Meadow Theory
| dc.contributor.author | Chan, Derek | |
| dc.contributor.chair | Hutchinson, Ishion | en_US |
| dc.contributor.committeeMember | Van Clief-Stefanon, Lyrae | en_US |
| dc.contributor.committeeMember | Mort Hutchinson, Valzhyna | en_US |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2025-01-14T19:28:53Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2024-08 | |
| dc.description | 73 pages | en_US |
| dc.description.abstract | In Meadow Theory, longing and loss drive the speaker into excavations of familial history, political erasure, objecthood, and place-making. These poems travel from Australia to Hong-Kong and China, where the cornfields of a hometown village and a grandmother’s plastic flowers shape the imagination of speaker attempting to retrieve a diasporic lineage; to Ithaca and New York, where the snowy landscapes open into meditations of the exilic condition, the dailiness of inter-generational trauma, and elegiac encounters with absent beloveds. Permeating Meadow Theory is a metaphysical ethos: an interest in not merely documenting the world, but also of attuning into what shimmers elusively behind the material landscape, and the transformations which occur in that encounter. Meadow Theory attempts to give form to indefinable thresholds of experiences; human and other-than-human perceptions are held in quivering suspension, relations, and contradictions. These are poems which trace the erotic swerves of the mind, as they work to interrogate and deconstruct the limits of what can be known, and to unsettle the locus of the self through language. By piecing together voices, memories, and fragments—using persona, myth, and imagination—Meadow Theory inhabits the shimmering ruptures of archive and history—suspending the page into an archeological practice which exists within and beyond the boundaries of space and time. Here, the speaker in is not only haunted, but actively haunts their past, through imaginative visitations and communions with the dead. Blue petals are stirred by the wind into the shape of a lost child; drowned voices float out from the bottom of a well, trying to stitch themselves into unsent letters for their mothers. Where history falters, the lyric rushes in to fill the gaps left behind. | en_US |
| dc.description.embargo | 10000-01-01 | |
| dc.identifier.other | Chan_cornell_0058O_12170 | |
| dc.identifier.other | http://dissertations.umi.com/cornell:12170 | |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://hdl.handle.net/1813/116238 | |
| dc.language.iso | en | |
| dc.title | Meadow Theory | en_US |
| dc.type | dissertation or thesis | en_US |
| dcterms.license | https://hdl.handle.net/1813/59810.2 | |
| thesis.degree.discipline | English Language and Literature | |
| thesis.degree.grantor | Cornell University | |
| thesis.degree.level | Master of Fine Arts | |
| thesis.degree.name | M.F.A., English Language and Literature |
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