Chicana Poetry: One New Voice and Where It Stands
Author:
Ashley OrozcoMentor:
Brian Rasmussen, Department of English , California Lutheran UniversityTitle: Chicana Poetry: One New Voice and Where It Stands Auhor: Ashley R Orozco, California Lutheran University Mentor: Dr. Bryan Rasmussen, California Lutheran University Throughout the various waves of feminism, poetry has been a way of capturing the history and voices of generations of women to which my own collection of poems will contribute. My project is a collection of 5 personal poems that relate to the topic of women and family tradition, specifically in the realm of Mexican American women, or Chicana. Chicana poetry shares common themes of sexuality and gender identification that are passed down through tradition to each new generation of women writers. My poems experiment with three different narrative perspectives, or “focalizers” in narratologist William Neelles’s terms, to illustrate how focalization in poetry can be used to exemplify the Chicana poet’s experience of sexuality, identity, and tradition. Each poem “focalizes” women of different ages dealing with identity issues relevant to their age. My objective is to create various story windows, while at the same time holding together a common thread of generational wisdom. My poetry demonstrates the speaker’s perspective on tradition while offering the reader the experience of that tradition through poetic perspective. I will present a selection of my poems and offer a brief analysis in order to explore how they relate to one another, how focalization affects interpretation, and how my experiments in narrative poetry relate to other Chicana Feminist poets such as Gloria Anzaldúa.