The dissertation is divided into two sections: an essay titled “Redefining the Postmodern in American Poetry” and a book manuscript titled O, Enduring Sun.
“Redefining the Postmodern in American Poetry” presents an original critical framework that seeks to comprehensively describe American poetry written since 1945. The paper posits nearly every poem published in America during that period tends to conform to one of four stylistic modes. These modes are labeled the Meditative, Discursive, Associative, and Linguistic, and each represents a distinct tactical response to Romanticism; Modernism; and the unique philosophical, political, and economic forces at work in America during the Nuclear Age.
O, Enduring Sun is composed of lyric poems that attempt to define their speakers’ experiences within a larger cultural and political context. The manuscript regularly juxtaposes conversational tone with more ornate lyricism and musical tactics such as anaphora, alliteration, and internal rhyme. The poems favor associative rather than linear logic, and they generally feature disjunctive description and imagery that extrapolates away from autobiography into more fictionalized versions of subjective experience.