Abstract

Double / Sight is a poetic interrogation of eyesight: the gaze as surveillance, as violence, as desire, and as misinterpretation. My project has two interwoven components: the idea of the eye as a malfunctioning or mystical organ, and the eye as (mis)interpretive and surveillance device. These primary themes embed lyric, form, shape, epistolary, and prose poems with my 21st century female narrator, Anna, as she examines her double sight as an intersection with presentday gender politics, technological surveillance, and misinformation. In her isolation, Anna creates a sixteenth-century ancestor, Suzannah, who she may or may not be related to. Using court trial texts and online research, Anna imagines she is reaching Suzannah with story, advice, and warnings, in a Deleuzian time fold. Time barriers collapse through found parallels between past and present, as Anna’s desire to save Suzannah is in tension with her knowledge of female outcomes during the witch trials. Her longing for this connection includes poems that “see” their circumstances as two versions of the same thing, a doubling similar to the speaker’s double vision, and to the double face of fact. This project is influenced by the revisionist poetics of Anne Carson’s many texts and Karen Solie’s Caiplie Caves as they seek to find new voices for staid narratives. As well, the work is in conversation with research of the North American witch hunts and with the original black-and-white film footage of The Wizard Of Oz for its depiction of gender, witches, and abuse of power.