Bon Amoeba

Abstract

Bon Amoeba is a single lyric poem comprised of unnumbered segments. It is enunciated in the first and second person by female speaker to her best friend. The setting of the poem is the proximate future, when the current environmental deterioration has advanced significantly. Crop failure has lead to widespread famine. The poem's speaker and addressee are neighbors as well as lifelong friends, and are attempting agriculture for the first time. After several failed tries, they take off on a trip to visit a seed bank where they hope to find more hardy breeds of seeds. In this creative thesis, I wanted to explore the lyric "you" and work how a poem might "[evoke] overtones of love without destroying love's life-giving vulgarity, and sustaining the poet's feelings towards the poem while preventing love from distracting him into feeling about the person" (O'Hara). Or, I wanted to better understand how to write poetry that focuses on language (the universal) without completely forsaking my own feelings. I chose to write about a female-to-female friendship because with regards to literature, I'm interested in valuing relationships alternative to romance. The poem therefore is an attempt to address current global and personal concerns of mine, as well as an exercise in style and craft.