| This dissertation concerns itself with the challenge of finding meaningful work in a culture in which the term "meaning" is itself always already under erasure. In these pages, I meditate once again on the problems of love's labors and labors of love in the hopes not of answering the unanswerable but of highlighting---and lightening---the query.; The title poem, "Early Retirement," reflects the author's current preoccupation with the psychic cost of her various occupations, including poetry. The enormous and enigmatic nature of the topic called upon me to make a break from the shorter lyric poems that I had been writing. Not sufficiently rational or logical to withstand enumeration, the sections of the poem are divided by symbols. To affix numbers to the sections would perhaps suggest that the sections themselves were additive---that the final section arrived at some conclusion about how to work and still live. "In Autumn" likewise resists enumeration while enacting a feminine resistance of linearity.; Echoes of traditional forms and genres are most obvious in the two rhymed poems, "Evening Song," which is, loosely speaking, a sonnet, and "For Emily Dickinson," which modifies the form of Dickinson's own verse. "Richmond Romantic," which speaks directly to a geni loci, is an ironic adaptation of the traditional pastoral elegy. Although I've noted only a few instances of my indebtedness in these paragraphs, the poems here owe their very blood to books, to writers who have moved this writer to once again enter the most elevated and exacting conversation on Earth---poetry. |
