Quinn 1 INTRODUCTION: A VOICE IN THREE PARTS I have been attached to the supernatural world since childhood. The month I was born, my father began listening to Art Bell’s long-running late-night talk show Coast to Coast AM, which frequents topics such as ghosts, aliens, cryptids—anything paranormal and utterly bizarre. The show was my family’s fourth child, living in the background on long road trips and 5 A.M. drives to Bible study. When I graduated and moved out on my own, the supernatural took a back seat to the every-day, though it always remained, lingering ghostlike on my periphery. In 2019, amidst internal turmoil born from personal religious deconstruction, a Bipolar II diagnosis, and an extramarital affair, I found myself returning to the world of the supernatural at almost an obsessive level. In my return, I recognized a pervasive desire in humans to define and categorize the unknown and unexplainable. It is no surprise that the reemergence of my interest in the supernatural occurred at a time I was experiencing such deep-seated identity reconstruction, a time I was seeking to categorize and understand my choices, my history, my ideas. It was also around this same time that I first began writing poetry. Poetry is a form in which asking questions is more beneficial than receiving answers. The very nature of poetry itself intertwines with the inexplicable. It is a means through which we observe and grapple with the unexplainable and the undefinable by embracing the vibrancy and density of language, allusion, metaphor, and imagery in hopes of brushing up against that resplendent moment of self recognition. When we read poetry “we want to feel that we are encountering a speaker ‘in person,’ a speaker who presents a convincingly complex version of the world and human nature” (Hoagland 5). We want to feel seen, heard, and understood. When organizing this collection, I wanted to consider what story my poems were telling without detaching myself from the experiences, emotions, and artistic obsessions that spawned Quinn 2 them. I wanted “less a situation of a linear narrative becoming coherent from inside a mess of cards on the table, and more an experience of (and/or with) an entity composed of disarray: its superfluous, midnight verdant logic lighting up the guts within the tangle, the mess, the shambles” (Saterstrom xx). I was deliberate in describing my relationship with the supernatural as “attached.” In Hooked, Rita Felski explains, to be “attached” is “to be affected or moved and also to be linked or tied” (1). For Felski, our attachments, specifically our attachments to aesthetics, cannot be completely untangled from the ways in which we consume and create artistic experiences. With this understanding, I do not believe that my affinity for Bigfoot, aliens, and Zak Bagan’s Ghost Adventures, can be completely disentangled from the way in which I write and process my own life experiences. I can’t think of Bigfoot without thinking of my father watching hours of Expedition Bigfoot, teaching my daughter how to look for the creature while hiking in the woods, and the way she squeals every time he mimics the Bigfoot call. My husband and I spent countless hours watching Ghost Adventures in the aftermath of my affair, rebuilding our relationship through nights of drunken laughter over Bagan’s dramatic “lock-downs.” This realization led me to explore the way in which these attachments intersect with the topics I write about: mental health, womanhood, motherhood, trauma, religion, and marriage. When I began writing with a focus on the ties between the human experience and the “supernatural,” I wasn’t sure where it was going to take me. At the heart of this collection is a speaker haunted by herself, lurking in the corners of the poems and images on the page; a speaker yearning to unravel her past, present, and future to find her voice: a voice that transcends time, space, and medium, an “animate thing” that is “above all, alive” (Hoagland 3). I accomplish this in Gaze of the Ghost by utilizing various artistic mediums and poetic forms to shape the consciousness of my speaker, making her feel more fluid and alive. Quinn 3 The speaker of my collection is focused on finding herself while simultaneously breaking free from the various expectations placed on her. This comes through in a multitude of ways: exploration of poetic form, fractured imagery, and multiple voices that reach through time and space to interact with one another in her search for identity. In this thesis I will discuss how the poetic theories of Kathleen Stewart, Selah Saterstrom, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Rita Felski, helped shape my understanding of poetry. I will also explore the work of Diana Khoi Nguyen, Sarah J. Sloat, Sandra Simonds, and Galway Kinnell, who helped inspire this collection, guiding my writing much the same way a ghost might reach across the veil of time to guide a descendant towards unapologetic candor. I. A VOICE OF LIBERATION The key to emotionally effective autobiographical poetry is a degree of vulnerability that balances a verisimilitude of the experience described and poetic techniques wielded in its description (Dunn). In other words, successful poetry finds a way to connect our inner and outer worlds by intending a new reality through imagery, language, and metaphor. Maria Takolander says this happens when the agency of the author comes together with the agency of writing technologies and attachments—including techniques such as metaphor, allusion and imagery, as well as our experiences, societal ideals, and artistic inspirations—to create an “autobiographical self” in poetry that may not be wholly “truthful.” This is not because that “self” is an outright lie, but rather because it is a creation focused on allegiance to both the poetic technologies and to the “emotional truth” over factual truth. As Paul Heatherington has said, “In the best poems, such inventions…may look more intensely like reality than reality itself” (20). In other words, a metaphor or image can oftentimes feel more real than reality. Quinn 4 In a 2023 AWP panel on writing with and about mental illness, Diannely Antigua commented on the way in which poetry stemming from deeply personal experiences and sources is sometimes received: “Often the nature of diary writing has been disregarded as ‘too confessional’ (first of all, what the hell does that mean and why is it considered a problem?) and therefore lacking in literary significance.” Though many traditionally studied “confessional” poets such as Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton have utilized the confessional nature of their poems to push back against societal conformity, and numerous critics have acknowledged the expertly crafted nature of these poems, there still seems