Locating desire in the intertextual and footnote prose poems of Conchitina Cruz from her collection Dark hours

• Main Author: Tee, Linnzi Tyna A.
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2007
• Subjects: Prose poems; Poetry > Criticism; interpretation; etc; Poems > Collections; Intertextuality
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etd_honors/273
• Institution: De La Salle University

This paper studies seven prose poems from Conchitina Cruz's collection Dark Hours. Using Catherine Belsey's synthesis of the articulation of the theory of desire by Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida from her book Desire : Love Stories in Western Culture, the study shows how the proposed reading paradigm helps in understanding Cruz's prose poems through the identification of the features which aid in the blurring of the two genres. Applying the theory of desire, the study reads the prose poems with careful respect to their form, not privileging their content over it, examines their different S/subject positions, and determines whether they are postmodern texts which foreground the implications of difference. The features identified from the prose poems namely the use of disjointed scenes, double narratives, materiality of sounds, meta-narratives, the pronoun you, intertextuality and footnotes lend the prose poems open-endedness, self-reflexive tendencies and writerly roles for the reader. In this manner, the texts subvert the boundaries of genre of prose and poetry and question the role of the reader in the construction of meaning in the texts.