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Imagenus
Ethan Cohen
Defense Date: November 5th, 2019
Advisor: Dr. Julie Carr—English Department Honors Council Representative: Professor Noah Gordon—English Department Out-of-Department Reader: Professor Joel Swanson—ATLAS
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Cohen 2
Imagenus
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Cohen 3
In two dimensions there are three: a sprig in some white little ruts of light. See how you can taste this.
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Cohen 4
I learn its color: a lilt of gray smeared on the window.
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Cohen 5
I will taste my mouth. I will sail out to say you. Okay hold on
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Cohen 6
I put things where you are, and remember to file the crow under ‘not yet’, we uninvent.
It flies away.
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Cohen 7
Enter the creek with will and honey agate, whom
I conjure.
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Cohen 8
We strong a stone toward the babel and look,
I only know a hand full of words.
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Cohen 9
I know knoll. There is one downstream and when it is wash-hungry we splay like dogs.
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Cohen 10
I know notion. Is it that we are one? or broke or are we will and honey agate
afloat.
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Cohen 11
Collection. in many senses we are a dead one. The first thing I ever knew to be true. *
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Cohen 12
Burial Committee
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Cohen 13
Let us unspool
this carpet in accidents. There is clarity in accidents.
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Cohen 14
I hear a chair before ever seeing one as the bones of a thicket, the length of one minute in wood.
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Cohen 15
I sit in the discovery of living rooms. Actually, I am the first to pull a chair out of the creek and ready it for funeral.
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Cohen 16
There is so much missing that when I see snow, I wave. Some days you leave without you. So inside I crush and take up drawing at all.
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Cohen 17
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Cohen 18
Turning toward a mirror piece I weave the image. Is it leaking? There is clarity in puddles.
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Cohen 19
A pool pools around us. You drink and wash in a house which is not your own. There must be a name for this.
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Cohen 20
We window at the light and I hum a while. My heart starts to vacuum.
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Cohen 21
I burst at it. The storm on the porch near a chair in the grass, which is actual.
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Cohen 22
I say to the glass, I say to the storm, I wonder where you are anymore. There you are.
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Cohen 23
Bereft is the foundness of a little quarry, a place we sit to winter, hold a thicket close like mother’s knuckles.
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Cohen 24
In the piles of agate and seed, I think you reach out your hand to find a tree already growing at some little pieces of the sun. *
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Cohen 25
Conjurer
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Cohen 26
To describe stone as metal, is missing heat. This I can feel. See how heavy my tongue is?
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Cohen 27
A space between cliffs and water is called emptiness or something.
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Cohen 28
You are odd now, and I have cried easily to the sound of milk bottles on the porch in a storm.
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Cohen 29
I am told this is just the math of honey, a way to fountain the dryness.
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Cohen 30
I dig up a key over by the water and open my body for filling with real rocks— this is muscle logic? or something
invisible
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Cohen 31
When I discover afternoons I tell every car who will listen to watch me disappear the sun
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Cohen 32
and wait for the day to bury. We all start kissing just a little.
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Cohen 33
Enter a birthed concept of up. I take myself to the log and plant a finger there. I return to find the whole hand.
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Cohen 34
The sun is hot. My hair is hot. October is hot but in a slanty way.
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Cohen 35
I think this is how the crow flies: unfettered, a black stain piles the sky.
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Cohen 36
I compress and stage some burial for a bone I found. It is a dark cold fraction. The moon pining for breeze drinks milk at a found table.
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Cohen 37
These boiled years and late nights pack muscle onto skeletons, the nearness of a new picture, I move in to a warm form. The hand is sprouting a long arm.
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Cohen 38
I splay like dogs in rain I splay like steam from pockets I dig in for the ends of town hauling stone until I sleep it all
knowing
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Cohen 39
somewhere finds me all hung up, hands in my pocket scratching initials into fabric until I am. *
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Cohen 40
The Grid and its Shadow
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Cohen 41
I have been tilling the afternoons for a brain. I am measured now. I know how I am.
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Cohen 42
There is more then there is light then there is more light. My calendar exploded the year all over.
