Litterbug
Abstract
Historically, particularly in the American South, the societal and medical attitudes towards the mentally ill compounded the regional sense of shame towards the abnormal. The silence this shame inspires in those who may benefit from seeking help with their mental health often solidifies societal gaps such as those in class, race, and gender. The poems within this thesis explore how such attitudes shaped the speaker’s family, plagued by poverty, drug abuse, and isolation both within and outside of the home. The speaker—white and Southern; queer, and mentally ill—must learn to navigate memory loss begotten by her lived trauma, as well as her unhealthy single-parent household and her other relatives’ tumultuous lives, each character affected by consequences wrought by a lack of resources. The speaker strives, or must strive, to develop her own sense of self and thereby a reason to break the cycle. The language tries different compositions and arrangements of lines, uses of punctuation, points of view, and registers of language to complement these explorations. Litterbug acts as a largely autobiographical, living ars poetica—the biome inside which a literarily underrepresented speaker tries to answer the classic writerly questions of So what? and Why bother? as well as the quintessential human question of Who am I, and why am I here? Other themes which appear are the use of and engagement in horror as catharsis; ecopolitics and the treatment of nature; working class rights, experiences, and solidarity; and the impact(s) of organized religion, particularly Christianity.
