| The Chameleon House is a collection of poems that draw on traditional subjects of the lyric---love and loss, childhood and the animal kingdom, interior states of being, landscape and language---to explore a contemporary desire for openness, stability, and belonging. The words of the title function as doubling metaphors for the body/self and language/poetry, and for the tensions between change (chameleon) and stasis (house); between the natural and animal (chameleon) and the made, the societal or human (house). To convey those ambivalences and uncertainties, the lyric forms employed shift in and out of song-like couplets, triads, ballads, and other stanzaic structures, and into lyric-narratives and prose poems that experiment with syntactic juxtaposition, lyric compression, and tonal fusions of rhetoric and song, meditation and incantation.; These themes and structures were informed by a variety of sources. Issues of interiority/exteriority and the house as transformative space borrow from Bachelard's Poetics of Space. Lynn Hejinian's argument for restlessness and against closure, as well as Andrew Welsh's study on the roots of the lyric and poems forming that tradition, from Dickinson to Duncan, aided my experimentation in form and voice. Tensions between Ellen Bryant Voight's non-gendered theories of the "flexible lyric" and Juliana Spahr and Claudine Rankin's feminist interrogation of lyric practices proved useful for shaping individual poems and the arc of the whole manuscript. Although formations and metamorphoses of childhood and sexual awakening figure into an over-arching narrative, the text is less bildungsroman than a kind of psychic hagiography, borrowing from Theresa's Interior Castle and the Bestiary tradition. The central speaker moves from invisibility, neglect, and silence into more open spaces, assertion, and song. The degree to which transformation or enlightenment of the domestic/domesticated self is achieved, however, remains ambiguous, or, perhaps, perpetually morphic, as, of course, do language and poetry. |
