Anna Meister

 Courses:

Fall '09:

Exploring the Divine Feminine (Robert Meagher)

Speaking the Unspoken: Media Irony &amp; Cultural Politics (Viveca Greene)

The History of Photography: The Art of Fixing a Shadow (Karen Koehler)

Mediawork (Jim Miller)

January '10:

Feminist Perspectives on War &amp; Terror (Rachel Zaslow)

Spring '10:

Chemicals in Your Food (Nancy Lowry)

Intermediate Poetry Workshop (Heather Madden)

The Politics of Popular Culture (Susana Loza)


 * Passed Division I

Fall '10-Spring '11 On Leave

Fall '11:

Rethinking the Sexual Body (Angela Willey)

Hip Hop &amp; Critical Literacy for Social Change (Rec McBride)

Plate by Plate: A Poem's Tectonics (Aracelis Girmay)

Spring '12:

Poetry Workshop: UMASS (Doug Anderson)

The Lives of Teenagers (Amy Grillo)

The Personal Essay (Marian MacCurdy)

Voice &amp; Visibility: African Americans &amp; the Power of Spoken Word (McKinley Melton)

Summer '12: Writers in New York - Intensive Poetry Workshop: NYU (Rachel Zucker)

Writers in New York - Intensive Poetry Craft: NYU (Matthew Rohrer)

Fall '12:

More Eyes: Methods of Writing the Persona (Aracelis Girmay)

Past Performed: Creative Reconstructions of Oral History (Uditi Sen)

Adolescent Development: Culture, Brain, and Development (Jane Couperus)

Reading Contemporary Poetry: Smith (Patrick Donnelly)

Advanced Poetry Writing: Smith (Joan Larkin)

Internship with Paris Press in Ashfield, MA (CEL 2)


 * Passed Division II (accelerated)

Spring '13:

Creative Writing Concentrators' Division III Seminar (Aracelis Girmay)

Internship with Paris Press in Ashfield, MA

Fall '13:

Internship with Paris Press in Ashfield, MA (ALA)

Division III Contract:

ars memoriae: an elegy to & poetic mapping of time, family, & home is a Division III project in two parts. Consisting of a poetry collection (~60 pgs) & essay on poetics & process (~10-12 pgs), this project is concerned with the structure & (dis)organization of memory & non-linear time, as well as family narrative, loss, & conceptions of home. Additionally, this Div III is a meditation on structure & space, asking the reader to consider the role of space throughout in both form & content. The house, central to the project, is viewed as a holder & sewer of many times, histories, & voices, as well as a site for (& archive of) childhood memory.

As a series, these poems work to construct a world through mapping. As poet, I am cartographer, deciding what to name & what to withhold, thereby framing the world. Maps are records & to map is to remember. To think of my poems as (parts of) maps helps me to understand the work they are doing in relation to memory.

These poems work to inhabit many voices & perspectives within a family & to convey a multiplicity of truths, often allowing for & resulting in collision & contradiction. A familial/generational mirroring, doubling, & destabilized “I” is central to the work of this project. Many poems in this Div III serve as elegies & the project as a whole is an elegy for a time, space, & people no longer present. Every speaker, room, & totem in this series is dealing with its own kind of loss.

The essay accompaniment is a chance to explore & expand upon many of the themes & threads present in the manuscript of poems. It will also serve as a space to engage with texts by authors I read last semester whose works were important in the shaping of this project (ex: Helene Cixous, Gaston Bachelard, Henri Bergson, Peter Turchi, etc.). This essay will not serve as a close or critical reading of any particular text, but will allow me to collect the pieces, mapping my Division III process & intentions behind my poems.

Lastly, I will include some collage work (~12 pieces) throughout the manuscript. These simple pieces, created from an archive of family photographs, are meant to mirror the fragmentation & collision of time found within the collection of poems, simulating how the mind behaves when remembering. By calling attention to a story in pieces, these collages make the viewer aware of a withholding of both image & narrative, evoking feelings of both loss & intimacy. Throughout, hybrid-bodies are created, asking the viewer to reassess what makes a body/how a body is mapped.

Some guiding questions I have asked myself & my work throughout this project:

What makes something true? How can many things be true at once? Is memory truth or fiction? How does time alter memory? How do we practice memory? What do we hold for each other? In what ways is a poem a house (or a room)? How is space working? How is structure informing narrative? What are these poems maps of? What is hidden here? What is alive (& dead) here? How do we carry our dead? How is grief working here? What is the relationship between grief/loss & appetite/desire? What is the body of the house?