to be a hesitancy to fully embrace “confessional” poetry in the academic world. Antigua also places “sentimental” on par with “too confessional”: descriptors used by some modern academics to diminish work that acknowledges and embraces the emotional attachments responsible for the creation of the piece; or, as Felski argues, work that is not “detached.” In other words, work too focused on the personal cannot make objective or intellectual statements about the collective human experience. While Felski acknowledges that there are merits to viewing and critiquing art from a place of detachment, she suggests that instead of ridding ourselves of our aesthetic attachments all together, we “reflect on their intertwining” (11). Breaking down multiple examples of people’s experiences with various forms of art, Felski comes to the conclusion that emotions and attachments, as much as we try, cannot wholly be separated from the manner in which we experience art: “while some ties [to our attachments] are broken, new ones are forged” (9). Although Felski’s overall argument focuses on aesthetic attachment from a critical standpoint, her argument can certainly be applied likewise to the creation of a collection’s poetic speaker. The intrinsic connection between personal experience, emotion, and attachment is imperative to poetic construction. Quinn 5 In an interview with Matthew Tuckner for Bennington Review about her collection Orlando, Sandra Simonds describes her writing process: I have to feel my poems in my body. I have to observe what’s around me and really feel what I want to say so the poetry is never far from that intimate connection between event, the flesh, the daily life, the work life, the life of parenting, the processing of pain and trauma, the sense of existential dread or the funny little things that keep us going, and the way we create narratives to connect these things in the formal act of organizing language into poetry and then into books. Despite the clear connection between her experiences and her work, when asked if she considered herself a post-confessional poet, Sandra Simonds responded, “I don’t really like the word “confessional” since it has a moralistic and punishing quality to it that I don’t really see fits well with my poetry” (“Sandra Simonds in conversation with Bennington Review”). While Simonds acknowledges her personal connection to the work she creates, there is still resistance to the label. I too have experienced a desire to distance myself from the term ‘confessional’ when I was recently told that my poetry “wouldn’t resonate well with academic audiences” because it was, like Anitgua’s, “too confessional.” I’ll admit (or confess) that for a time I panicked over this response, the classification of my work as confessional, and the academic acceptance of writing about both mental illness and having an affair. While writing poetry is, and always will be, a deeply personal and fulfilling process for me, it would be disingenuous to say I don’t care about other poets and academics negatively engaging with or dismissing my work on the basis of its autobiographical, emotionally charged content. Because of this, I too feel a level of resistance to the label ‘confessional.’ Perhaps this comes from my desire to examine and redefine labels that box in Quinn 6 those who veer outside the “norm,” or perhaps it is because I agree with Simonds that the word carries too much moralistic punishment; I am neither seeking forgiveness for my life choices nor am I revealing anything those around me don’t already know. I aim to avoid taking any moral stance in my work, choosing instead to present events and emotions as they are: rhizomatic, messy, complicated, fluid, and evolving. While my work is autobiographical—I did have an affair, I am Bipolar, abuse does run in my family—it is more than just an intimate expression of these deeply emotional events, more than what Ezra Pound once called "the mere registering of a bellyache and the mere dumping of the ashcan" (qtd. in Bushell). But if “confessional” isn’t the right word for my work, what is? In the same interview with Tuckner where she rejects the overly reductive label “post-confessional,” Simonds offers up an alternative way to view her poetry: My poetry is interested in liberation: political, sexual, gender, economic, linguistic, racial, and environmental for humans and animals to create a shared future. So for me, the act of writing poetry is a hopeful gesture because poetry has faith that this liberation is possible. (“Sandra Simonds in conversation with Bennington Review”) What a lovely word liberation is, how it rolls around in your mouth building to the climax before expelling outward in its final syllable. It is a word and idea that I find myself drawn to when classifying my own work. Gloria Anzaldúa has written about liberation in poetry, arguing that it comes from “a tolerance for ambiguity,” a “breaking down of paradigms” (249). She bases her explanation on Arthur Koestler’s bisociation, or the moment in creativity when two distinct structured modes of thinking come together to create something new, something that Tony Hosgland might argue becomes a poem’s voice. “El choque de un alma atrapado,” she writes, “entre el mundo del Quinn 7 espíritu y el mundo de la técnica a veces la deja entullada” (Anzaldúa 248). It is this “coming together of two self-consistent but habitually incomparable frames of reference [that] causes un choque, a cultural collision” (Anzaldúa 248). For Anzaldúa, this voice is la mestiza. For Eugenia Leigh it is Bianca. For Louise Glück, it is the voices of the flowers, the humans, and the god-like figure in The Wild Iris. I follow in the same vein as poets before me, such as Sharon Olds, Galway Kinnell, and Franny Choi; My liberation is found in an unnamed “I,” a speaker who is both me and not me, a bisexual, bipolar, bisociation; a woman walking between binaries; a confluence of who I was, who I am, and who I am yet to be. The “self” I create in my poetry presents as fractured, inconsistent, and at times contradictory. As Stewart says, the self is complex, “a dreamy, hovering, not-quite-there thing. A fabulation that enfold the intensities it finds itself in. It fashions itself out of movements and situations that are surprising, compelled by something new, or buried in layers of habit…forms of attention and attachment keep it moving” (58). Like the ghosts and cryptids that inspire this work, so too is the speaker “dreamy, hovering, not-quite-there.” My speaker lives in both her own words, and, through my erasures, the words of others. She weaves in an out of the collection in various forms—Kraken, ghost, mother, thread, image—moves between states of being—“I,” “You,” everywhere, nowhere—and she is born from the “layers of habits,” the absolutely “ordinary-ness” of life, the holy marriage of the personal and the external and a reaching back into the Jungian “collective unconscious” of humanity—bitten nails, squeaky settees, and dandelion seeds. It could be said that encountering a ghost is much like encountering the same convergence of identities, forms, and binaries. Many seances and Electromagnetic Voice Phenomena (EVP) recording sessions include participants questioning the identity of their Quinn 8 ghostly subjects. Is who they were in the realm of the living who they are now in death? Though answers from the other side may vary, a closer look at the nature of such a question suggests a consistent concern among humans to determine how identities shift under drastic changes and events. This is in part why I considered the nature of hauntings as a metaphor for my experiences in the first place. A reconstruction of identity is akin to the death of parts of me and the birth of something new: a reconciliation of the contradictory nature of the “self.” By leaning into multiple poetic forms—erasure, sestina, villanelle, prose, digital recordings, freeverse—I am able to take aspects of my experiences, the philosophical ideas surrounding the supernatural, and the nature of poetic techniques to call forth a new poetic self. II. A VOICE OF IMAGERY The inception of my poetry is often found within an image: the flickering A on the sign above my friend’s apartment, feeding my daughter mashed bananas, my grandfather’s settee shoved in the corner of my mother’s bedroom. They are my own personal “fragments of experience that pull at ordinary awareness but rarely come into full view” (Stewart 19). My mother always asked where I got it from; her little artist in a family of mathematicians and scientists. One summer she sent my brother and me to visit her mother among vast meadows of fireflies in Louisville, Kentucky. My grandmother painted in precise strokes, portraits of young girls and little Jack Russell Terriers. She painted pastel bouquets of flowers and charming landscapes. When I returned home, I spent my days seeking to capture the world in the same way she did, to catch the exact way the brightness of firefly light haunts the violet sky as though time is slowing down, edges seeping together. Quinn 9 Imagery has always been a keystone of poetry, a still life exploded outward into something other, “a static state filled with vibratory motion” (Stewart 19). These images are often part of the everyday, sometimes large, sometimes small, all filled with the “intensity born of a momentary suspension of narrative, or a glitch in the projects we call things like the self, agency, home, a life…a simple stopping” (Stewart 19). The images that create the basis of this collection are fragments of memory from a fragmented time in my life, arranged into a narrative, with the hope of “[providing] context so that the rupturing of identity is recognizable” (Camille Roy qtd. in Saterstrom xiii). They are, what Selah Saterstrom calls, divinatory poetics: “the way we send postcards to our past, present, and future selves through the crackling medium of fragmentation and juxtaposition” (Saterstrom 8). Sandra Simonds illustrates a similar idea in Orlando, Then I decided feeling is a theater where we see only the replication of feeling, a kind of Frankenstein written by a teenage girl that looks less like a diary, and more like the same diary read by the woman years later trying to understand the diary she wrote as a teenager…(14) These ordinary moments, objects, images, and experiences are essential to how we construct our identities, and in turn, our poetry. Looking at Wallace Stevens’ “July Mountain,” Kathleen Stewart explains the way the ordinary coalesces in the poem’s line, “Vermont throws itself together”: The question is not where, exactly, this Vermontness came from—its ‘social construction,’ strictly speaking—but the moment when a list of incommensurate yet mapped elements throws itself together into something. Again. One time Quinn 10 among many. An event erupting out of a series of connections expressing the abstract idea—Vermontness—through a fast sensory relay. Disparate things come together differently in each instance, and yet the repetition itself leaves a residue like a track or a habit—the making of a live cliche. (30) Therein lies the liberation of poetry, the making sense of the senseless, bringing the blurry ‘abstract’ into full color through collecting and connecting fragments of life into a tangible, concrete moment. Approaching my thesis felt much the same as both Simonds and Saterstrom describe, a journey through and reconstruction of time, peeling back hastily written, three-year-old journal entries from therapy and wearing my grandfather’s threadbare Ohio State sweats around the house as I figured out how watercolor would react to the pages of an old Nancy Drew novel with the words cut out. I wasn’t aware of it at the time, but much of the work was a desperate search for the “ness” of my work: the poetic voice tying the fragmented images, thoughts, and moments together. Each moment I spent stitching together the past and future flew out in poems, embroidery, and silver paint, until finally, standing back, I looked at my collection laid out on the floor and found the red thread tying them all together: imagery, written, painted, stitched, and photographed. It was in this moment that I experienced the liberation in imagery described by Ezra Pound: An Image is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time… It is the presentation of such a “complex” instantaneously which gives that sense of sudden liberation; that sense of freedom from time limits and space limits; that sense of sudden growth, which we experience in the presence of the greatest works of art. (Pound) Quinn 11 As poets, when we give in to the fragmented nature of the image, the frozen-in-time moment that simultaneously tendrils beyond time. The moments in time that “shift people’s life trajectories in some small way, change them by literally changing their course for a minute or a day” (Stewart 12). These moments can take the form of a metaphor lasting a stanza, the length of a poem, or extending the entire collection. Oftentimes it’s a combination of all three. In Diana Khoi Nguyen’s Ghost Of, a story of familial loss and suicide is laid out in water-based images of hauntings; Franny Choi explores womanhood and racial identity at the intersection of humanity and computer software in Soft Science; Tracy K. Smith’s Life on Mars is an elegy to her father through the lens of 2001: A Space Odyssey and David Bowie; and in Mothman Apologia, Robert Lynn Wood grapples with the death of his friend through a coming-of-age story centered on Point Pleasant, Virginia's famous cryptid, Mothman. Much like these