Smutty Alchemy

Smith, Mallory E. Land

Smutty Alchemy

dc.contributor.advisor	Sigler, David
dc.contributor.advisor	Lai, Larissa
dc.contributor.author	Smith, Mallory E. Land
dc.contributor.committeemember	Jenkins, Jacqueline
dc.contributor.committeemember	Camara, Anthony
dc.date	2021-06
dc.date.accessioned	2021-01-26T21:30:01Z
dc.date.available	2021-01-26T21:30:01Z
dc.date.issued	2021-01-18
dc.description.abstract	Sina Queyras, in the essay “Lyric Conceptualism: A Manifesto in Progress,” describes the Lyric Conceptualist as a poet capable of recognizing the effects of disparate movements and employing a variety of lyric, conceptual, and language poetry techniques to continue to innovate in poetry without dismissing the work of other schools of poetic thought. Queyras sees the lyric conceptualist as an artistic curator who collects, modifies, selects, synthesizes, and adapts, to create verse that is both conceptual and accessible, using relevant materials and techniques from the past and present. This dissertation responds to Queyras’s idea with a collection of original poems in the lyric conceptualist mode, supported by a critical exegesis of that work. “Smutty Alchemy,” the poetry collection, navigates lyric and conceptual traditions and forms to discuss scientific subject matter, taking as a focal point the work of Margaret Cavendish, a writer at the start of the seventeenth-century scientific revolution. The exegesis aims to situate the collection, “Smutty Alchemy,” within the intellectual context both of contemporary Canadian poetry and of creative-scientific writing. Stylistically, “Smutty Alchemy” speaks to the concerns of lyric conceptualism by blurring the lines among lyric, conceptual and language poetry traditions, playing with such recognized forms as sonnets, triolets, epic poems, and free verse, as well as refigured poetic shapes, such as the element poems, the cursed sonnets, and invented poetic shapes, such as the tardigrade-shaped poems, which specifically reference concrete poetry. Feminist writers and critics can both refuse to limit subject matter or style based on the autobiographical and confessional modes of the lyric poets and still discuss the mark of the personal upon even the most process-intensive poetics and “objective” voices. Additionally, they refuse to adhere strictly to any stringent rule-making of the conceptualists, or to choose exclusively a focus on language moments as do the language poets. My project explores this impetus towards the understanding of poetic forms, coupled with the impulse to delimit and expand the range of those forms by creating a poetry collection that pairs scientific subject matter with experiential knowing and the synthetic and invented poetic shapes of lyric conceptualism.	en_US
dc.identifier.citation	Smith, M. E. L. (2021). Smutty Alchemy (Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca.	en_US
dc.identifier.doi	http://dx.doi.org/10.11575/PRISM/38587
dc.identifier.uri	http://hdl.handle.net/1880/113019
dc.language.iso	eng	en_US
dc.publisher.faculty	Arts	en_US
dc.publisher.institution	University of Calgary	en
dc.rights	University of Calgary graduate students retain copyright ownership and moral rights for their thesis. You may use this material in any way that is permitted by the Copyright Act or through licensing that has been assigned to the document. For uses that are not allowable under copyright legislation or licensing, you are required to seek permission.	en_US
dc.subject	Poetry	en_US
dc.subject	Margaret Cavendish	en_US
dc.subject	Science	en_US
dc.subject	Feminism	en_US
dc.subject	Lyric Conceptualism	en_US
dc.subject	Canadian Poetry	en_US
dc.subject	Contemporary Poetry	en_US
dc.subject	Scientific Epistemology	en_US
dc.subject	Science Poetry	en_US
dc.subject	Poetics	en_US
dc.subject	Sina Queyuras	en_US
dc.subject.classification	Fine Arts	en_US
dc.subject.classification	Literature	en_US
dc.subject.classification	Literature--Canadian (English)	en_US
dc.title	Smutty Alchemy	en_US
dc.type	doctoral thesis	en_US
thesis.degree.discipline	English	en_US
thesis.degree.grantor	University of Calgary	en_US
thesis.degree.name	Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)	en_US
ucalgary.item.requestcopy	true	en_US