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Cohen 43
In honor of some woods, I make a return to babble. The tongue is a bottle of lead. A crow laughs at me.
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Cohen 44
I cannot walk and also see myself: This is the root I tumble over always, how to speak about my own pink tongue.
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Cohen 45
Things have cooled and you are again pacing behind blue, blue eyes. I am sorry for the interruption and the storms and all the uninvented chairs forested in the house.
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Cohen 46
The truth is that there is a light patch and a dark patch and a fence-post and its shadow. and I am trying to fit them all into a single world.
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Cohen 47
So I smear honey on a stone and place it in a stump, the sweetness of a wooden foundry is the scent of it’s image. How many of these deposits have I made?
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Cohen 48
I grow a body a leg, a mess of teeth. I loud onto green surfaces, still life.
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Cohen 49
Knowing how a wet mouth in the creek looks, I check it. Pull a stone out. Cast one for someone. Dip myself slow like a buoy in the milk of things. *
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Cohen 50
Bibliography
Celan, Paul. Poems of Paul Celan. Translated by Michael Hamburger, Persea Books, 1972.
This collection contains both English and the original German versions of Celan's
important works spanning from 1952 through 1976. Celan's preoccupation with the body,
the self and its relationship to others provided a thematic example from which I worked.
Creeley, Robert. Windows. New Directions Publishing, 1987.
Creeley's short form poems modeled impactful, concise poetics.
Foust, Graham W. Necessary Stranger. Flood Editions, 2007.
One of the most formative books of poetry for me, Foust's language and wordplay model
how poetry can at once be funny, strange and crushing all in a two line stanza.
Howe, Susan. The Quarry. New Directions Publishing, 2015.
A book of previously uncollected essays, The Quarry explores art, history and loss in New
England. Howe's work is heavily historical, and as a result, utilizes image and found text to
supplement Howe's own language, which is why this collection was influential in working
with multiple mediums.
Howe, Susan, and James Welling. That this. New Directions Publishing, 2010.
Howe's expertise in repurposing found text for poetic and visual ends was valuable to draw
from in manipulating my own images.
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Cohen 51
Jogging House. From, Seil Records, 2017.
An atmospheric modular synth record which aesthetically influenced the work. Also served
as a model for the dynamics, textures and temperatures that I aimed to channel.
Krauss, Rosalind. "Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America." The MIT Press, vol. 3, Oct. 1977,
pp. 68-81, doi:10.2307/778437.
Krauss recaps Lacan’s mirror-stage, and discusses signs and referents as they relate to art,
and specifically, photography. This article was important because it speaks theoretically
about one of the key relationships I explore: the relations between different modes of
referral.
Nguyen, Hoa. Red Juice: Poems 1998-2008. Wave Books, 2014.
Nguyen's work provides an example of functional space, and absurd image combinations
which are atmosphere creating. Her total originality and creativity amount to work which is
at once inspiring and frustrating to emulate.
Rankine, Claudia. Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric. Graywolf Press, 2017.
Rankine's book is a mediation on American depression, medication and post-911 anxiety.
This book influenced the placement of images and design of my pages.
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Cohen 52
Steensen, Sasha. Gatherest. Ahsata Press, 2017.
Steensen's work gives a formal example of how space functions in a longer piece. Gatherest
features three long poems, all distinct in form, but working toward the thematic and
aesthetic atmospheric unity toward which I also write.
Swenson, Cole. Noon. Sun & Moon Press, 1997.
Swenson writes about the process by which we develop a relationship with our body. The
object based voice influenced my own.
Wilkinson, Joshua M. Selenography. Sidebrow Books, 2010.
Wilkinson writes poems congruent with polaroids by Tim Rutili, and creates a relationship
with image that is not always easily apparent, but is always present. This was useful in
observing the relationship between language and image in practice.
Wilkinson, Joshua M. Swamp Isthmus. Black Ocean Books, 2013.
Wilkinson's method of delineation and section titling served as a model for the sections in
Imagenus. Additionally, his pacing, voice and object based images construct a world akin to
visions I have for my own work.