Too Many Kates

Abstract

The poems in this collection were written for the most part during the last two years of the Masters of Fine Arts program at the University of Maryland. They are arranged in five parts to signal the multiplicity of the "many Kates," with a longer poem, a six part elegy, as the collection's center. The elegy as well as many other poems in this collection attempt to think about the problem of autobiography as the emotional and narrative source of poems. Accordingly, the speakers in these poems often manufacture voicesmasksthat subtend or ironize the very experiences they narrate. Similarly, the poems attempt to mix high and low culture. This thesis represents a deepening of poems that rely heavily on voice, wit, narrative and whimsy with an attention to formal control, lyricism and emotional risk.