I, Conduit

Abstract

I, Conduit is, first and foremost, a collection of poems written in the wake of my father's death in June of 2023. The poems, split into four sections, explore the shifting forms that grief has taken for me as a person and as a writer. The first section, "The Centripetal I," contains poems that turn inward toward an autobiographical self, a speaker that is fully related to the "I." The next section, "The Circuit Breaker," introduces the figure of Hildegard of Bingen, a German abbess and esteemed polymath, who is known to have experienced what she described as "visions;" these visions, religious in nature, are relatable to me in that the act of writing often feels transmitted to me through some divine sense. Hildegard is mythologized in my work to place less emphasis on her religious roles and more emphasis on her reception of the divine and her imagined afflictions. Following this section, "The Past Lives" contains poems using what I have deemed the Past Life Regression form, a type of persona poem in which the speaker is guided into a meditation revealing different past lives––this meditation can be viewed as a form of escapism. The final section, "The Spark Gap," allows the collection to become circular, another quality of the grieving process. Overall, I, Conduit illustrates a personal journey through grief and its effects on past, present, and future memories.