Thesis Defence: Beacon

Meghan Reyda-Molnar, supervised by Professor Matt Rader, will defend their thesis titled “Beacon” in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing.

An abstract for Meghan Reyda-Molnar’s thesis is included below.

Defences are open to all members of the campus community as well as the general public. Registration is not required for in-person defences.

Abstract

Beacon is a book of odic poems that use grieving as a modality to reach a queer futurity poetics.
The poems within Beacon draw on oceanography to investigate how, as we are all bodies of water (Neimanis), our lives record grief similarly to parcels of ocean water holding signatures of how they have moved and what other bodies they have encountered. As our present losses occur under the “interlocking systems of domination that define our reality” (hooks 7), these losses are entangled; grieving them cannot be an isolated or singular process. Contemporary heuristics of grief revolve around the Freudian notion of mourning as a return to normalcy (Brophy 20) where “the ego becomes free and uninhibited again” (Freud 245)—representing also a return to the productive stasis of “normalcy” upon which white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy depends. The poems in Beacon experiment instead with a mourning practice where “one mourns when one accepts that by the loss one undergoes, one will be changed, possibly forever” (Butler 21), and how such a practice might turn us toward each other and away from systems of power. The poems within Beacon visit various locales of grief: a sensed loss of identity as a scientist through questioning the ethics of the Western scientific method, queer loss at the heartbreak of homophobia (internalized and externalized), loss of family members and animal companions, and loss faced by friends, neighbours, strangers confronting different scales of political violence. The poems allow for multiple registers and scales by moving between stricter received forms and the Keen, and through utilizing the long poem to engage the idea of “queer time” through how the long poem’s “sense of the passage of time drives them by and into history beyond the capacities and preoccupations of the lyric” (Thesen 452). The concerns of Beacon float in the metaphorical space of a ship—offering unsettling, fluid, locations to enter and connect otherwise disparate experiences of loss that counter our terrestrial “obsession for fixity, assuredness and appropriation” (Cassano qtd in Hessler 32). The poems in Beacon believe that investigating the interstices and praising the transformation the process of mourning allows provide a rich imaginative knowledge that points towards futurity otherwise unseen, unmapped by linear, objective ways of thinking or grieving.