DAUGHTER OF DOMESTICITY

Thesis Advisor: Spring Ulmer

December 2021

From September to December 2021, I worked with the incredible support of my thesis advisor Spring to create my first ever collection of poetry. Inspired by Emily Dickinson, Ada Limón, and Henry Adams, among others, I let nature's seasons guide me through themes of womanhood, sense of self, depression, family, and grief.

Sweeping My Head Off

“All things swept / sole away”¹:

look at those grooves in the floor!

I quiver and I sway,

then peer twixt those nerve-like archways

where library ripples with drawers

of “all things swept / sole away.”

This is Adams’ unity²: each wave and the whole bay—

it spills finite me onto the shore,

forced³, I quiver and I sway.

I pluck my dusty silhouettes out to play,

and ask them if they know who I am anymore.

“All things swept / [soul] away.”

I want their advice; I ask them to stay.

They spit and sip—wit and tea—before

slinking back into the grooves to quiver and sway.

I let my mind go nude, vulnerable as prey,

pray to my darling multiplicitous corps:

“All things swept / sole away”!

I quiver and I sway.

See Emily Dickinson’s #1548 “All things swept sole away”
The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams. In “The Abyss of Ignorance,” Adams writes, when exploring the idea of Unity and Multiplicity, and force versus will: “We deal with Multiplicity and call it God” (358). I’m interested in his thoughts on looking at history from a scientific standpoint (force, rather than will), and how “[m]odern science guaranteed no unity” in the way the Church did by ignoring the amoral, non-predestined plurality of ways life could unfold. I think about the different selves within me that form my united self, but that to be one, I must acknowledge the many.
In “Chaos (1870),” Adams ruminates on his sister’s death and his newfound experience of nature as an amoral force.

Part I: SPRING CLEANING

Part II: SUMMER LOOKS IN THE MIRROR

Part III: FALL HARVEST

Part IV: UPROOT

Part V: WINTER'S HUSH

Part VI: HOMEBODY