poets, Gaze of the Ghost approaches the story of my marriage, affair, and identity crisis through an extended metaphor of supernatural phenomena. Ultimately, like a rhizome, I adventitiously inch back to Heatherington’s point that, to me, these cryptids, ghosts, and hauntings, “look more intensely like reality than reality itself” (20). If poetry is the materialization of my immaterial thoughts, feelings, and experiences, then what better way to engage with the craft than through an exploration of these events through supernatural beings traversing our world in much the same manner. Galway Kinnell takes a similar approach to exploring the complexity of life through the lens of death in, The Book of Nightmares. Listed alongside “deep imagist” poets such as Robet Bly and Robert Kelly, Kinnell reaches into the depths of human imagination to create a “persona” in which “poet and reader…meet as one” (“Poetry, Personality, and Death 221). Images that resonate with our innate human nature can often accomplish this. Kinnell by mimicking imagery akin to nightmares, yet Quinn 12 bookends his collection with images of the birth of his children, calling attention to the cycle of life and death. “Little Sleep’s-Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight,” Section VII of The Book of Nightmares follows two particularly grotesque explorations of death, “In the Hotel of Lost Light” (V), and “The Dead Shall Be Raised Incorruptible” (VI). It begins, “You scream, waking from a nightmare.” linking the prior sections of death with the experience of nightmares. Thin is continues, When I sleepwalk into your room, and pick you up, and hold you up in the moonlight, you cling to me hard, as if clinging could save us. I think you think I will never die, I think I exude to you the permanence of smoke or stars, even as My broken arms heal themselves around you. (The Book of Nightmares 49) Moving from the nightmare of death to the image of a father comforting their child demonstrates the nature of the life cycle. Although they find comfort in this moment together, the speaker can’t escape the thought of death. I explore a similar cycle in many of my poems, and in my collection overall, finding personal meaning in the connection between objects, memories, emotions, and death. The very real settee in “Letter to my Grandfather’s Settee” is the only material connection to the now immaterial ghost of my grandfather and a means through which I explore my own relationship Quinn 13 with death and regret. “Let us being with an affaire seance” juxtaposes images of Gods and sex (fertility) with the reality of suicidal ideation after the collapse of a marriage. “In the dark of our attic” uses images of both ripened and rotten peaches to trace the harrowing effects of sexual trauma through four generations of women. Each of my poems seeks to find imagery that can resonate with my readers to help guide and direct them towards self-identification through the coupling of inner emotional experience with the concrete exterior imagery. III. A VOICE OF MULTIMODALITY When I first encountered the word “multimodal” images of digital spaces and sleek powerpoint presentations were conjured up in my mind. However, throughout the construction of this thesis, I have come to understand multimodality as more than just the medium (digital, paint, language, print) through which a piece of art is portrayed, but rather the framing of a piece of art. In an indepth look at contemporary multimodal poetics Richard Andrews takes a more rhetorical approach to poetry, defining it “not as a merely private, individual voice, but as an array of public voices whose function is partly to persuade the reader/audience” (1). While this view of poetry as a form of public discourse is certainly nothing new (Andrews bases his argument on Aristotle’s Poetics), his inclusion of contemporary multimodality adds a new dimension to the mix. Spatial arrangement in poetry includes form, line breaks, grammar, symbols, delivery method, negative space, and visual imagery and is (arguably) more important in poetry than prose “because relative positioning of words is used to generate semantic, musical and choreographic meaning” and “meaning is generated more in the relations of the constituent elements in space than from each element itself” (Andrews 6). Andrews continues, Quinn 14 An individual element can have multiple meanings that can be hard to pin down. By locating it alongside other elements, a more precise meaning emerges. If these elements consist not only of words but also of gestures, visual images, sounds and movements, then the meaning that emerges, shaped within the frame that is chosen to separate text from context becomes clearer. (6) While artistic methods of conveying poetry have existed throughout history, the digital era has opened up a new world of mediums through which poets can add greater meaning to their work via multimodality. In this thesis I chose to focus on a few methods of multimodality that I felt best relayed the voice of my collection’s speaker: erasure art, white space, and digital voice recordings. Writers have embraced digital poetics through video editing, voice recordings, collage imagery, photos, and hyperlinks, opening new pathways to artistic expression, giving agency to material affects of the modern world. Online identities and technologies are formed, fractured, and reformed, birthing new creations of being, shifting the way we view not only art, but the ontology of humans as well. Erasure While poetry is a relatively new method of artistic expression for me, I have been painting since childhood. Acrylics, watercolors, oils, and gouache, I have spent years exploring the ways in which various forms of materials mix to create new textures and colors. When I first started writing poetry, I always knew that I would one day bring my art into the mix, though it wasn’t until I read Sarah J. Sloat’s Hotel Almighty and Nance Van Winckel’s Book of No Ledge that I knew what that mixture would look like. Quinn 15 In The Hatred of Poetry, Ben Lerner explores the dichotomy between both the hatred and defense of poetry, finding “the appeal of the defense of the genre is that it is itself a kind of virtual poetry…lines of poetry quoted in prose preserve the glimmer of the unreal… ‘line breaks were replaced with slashes, so that what was communicated was less a particular poem than the echo of poetic possibility’” (Lerner 22-23). Erasure poetry seems to likewise “preserve the glimmer of the unreal” and Sloat would agree: “Erasure, like all found poetry, is a process of discovery and reinvention. Above all it’s about possibility, and trusting in possibility” (Introduction). In the Introduction to Hotel Almighty, Sloat writes, I think of my work as creating something new, in part by