The poems contain a variety of humor, tone, and voice. The humor in the poetry is unconscious to the speaker and shields her from her sense of loss and separation from her partner, her family, and divinity. At times she appears sarcastic and flippant, curious and gullible, yet always there is an undercurrent of deep thought. My visions and images for the poems are sourced from the philosophies of metaphysics, and are inspired by both Western and Eastern teachings of mysticism and myth that leads to Self-realization, or God-communion. It is through my studies of these sciences and methodologies that I have sourced my life long aspirations of spiritual knowledge for greater understanding of the human condition. Glass Shoulders is my attempt to show Self-realization as a gnosis of healing. This is a tale of freedom of psyche.

Download

Included in

Poetry Commons

Share

COinS