Poem of the Week | December 09, 2013
Brianna Noll: "The Collective Unconscious"
This week we offer a new poem by Brianna Noll. Noll is a PhD candidate in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her poetry has appeared, or is forthcoming, in the Kenyon Review Online, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Poet Lore, Ninth Letter, Blackbird, and elsewhere.
Author’s note:
This poem stems from my interest in the commons, those things accessible to, or shared by, all the members of a society. Commons tends to refer to things like natural resources—water, soil, air—but in a more abstract sense, it also refers to language. Here, I consider the origins of shared language alongside the fear that our commonalities are growing fewer. Perhaps it’s not surprising, considering this line of thinking, that I’m also interested in choral poetry and the use of a collective, public (as opposed to private) speaker. I’ve been writing first person-plural poems for a while, but this is the first poem I’ve written that engages directly with notions of collectivity.
The Collective Unconscious
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