eliminating something that exists. In erasure, the source text is a raw material. Through erasing, I am getting down to what I’d like to say. (Introduction) Sloat’s pieces in Hotel Almighty take pages of Stephen King’s Misery, Sloat lets the agency of the clippings from magazines, scraps of paper, and thread work with the language on the page, weaving together to create visual movement and texture you can feel. In her piece, “In the case of…],” (pictured below) Sloat’s use of circles, accompanied by the small flower like shape at the bottom echos the meaning present in the language: the flower like shape acts as an explosion outward, a liberation from the confines of the gray circles above it (Sloat 85). This harmonious collision of material affects creates an entirely new poetic identity for the pages Sloat uses as a canvas. Quinn 16 While artistic, collage-style erasure forms a large part of my collection, there is another aspect of erasure I would like to touch on briefly that melds well with both Sloat’s work and my own. In Divinitory Poetics, Saterstrom speaks to her method of writing noting, “Some of these vignettes have been written over so many times they remind me of graffiti-patina of the sort I’ve Quinn 17 seen on ancient tombs: layers of inscription piled atop so that another language suggests. And so the pilgrim traces the deep cut of the words. Words inscribing into erasure: erasure inscribing into words” (11). In other words, there is a second kind of erasure haunting my collection as well: that which was said, then unsaid, until the heart of the poem is found. Here we come back to this idea of the fragmented self—poems, words, images painted over, placed, stitched together, erased, cut out, torn up until from the pieces left, meaning is found. Poems become palimpsests, traces of the original work flitting through the finished product like glimmers of ghosts wandering the halls of their homes. Like Anzaldúa’s “tolerance for ambiguity,” the original being of these poems exist underneath newer work, though their original meaning may be obscured by their new identity (Anzaldúa 249). White Space & Sound Because arrangement is so vital to the creation of meaning within poetry, I would be remiss to leave out a section on the use of white space as a framing device, especially when it plays such a large role in Gaze of the Ghost. My use of white space circles back to Stewart’s defining of the self as “a dreamy, hovering, not-quite-there thing.” Much like a ghost, white space is what is left unseen, unheard, unsaid. It pulls at Lerner and Sloat’s “possibilities” of poetry, leaving space for the reader to insert and explore their own reactions and attachments. Writing about complex situations, such as Bipolar and marital affairs, in such a candid way also suggests that there might be things best left unsaid, things kept between the speaker and their metaphorical ghosts. In Ghost of, Nguyen writes about the loss of a family member through suicide. She employs the use of white space to demonstrate the fracturing of a family wracked with despair through family photographs in each of her poems titled “Triptych” (19-21; pictured Quinn 18 below). These photographs are ones in which her brother, two years prior to his suicide, cut himself out of the family photo (“Diana Khoi Nguyen, To Cut Out”). Nguyen used these cut outs as “constraints” for the poems, writing within and around them, cutting of words whenever the white space dictated it (“Diana Khoi Nguyen, To Cut Out”). In this, Nguyen says the white space “enacts the process of grief,” cutting into life without warning (“Diana Khoi Nguyen, To Cut Out”). Quinn 19 Quinn 20 The white space of “Tryptic” inserts itself into oral readings of the poem. In an interview with Nguyen, Eva Heisler discusses Nguyen’s choice to pause at the edges of the white space, allowing the silence to penetrate the reading (“Diana Khoi Nguyen, To Cut Out”). This is a strategy I utilize as well in the digital recordings of my poems, “EVP in a Neuropsychologist’s Office” and “EVP in the Basement of My New Home.” In creating white space both visually on the page and sonically in the recording, like Nguyen, allow the space its own agency, its own voice, its own identity, mirroring the way ghosts, expectations, memories, and emotions exist within and around our frames of being even when they remain unspoken. CONCLUSION: A VOICE COALESCED Gaze of the Ghost has led me through a reshaping of my consciousness, which, at times, has felt like a haunted house. I have explored the rooms of my past and my present, my choices, memories, and my emotions, stitching together a future self who circles back on those moments to sometimes impart wisdom and sometimes sit in the empty space and imagery in silence. Through it all I have come out of this collection with a more sure sense of my poetic voice, knowing how I would like to move forward as an artist and academic. It is my plan to take this collection and expand into a full-length manuscript for publication. There are poems that are in the process of being written and poems waiting to be called forth as the collection continues to jigsaw itself into its final form. In future iterations, I plan to continue to frame the collection with both artistic erasures that speak outside my personal experiences and EVP Poems that act as vocal performances of a past/present self in conversation. I also plan to focus more work on Stewart’s “ordinary affects” by finding those small affects, Quinn 21 attachments, and objects that are haunting, yet present in the everyday, taking them out of the ordinary, and exploding them into the beauty of language, imagery, and artistic meaning. Quinn 22 Gaze of the Ghost Quinn 23 Let us begin, an affaire séance lay bare my élan vital, the raps & the taps & the questions I asked that night I contemplated what would happen to me on the other side. My husband threw me out, our daughter slept, I lost myself in a car driving under streetlights, a half-packed suitcase until I found Dionysus lost in a flickering neon “A,” His voice through the phone soft wine, ecstasy, madness. How do I abide madness, this drunken state of possession? O how the Gods live among us, how we find them in each other let them breathe their worship inside our bodies. I came to Him that night & all the nights before, the screen of my phone a glimpse of heaven, my dark room. We praised the stars in secret & He placed my crown among them. What is it like to taste death to grab the pomegranate, rip skin from membrane until seeds stain your hands, little red stars read along the lifeline of your palms? Gods require sacrifice. His palms cupped soft skin, Quinn 24 my leg. He begged me to stay, my giver, my lover, He whispered His front seat promises in the back of my car. Gods are petty & jealous, & I knew I couldn’t outrun this, so I drank my fill from the life vine of pleasure glutted the distance between us pregnant with lust until morning came. How many times can I count floors from an apartment balcony, trace the split street below, cracks filled with black rubber tar pouring over, with me pouring over before my fingers root the railing and I gasp in the fall air? Then I said goodbye, I said I love you I said we alway have tomorrow I beat on my front door I begged my husband to let my shears slice our tender green flesh, bless our garden with new growth. I crawled from my own throat said I love you, I love you, I love you, I said you are what I want, I said you are what I need. How many times can I lie before it becomes the truth? Quinn 25 EVP Session in a Neuropsychologist’s Office 1:42 PM static// [What happened to you?] twenty-eight neuropsych— dropped bipolar shoved —n crevices —iagnosis ornate armchair shook spiritual vibra— eyes red teeth fing— scratched anemon— nails leavin— marks groaning [you are] [not] [are you] —ysregulated [not] toxic [not] [not] [you are] [not] psychotic [i am] [not] [not] [not] [am i] avoidant Quinn 26 [Why are you haunting this place?] dropped rock [on your big toe] [you were seven] & Mother dragged— [she said you were fine] bloody stum— piglet pink peony bruise blosso— Mother instructed [you didn’t] let nail fall o— [you couldn’t] —mpatience [you pulled the nail off] slowl– [did you hear that? A red fox in the night] maroon poolin— —n the floor [let blood clot & cleanse] Mother bandag— [said i brought this on myself] [said i was so goddamned dramatic] Quinn 27 [Do you have a name?] hypersensitive [people fear black widows] [messy, irregular webs strung among gardens] crazy follow— me —n my car bit polish [seventeen, your Mother called you selfish bitch] —ingernails ripp— crescent moons spit [who would ever marry someone so nasty] —hem out hopelessness self-critic— [lady widows are known for their bite] egocentric [no one speaks of the way they spin] jagged cuticles po— [silk strong and flexible] —ail beds bloom— blood [can you love someone you can’t pin down in the palm of your hand?] Quinn 28 [Do you know you’re dead?] understand [my therapist said it takes time] emotional regulation hours late— [these days i sweat from my husband’s embrace] impulsive poured drove home double-rye whisk— [have you ever tasted metal, a wedding ring, the back of a hand] [i] vomited [fear rejection] High-West husban— held —air back //static Quinn 29 Quinn 30 Letter to My Grandfather’s Settee for V. Grant Hostetter I. We got you when he died. I used to trail my eyes along your satin pink brocade. Your tufted back curved the hand-carved wooden trim. You smelled like ten years of chain-lit cigarettes burnt down to the butt and left in ashtrays. I would lay on your cushions, think of how we would drive around in his red sports cars, windows rolled down, singing night fever, night fever. II. It’s funny the way we remember things over time. I remember leftover raspberry Danish pastries, neatly folded newspapers and trips to Publix and “Wal*Mark” to get whatever you like, sweetheart. I don’t remember why at sixteen I could only count the days on one hand, why I decided anything was more important than one more ride in his now blue sports car one more 12 P.M. donut, one more round of Stayin’ Alive. It took til thirty to learn time curves back on itself each time I use burnt coffee grounds to fertilize my plants. By then it’s too late to catch the hint of french vanilla in the air. III. Once he came to me in a dream, standing over the netted bassinet where my infant daughter slept. Can’t stay long, he said, I just wanted to see her. Her. First great-granddaughter from the first granddaughter. He laughed his trademark laugh as he left. His “ch” hiss of air through teeth was our lullaby for weeks. IV. Mom said he sold you before he died: probably mad about something I had done. You were her family heirloom. You were five hundred dollars she paid to have her father back, five hundred she paid to hold him again, five hundred to pick him up off the shag carpet of his childhood home where his Quinn 31 heart failed him. Where his heart left her crying in an empty tub. V. I’m sure you remember. Mom used to lay on you, back before you were my grandfather’s. Back before you were mine, back when my great-grandmother Bea played hymns on her organ. In the story of my mom’s childhood she is lying on you. The window in the front room of her home is open. Lace-trimmed curtains rustle in the breeze. VI. Residual hauntings occur when energy attaches itself to an object, left there from repeated use, routine, habit, the sound of the electric coffee pot singing in the early morning, footsteps, sliding glass doors cracking open for a smoke, the back of rough, aged fingers rubbed gently against my cheek, or the soft creaking sigh of your old settee springs. VII. Quinn 32 VIII. My grandfather died four days after he left our house. He drove all night. In his two-story colonial, his childhood home with AstroTurf on the porch, he would spend four nights watching old Ohio State games, kept company by half-burnt cigarettes, ashes burning holes in the carpet, their smoke settling on you, your pink satin button edges yellowing from age, smoke and stale evening air. IX. You weren’t there when it happened. You were sold. But I didn’t know that. I thought if I laid on you long enough, I could be there, watching aged lines of his face darken in flickering TV lights, cold coffee in one hand, smoke spirals climbing into rafters. When he stood up I could reach out, catch his cup. Together we would “ch” laugh, and I’d clean up the stain on the red carpet, dark like blood. He would sit back and tell me, you know the Ohio State stadium can hold over one-hundred thousand people? Quinn 33 Quinn 34 Self-Portrait as Spodomancy Wood ashes work well when raising divinity. I study soot clots that fall from black tipped matches, become poet-judge-seer. In sacrifice I burn my oak frame, let blue tongues lick lawns to start my garden anew, dissolve wood into ashes. Working to raise divine hell through my throat, I spit out prophecies of fire, bile splitting skin, poetic judgments of the match’s sacrifice, odes to time’s lie told in remains, the body’s decay. Sparks skip in to night, sing of divine wood ashes: O how they raise the dead from the heat flames. I spread out cold coals, dig holes, graves, pile up hills, until I match the sacrifice of poets, judges, seers before, spiritual fingers claw words in the strawberry patch where I laid to rest divine wood ash to become poet-judge-seer & sacrifice myself, match to flame. Quinn 35 In the dark of our attic the ghost of our grandmother hangs a golden frame at the back—back behind moldy newspapers, canned peaches