Born to hula

Abstract

The thesis represents a body of poems accumulated in response to the COVID-19 pandemic as it continues to spread and the poet's subsequent ruminations in confinement. Born to Hula is a collection of poems exploring the mundane weight of living, confused locality, and its fatigue, the confines of American society and their expressions in dislocation. The impulse of the thesis aims at an exploration of space, the degradation of potential futures, and considerations of the past in honest relief. These poems aim at locating and losing against the threats and follow-throughs in American society. Diners, thought of in these poems as the lighthouses between a slack bed and a hard road, act throughout the collection as a centering place, an oasis of grease and no-eye-contact refills. Born to Hula uses these fixtures as relief against ongoing structures and construction, the unchangeable churning of progress and those left behind. The central motifs of the collection are divided between the local and the dreamscape. These patterns enter on explorations of the area of Edmond and the diners stuck between. The dreamscapes found here act as personal explorations of potential futures lost and the narrowed possibilities of escape against such loss... Together, this thesis serves to illustrate the lost home of the insomniac daydreamers sparsely populating vast plains, and the coping mechanisms reached for in diners and on blank pages.