Digital Commons Network^™

There’S No Space In History: Affiliation, Eros And Colonial Entanglements In North American Nuclear Poetry, 1945-Present, Marguerite Daisy Atterbury

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation investigates “affiliation” as a socio-spatial poetics and spatial ontology, a departure from the past and future to the material, landed present. The author’s experience growing up proximate to federally ordered uranium mining and nuclear weapons research on Indigenous land and at Los Alamos National Labs drives this work’s aim to render visible the economic, social, and ideological structures governing social-spatial dynamics in the North American context. This dissertation argues for a poetics of affiliation as a methodology, to move beyond theoretical and discursive questions in scholarship to negotiations of the social at scales that affect systems beyond the …

Womanist Poetics: Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, And Audre Lorde, Aya Telmissany

Theses and Dissertations

Today, the sentimentality associated with poetry is often condescendingly dubbed in a patriarchal society as “feminine poetry.” The first women poets who dared to attempt the pen were often met with attacks on their femaleness and harsh critiques of their writing which was likened to sorcery and witchcraft. Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, and Audre Lorde are three American women poets who countered these attacks and turned them inside out in favor of their own womanist poetics. They wrote about experiencing the world as women and most importantly about experiencing poetry as women. What happens to poetry when a woman appropriates …

Writing Not Writing: Transdisciplinary Poetics, Institutional Critique, Miriam L. Atkin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is an exploration of transdisciplinary creative practice as a means of institutional critique. The artists I have chosen as my primary focus—Robert Kocik, Eleni Stecopoulos, Zora Neale Hurston, Jimmie Durham, Leslie Scalapino and Lyn Hejinian—employ multiple mediums and fields of discourse to address the presumptions and exclusions that are structurally integral to the institutions that house them. They enact “architextural” interventions through their use of forms that move between the page and three dimensional space, incorporating architecture, sculpture, drawing, painting, film, performance, poetry and prose. My work aims at a renewed understanding of critique as such, and therefore—though …

Twentieth-Century Feminine Visionary Poetics : Vulnerable Visions Of Survival And Healing:, Lucyna Prostko

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

H.D. and Denise Levertov, two visionary poets of the twentieth century, represent both female poets’ awakening of political and historical consciousness and their engagement with the poetics of vulnerability and survival. H.D. and Levertov offer lyrical visions that dismantle the binaries of real and unreal, earthly and transcendent, and individual and communal. The subject of this project is visionary imagination and its various reverberations, limitations, and potentialities. What is at stake in feminine visionary twentieth-century poetics is the creation of imaginative worlds, the space of possibility, and the shaping of a lyrical form that encompasses the voices of survival, vulnerability, …

Topics Of The Sky: Ashbery's Involving Search For The Poem, Tom M. Carlson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

An essay lived by John Ashbery's Three Poems with special attention to the possibility of cosmic relevance. This paper attempts to imagine priorities and needs proper to celestial bodies. Three Poems is the consciousness that gives possibility to the text, while Blanchot, Nietzsche, and other thinkers ground its exploration in philosophical analysis.

Dickinson At Thirty, Philip Pardi

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

When we say there are “no Mozarts in literature,” we point to an enticing fact: writers become. Pick any text you love or revere, and there was a moment earlier in the author’s life when it could not have been written. The writers we remember develop over time; they change and are changed. Their careers divide, if not always easily, into a before (often thought of as a kind of apprenticeship) and an after (a work or body of work that has a significant claim on our attention). Personal relationships, lived experiences, social and political contexts, readers real and imagined, …

To See Again: Vision And Revelation In American Poetics, Emily C. Raabe

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

With this project, I am arguing for a particularly American visual poetics that dwells in the state of suspension implied by attention, quivering between wonder and contemplation, immobility and unfixity as it seeks to reveal, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty writes in his 1945 The Phenomenology of Perception, the world which is “always ‘already there’ before reflection begins — as an inalienable presence.”^[1] Grounded in visual theory, the project pairs poets and artists, searching not for similitude, but rather examining resemblance, difference, and most important, relation. Susan Howe, one of my guides for this project, writes that, “immense perspectives …

Descent: American Individualism, American Blackness And The Trouble With Invention, Simone White