in crooked stacks, glass jars of cloudy, rotten liquid seeping through cracks. Moldy roots of a pest-infested peach tree intertwine our mother’s delicate fingers as she intertwines a warning through each strand of hair that hangs in the braids around our neck: At our roots we are rotten. Through our scalp, down our back she draws the teeth of her black comb. Rotten, like purpled skin of mellowed Georgia peaches grandmother picked every summer—Peaches, are sweeter when bruising intertwines the soft, supple skin. They say bruising lets rot in, but really it teaches peaches to grow. Her voice hangs long after she’s gone, and we repeat the words back to her gilded ghost every time the roots of our mother’s rage snake our braids—roots from the tree that grew sun-speckled peaches our grandmother canned and hid at the back of her father’s attic, the attic where intertwined in her father’s hands, our grandmother would hang her tears on bleached branches, let the rot in, concede at some point we all become rotten. We prune and pull away mutilated roots in cracked and plastered cellars. We hang our heads, drink syrup of decadent peaches and scour our bodies with fermentation intertwined in our hair, breasts, legs, memories—back & back & back & back. Back before bruised peach pits became rotten, before the hands of generations entered us, wine- Quinn 36 soaked earthworms whittling escape routes to northwestern shores. Sliced and scarred peaches on pink blossomed branches, our hearts hang Like our grandmother’s ghost—hang back in the eaves of our rotting attic, peach paint peeling, names repeating, intertwined in the dust that settles around her roots. Quinn 37 Quinn 38 Becoming Kraken When floating beneath the ocean watch the water bleed blue then black, consider physics & the velocity at which you are pulled into midnight. In the abyss sunken ships in silt sigh & bend sleeping in trenches they disseminate memories of footfall waltzes on wooden floors rotting for years in acidic salt darkness. You belong here, calcified in your memories the before your husband's eyes across the Key West bedroom, his thirty-first birthday, you told him you were pregnant he kissed you every night Quinn 39 your naked bodies sticky with salty Florida sweat and in the morning, sweet waffles, the downtown diner. Four years later your body still carries the weight of your child and your husband's eyes look everywhere but you and your hands that beg to hold more than a spoon mashed bananas ice pack to a bruise your hands are wrapping him, tentacles sinking this ship you built together, so you let go to float the coastline away from hook eyes of fishermen threaded through bait, eyes of families wading water on the shore. You float in the twilight zone, dance with moon jellies Quinn 40 make meaning in movements they teach you in the depths Down here untouched by hands seafront explorers fingers through coral blooming by molten vents, you lie. Quinn 41 EVP Session in the Basement of My New Home 3:00 AM static// [Is there anyone here with me?] use —o be [teetering on the edge] grandmother porch ants droppin— —nto orb-weaver webs [watching them] roll meals into tight balls [i imagine i was the ant] —n silk blankets secure unaware warmth [venom tunneling veins] Quinn 42 [How many spirits are present?] doc—or —aid four [a double polaroid exposure] trace [taken in basement hallways] flick—r moods light switch— [on attic stairs leading nowhere] flicker trace everywhere pace [my feet wear out laminate of this house, drag dust tracks] hive o— criticism [all these abandonment issues] slam —-abinets [into the kitchen] keep out [my husband] prying eyes [keeps searching for chips in the china’s pattern] Quinn 43 [What is your name?] emotional— [labile] labia [frequenting changes] —n mood sel—ish [bitch with a strong need to violate rose bushes] tear apart lexapro nigh— [four Corralejo shots hung over] [one a.m. hook ups] —rthquake [shake me loose from the ceiling] drop —nto mania [bored affection, softly lit] lamo—rigine [mourning] rose [tea pours from a glass pot; the water’s gone] cold Quinn 44 —hy are you —ere? [female funnel webs eat their mates suck their bodies dry & crumbling we wonder why could be weighing her options could be a free meal could be her aggressive tendencies & voracious appetite her lack of impulse control] satiate Quinn 45 intimacy [ended] —ipping hole spa [i became] set masoch cetime a —ack mass —elevision [i became] [i became] ism preemp— [i was lucid] self-deroga— dreaming bedroom hydroxy zine [sleep paralysis takes hold, body & soul] Keep— demons crawl— walls [How did you die?] [i need to call a priest] —rom exorcize [my] self fro m— [self?] don’t [know who i] [am i] get am [i] —n knees [the guy down the hall hangs my lips from his necktie] ask —od look pretty [says from this angle i am delicate china] teeth hair pull— back glint— hung er [washed in fluorescents & his room] //static Quinn 46 Quinn 47 Using a Witch Bottle to Break a Three-Year Curse The practice of protecting a building and its occupants using [witch bottles] was at its height during the hysteria of the witch hunts and witch trials of the 16th and 17th centuries. Whether the witch-bottle worked or not is unclear, but it is said that once the evil-doer was dead, the bottle would break. — Museum of London Archeology A witch bottle needs a piece of the victim, so pluck a single strand of hair from your head with history winding through the root. Draw a thumbnail up the corpse of the dried lavender cutting. Pop the calyx from their whorls plunk them to the table below. Prune leaves of rosemary, strip each leaf from the parched bark place them in your mortar and pestle. Press their bodies against cool gray stone, grinding them down with bits of fresh chamomile buds snipped and left drying in the west-facing window to bathe in moonlight. Gather cut crystals—selenite for cleansing—let them twirl between your fingers, fibrous fractures catching pads, splinters slicing through flesh. Wonder if the pain will last beyond this moment as blood stains selenite. Wonder if tomorrow, when the incision is swaddled tender and swollen, you will have your answer. Think of the one who cursed you, the one who wielded her scythe like a flame against the frame of your house, who danced in charred ashes until her feet left tracks through your garden. Quinn 48 Think of the one who threw your good bones into her crisping pot, etching incantations nails scraping along dried marrow, their ivory pallor permanently scorched in her laughter. You know her. She has haunted you for years—crept through family photos, stood over your shoulder. Now she speaks her spells in words you write. Breath deep. Raise the bottle and throw it into the fire. When it bursts, see the story of your future laid out in glittering shards, stained