Thesis Defence: Do Suns Dream of Hummingbird Looms
April 9 at 1:00 pm - 5:00 pm
Vyatcheslav Bart, supervised by Professor Matt Rader, will defend their thesis titled “Do Suns Dream of Hummingbird Looms” in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing.
An abstract for Vyatcheslav Bart’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
Do Suns Dream of Hummingbird Looms is a book of lyric poetry, exploring loss and the possibility of renewal. A personal story of the loss of home and immigration is nestled inside a narrative of love and imagination. Genres within genres explore spaces within spaces in a number of different settings, including a town in Kazakhstan, a town in Canada, a village in Japan, and a fantastical city on another planet. The collection attempts to hold an intricate cosmos of human and more than human life from the perspective of a Russian-Jewish immigrant.
A complex woven structure is part of a poetic building of “the ark” – a recurring symbol, an inclusive liminal space of metaphor. The core of the thesis is made up of several long sequences of lyric fragments. This core of longer sequences is framed by two shorter sequences. These are sealed by a single visual assemblage poem, a crescendo of formal and thematic features. Two interconnected photographs form the outermost frame.
Braiding is a key formal feature and theme. The poems enact different forms of braiding individually and as series. The opening photograph is intricately matched with the closing photograph. The shorter framing sequence which starts the collection is matched with the shorter framing sequence at the end. The longer, core serial poems are pairs of braided sequences. In the first, a series of prose poems set in the author’s Soviet hometown in Kazakhstan, with an emphasis on the image of the ship and imaginary journeys, is braided with a series in verse, addressed to Beatrice and set in an ethereal, kaleidoscopic landscape of metaphors for the beloved. In the second, a series of poems in prose are set in the same hometown, with an emphasis on family life, domestic violence, the criminal world, and a child’s experience in a small town undergoing the collapse of the USSR. These prose poems are braided with a series of poems in verse, set in a fantastical urban landscape called Beatrice.
