Type of Document	Dissertation
Author	Byrd, Brigitte
URN	etd-09212003-185934
Title	Fence Above The Sea
Degree	Doctor of Philosophy
Department	English, Department of
Advisory Committee	Advisor Name Title David Kirby Committee Chair S.E. Gontarski Committee Member Sheila Ortiz-Taylor Committee Member William Cloonan Committee Member
Keywords	A Collection Of Prose Poems
Date of Defense	2003-08-02
Availability	unrestricted
Abstract “Fence above the Sea” is a collection of prose poems written in sequences. Writing in the line of Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, and Lynn Hejinian, I experiment with language and challenge its convention. While Dickinson writes about “the landscape of the soul,” I write about the landscape of the mind. While she appropriates and juxtaposes words in a strange fashion, I juxtapose fragments of sentences in a strange fashion. While she uses dashes to display silence, I discard punctuation, which is disruptive and limits the reader to a set reading of the sentence. Except for the period. Stein’s writing is the epitome of Schklovsky’s concept of ostranenie (defamiliarization). Like her poems in Tender Buttons, my poems present a multiplied perspective. On the moment. Like Stein, I write dialogical poems where there is a dialogue among words and between words and their meanings. Also, I expect a dialogue between words and readers, author and readers, text and readers. My prose poems focus on sentences “with a balance of their own. . . the balance of space completely not filled but created by something moving as moving is not as moving should be” (Stein, “Poetry and Grammar”). Repetitions are essential in everyday life, to the thought process, and thus in this collection. Like Stein, language poets are exponents from ostranenie, and the results are flatness of tone, experimentation with syntax, and decontextualization of words. I work within the same parameters. Also, I am making a political statement with this collection by asking the reader to be active and react to the text instead of being fed a poetry that is made a commodity for consumption. I particularly agree with Hejinian’s aesthetics and poetics: “the ‘open text’ often emphasizes or foregrounds process. . . and thus resists the cultural tendencies that seek to identify and fix material and turn it into a product” (Hejinian, The Language of Inquiry). Each poem from “Fence above the Sea” is an experiment with the thought that each sentence is a story and that a poem is an open text which is the mind.
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