green glass. Quinn 49 The Call of Cthulhu I built my house on a lake. The calm waters kept it from rocking in the wake of the unknown. Life was beautiful— the sunrise and sunset of the water; then He came. It started as a ripple on a rainy Thursday, a small orange tentacle peeking through a pristine surface. He was watching me at the waterline. Over time He grew bolder, sometimes letting out a whole tentacle or two to write at the edges of windows or scale up pillars on my porch. One day I waited with bait in hand, a whole roasted chicken bathed in lemon. I pulled each tanned drumstick from the sides letting the rosemary waft outward on the water. Eight tentacles came calling engulfing the moss-covered siding of my small wooden house. Then his eyes, wide, dark, deep, measured me and He let out his great, gawping beak. What is it you want from me? I screamed, shaking the chicken corpse in my hand, bits of flesh dropping into graying waters. He clicked His beak open, a black mass of a hole a gravitational force to be reckoned with. It sucked in every star numbered in the sky since my inception. I gasped and He clicked my body alive with the music of his jaw spun me in the colors of His notes until I gave in and jumped, slipped, slept in the darkness, the warmth of His mouth Quinn 50 churning the waters as he swallowed me whole. Quinn 51 Another Marital Exorcism On Saturday nights we watch Ghost Adventures to make amends for the death of our marriage. Zak Bagans says exorcism is required to cure possession and we know this is what we need to rid ourselves of our sins. We flick the TV off to banish demons in the dark, ask forgiveness into digital recorders, play them back for guidance. My disembodied voice bids “have a drink.” We begin our prayer, Clear the living room, gather Barbies from the thread-worn area rug, draw conjuring circles of salt ‘round rims of margarita glasses, lick clean the cups in invocation. On the hearth burn chamomile, incense, and each other, cleanse grievances of infidelity, sway the delicate macrame runner of our coffee table, let our bodies channel past anger while EMF readings ping levels we haven’t seen in years. We are drenched in holy water and exultation. The night is cool. The heat of our pain rises into our attic rafters. We know this minor rite is fleeting, still we lay, in the afterglow light, caught in a crystal prism, color pouring from each limb. Still. In the moments after. We know this pain is only temporary. Quinn 52 Healing from an Affair Reticent mountain clouds come down to meet our Salt Lake City lights and nights spent between us. Sunlight reminds us our time together was curved alongour spines. Now we resign ourselves to remember the echoes, how we lit chrysanthemums for warmth and gazed through opalescent windows to catch our reflection in the glass. We were twisted up, beasts of folklore crawling through desert underbrush, singing to the stars. These days I only hear the hush-hush of shade tree leaves as another man wraps around me. I can’t release the pain of knowing my truest form without losing dandelion seeds, the feel of your hips on mine, wildfire, our summer’s heat. Quinn 53 Quinn 54 Notes “The Call of Cthulhu” borrows its title from H.P. Lovecraft’s horror story, “The Call of Cthulhu.” It is a response to Ted Chin’s composite, “An Unexpected Guest,” pictured here. “Another Marital Exorcism” contains the phrase “have a drink” from an actual recording of a disembodied voice caught by Zak Bagans and the Ghost Adventures crew in Season 19, Episode 7, “Pasadena Ritual House.” Quinn 55 Works Cited Andrews, Richard. Multimodality, Poetry and Poetics. Routledge, New York, NY, 2018. Antigua, Diannely. “From Poe and Plath to Meds and Co-Pays: Poetry and Mental Illness.” Association of Writers & Writing Programs, 11 March 2023, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Seattle WA. Conference Presentation & Reading. Anzaldúa, Gloria. “From Borderlands/La Fronters: The New Metiza.” Feminist Literary Theory and Criticism, edited by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, W.W. Norton Company, New York, NY, 2007, p. 247-258. Bushell, Kevin. “Leaping Into the Unknown: The Poetics of Robert Bly's Deep Image.” Modern American Poetry, http://maps-legacy.org/poets/a_f/bly/bushell.html. Choi, Franny. Soft Science. Alice James Books, Farmington, ME, 2019. Dunn, Stephen. “Degrees of Fidelity,” After Confession: Poetry as Autobiography, edited by Kate Sontag and David Graham, Graywolf Press, Saint Paul, MN, 2001. Felski, Rita. Hooked: Art and Attachment. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL, 2020. Heatherington, Paul. “Poetic Self-Inventions: Hoaxing, Misrepresentation and Creative License in Poetry.” International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing, vol. 10, no. 1, 2013, pp.18-32, http://dx.doi.org/10/1080/14790726.2012.725747. Hoagland, Tony. The Art of Voice. W. W. Norton & Company, New York, NY, 2019. Kinnell, Galway. The Book of Nightmares. Houghton Mifflin Company, , New York, NY, 1971. ---. “Poetry, Personality, and Death.” Claims for Poetry, Edited by Donald Hall, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, MI, 1928, p. 219-237. Leigh, Eugenia. Bianca. Four Way Books, New York, 2023. Lerner, Ben. The Hatred of Poetry. FSG Originals, New York, NY, 2016. Quinn 56 Lynn, Robert Wood. Mothman Apologia. Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2022. Nguyen, Diana Khoi. Ghost of. Omnidawn Publishing, Oakland, CA, 2018. ---. “Diana Khoi Nguyen, To Cut Out.” Interview by Eva Heisler. Asymptote, https://www.asymptotejournal.com/visual/diana-khoi-nguyen-eva-heisler-to-cut-out/. Olds, Sharon. Satan Says. University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA. 1980. Pound, Ezra. “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste.” Poetry Foundation, 30 October, 2005, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/58900/a-few-donts-by-an-ima giste. Saterstrom, Selah. Ideal Suggestions: Essays in Divinatory Poetics. Essay Press, 2017. Simonds, Sandra. Orlando. Wave Books, Seattle, WA, 2018. ---. “Sandra Simonds in conversation with Bennington Review.” Interview by Matthew Tuckner. Bennington Review, https://www.benningtonreview.org/sandra-simonds-interview. Sloat, Sarah J. Hotel Almighty. Sarabande Books, Louisville, KY. 2020. Smith, Tracy K.. Life on Mars. Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, MN, 2011. Stewart, Kathleen. Ordinary Affects. Duke University Press, Durham & London, 2007. Takolander, Maria. “Confessional Poetry and the Materialisation of an Autobiographical Self”, Life Writing, vol. 14, no. 3, pp. 371-383, Taylor & Francis Online, DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2017.1337502 Van Winckel, Nance. Book of No Ledge. Pleiades Press, Warrensburg, MO, 2016.