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Description:
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My dissertation , Take From This World , is a collection of original poetry that focuses on issues pertaining to women’s experiences , including but not limited to the women in my family . The collection as a whole focuses on the representation of women through myth , archetype , and history , and also deals with their frequently untold stories , such as the story of what happens to Delilah after Samson . In many cases , the poems are re -imaginings of some of the conventional mythic and archetypal stories embedded in religion , collective culture , and history . Other poems further explore traditional roles of women by addressing women’s familial roles : mothers , daughters , and grandmothers . A number of the mythic and archetypal poems portray key women in history , including Mary Magdalene , and the Virgin Mary through the use of persona , dramatic monologue , and lyric narrative . These forms help me to remain authentic in giving voices to the silences of women , whether the woman is the Virgin Mary or my grandmother .
The poems in Take from This World are comprised of four main cycles . One cycle focuses on the various theories surrounding Mary Magdalene’s true identity—prostitute , wife , mother , and saint—and her position in the hierarchy of Christ’s followers . The poems in the second cycle re -imagine the ancestral and matrilineal heritages as personal experiences of my own matriarchal line . Thus , cycle one helps to further the autobiographical in cycle two in order to enlarge the archetypal and vice versa . Such an enlargement of experience and voice continues in cycle three where matriarchal voices are more fully developed , and poems in a poet -speaker voice of mother /woman /poet enter the conversation , including a dialogue with the more spiritual poems of the fourth and final cycle . This last cycle continues the poems of biblical women by bringing together the lives , stories , and re -imagined experiences of a few other biblical women including Delilah and Hagar . The themes and voices , however , finally and fully emerge as united in “The Daughter of Memory ,” the last poem of the collection . Here the poet -voice , speaker -voice , and historical female voice meld together and become a unified voice concurrently occupying both past and present concurrently ; one that finally realizes that the two can no longer be separated . |