Electricity for Beginners

Electricity for Beginners is a book-length collection of poems, many of which have been published in newspapers and journals. I have tided the collection Electricity for Beginners because the poems attempt to describe the different forms of energy that flow between families, friends, and lovers. These energies are the 'live lines' that connect us all, and my poems attempt, in their small ways, to understand the nature of this grid and how it shapes identity. use of the term 'beginners' in the tide stems from my belief that we are all, in some ways, beginners when it comes to understanding the invisible energies that help to shape our lives.The accompanying exegesis, Messing with Mr In-Between: Poetics, Praxis, and Negation in Four 'Unwritten' Poems focuses on self-reflexive poems that explore the idea of the poem. More specifically, the essay discusses four poems that are themselves tided The or variations on this theme. These poems are Louis Simpson's The Poem, Raymond Carver's The Poem I Didn't Write, Denise Levertov's The Poem and Wislawa Szymborska's Critique of an Poem. Each of these works describes a poem that could or would not be written, despite the speaker's best intentions. poems use negation generally (and the negation of the affix un- in particular) to make strong, affirmative statements about the centrality of attention in a poetic framework. While the poems initially seem to engage with the failure of authorial intention, they come to demonstrate that attention is of more significance that intention. Indeed, the poems suggest that attention should be the main aim of the poet, while intention is a negative force that distracts the poet from giving full attention to the true subject of the poem. I conclude by examining three of my own poems, Unwritten Love Poem, Diviner, and Known Unknowns, in light of my analysis of the other unwritten poems, a process which forces me to interrogate my own understanding of poetics.