UC Riverside

ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION

All Things Lose, Thousands of Times

by

Angela Penaredondo

Master of Fine Art in Creative Writing (emphasis in poetry),

Graduate Program in in Creative Writing and Writing for the Performing Arts

University of California, Riverside, June 2015

Professor Katie Ford, Chairperson

As part of my research in poetics for my dissertation, I studied texts that delved into an avant-garde and intentionally disobedient form of the lyric poem. In many instances, this included the fracturing of a poem’s line and stanza, using the inanimate object as a medium and incorporating a kind of the jazz aesthetic of improvisation. I studied literary theories that unravel modes of expressivity from this structurally improper lyric, such as Daniel Tiffany, Dean Young and Fred Moten. Further findings led me to experiment with the architecture of a poem’s fundamentals such as its narrative, meter, and landscape, tapping into more liberal mechanics such as organic structuralism, intertextuality and contradiction.

My dissertation addresses and investigates the spaces of intersections, most particularly where the intellect meets the sensual, the sacred meets the profane, and the amorous meets the violent. In this space of intersectionalism, the body, both whole or disembodied has shape-shifting and border-crossing tropes challenging questions of gender, feminism and transnationalism and thus propels the speaker’s desire for reclamation of identity and agency through the charged interconnectivity of these various opposing entities.