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Abstract
The Silence of Our, a manuscript of poetry, explores the liminal, in-between state that describes ones ontological beingexemplified in Heideggers notion of being thrown into the worldas well as the state of contemporary poetics, with its notions of a free multiplicity of form and a hybrid poetry freely appropriating from both avant-garde and mainstream lineages. The dissertations four serial poemsCartography, The Body, The Rooms, In this Element of Capture, and Indexemploy a poetics of noise as their primary formal mode. Borrowed from information sciences models of the communicative process, noise is defined as what must be excluded from the transmitted signal in order for coherent communication to take place, like static in relation to a radio broadcast. Translated into the realm of poetry, noise is an element excluded by the assumptions of genre (e.g., lyric or epic) or by tradition (e.g., avant-garde or mainstream); in a poetics of noise this prohibition is made evident through the use of dividing lines, brackets, and multiple voices and discourses. The prohibited element is in this way re-introduced into the poetry, re-inscribing noise as signal and implicitly critiquing the limitations of traditional and generic modes. The essay that begins the dissertation argues that the turn in contemporary poetics toward an avant-garde / mainstream hybrid likewise signals a turn from a linear paradigm of innovation to a spatial paradigm of experimenting with and inhabiting the entire range of available techniques, forms, and traditions. It argues that a poetics of noise, dramatizing the exclusion and re-inclusion of prohibited elements, works to situate both writer and reader in the midst, acting as a kind of orientation device within a network of texts, places, people, and sets of poetics.