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Descent is metacritical, ranging across disciplines to take up – as flash points or instances – failed attempts to revolutionize knowledge, considering these as descents, or movements into the deep, that remain stiff or un-poetic in their attitudes toward the American truisms “individualism,” “blackness” and “invention.” Beginning with William Carlos Williams’ formulation of descent (as a practice necessary for establishing national literary identity) in In the American Grain, the project resolves around the question, How can the critic make peace with her desire to dominate the object of critique by proposing its perpetual sameness in relation to the critic? …

A Poetic Poioumenon: Coterie And Ekphrasis In David Lehman's "The Breeders' Cup", Anna Beth Rowe

Master's Theses

David Lehman’s poem “The Breeders’ Cup” uses cross-generational coterie and ekphrasis to create a poetic poioumenon. When read in terms of art criticism, Lehman’s “The Breeders’ Cup” models creative processes from the past and calls for a rehabilitative ethic in postmodern poetics. Lehman follows the ekphrastic form, which associates a poem with a work of visual art, from his New York School predecessor Frank O’Hara. “The Breeders’ Cup” addresses Édouard Manet’s 1865 painting Olympia through ekphrasis, and the painting of a prostitute becomes a patron saint of parody for postmodern poetics. The poem introduces lust as a metaphor for creative …

"For The Voices": The Letters Of John Wieners, Michael Seth Stewart

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

American poet John Wieners is thoroughly disenfranchised from the modern poetic establishments because he is, to those institutions, practically illegible. He was a queer self-styled poete maudit in the fifties; a protege of political-historical poet Charles Olson who wrote audaciously personal verse; a lyric poet who eschewed the egoism of the confessional mode in order to pursue the Olsonian project of Projective (outward-looking) poetics; a Boston poet who was institutionalized at state hospitals. Wieners lived on the "other side" of Beacon Hill, not the Brahmin south slope, but the north side with its working-class apartments and underground gay bars. Though …

Critique Is Not Enough : The Empirical Imperatives Of Innovative American Poetry, Christopher Rizzo

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Critique is Not Enough: The Empirical Imperatives of Innovative American Poetryproposes that innovative modern and early contemporary American poetries redefine the relation of knowledge, consciousness, and poetic performance to lived experience. This study demonstrates how the radically different poetic projects of Walt Whitman, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and Charles Olson not only equally insist upon empirically investigative poetics, but also endeavor, each to each, to individualize their poetic methodologies, which thus challenges the generalized Enlightenment myth of rationality. In that each of these writers undertakes to redefine the relation of knowledge, consciousness, and poetic performance to lived experience, they also …

There Are Moments That Hang Suspended, Mark B. Lennon

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This project is the culmination of ten years of work in poetry. It was begun in imitation of those who impressed, not only with their fine words and dexterity with language, but also with their clear conviction in their subject material. Reflected in the works of Allen Ginsberg, Walt Whitman, and Adrienne Rich, among others, was evidence of a life lived, in Thoreau's term, deliberately. The writing of poetry seemed to be not simply a means of expression, but a goad to live a life worth examining, and to keep doing so; a progress report for a radical mind.

Politics …

Trans-Relational Poetics And Outsider American Modernist And Postmodernist Poetry, Anna Elena Eyre

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This dissertation is concerned with how language mediates the relationship between self and other, and in particular, mythopoetic language. The political potential of myth has long been condemned, so much so that the word "myth" is now synonymous with "false." I argue that this is a result of what I term as heroic mythopoesis wherein the relationship between self and other is predicated on a violent separation that reinforces conceptions of identity. In contrast, in what I term as trans-relational mythopoesis this relationship is contingent on an embodied exposure between self and other that reciprocally translates and transforms conceptions of …

"Last Scientists Of The Whole" : The Poetics And Politics Of Deep Image, Peter Conrad Monaco

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Abstract: "Last Scientists of the Whole": The Poetics and Politics of Deep Image

Poetry And The Multiple Drafts Model: The Functional Similarity Of Cole Swensen's Verse And Human Consciousness, Connor Ryan Kreimeyer Fisher

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This project compares the operational methods of three of Cole Swensen's books of poetry (Such Rich Hour, Try, and Goest) with ways in which the human mind and consciousness function. I use Daniel Dennett's Multiple Drafts Model of consciousness, as described in Consciousness Explained, alongside concepts presented in several other philosophical works (from both analytic and continental traditions), to demonstrate that significant similarities exist between the operations of poetry and consciousness in general, and that these operational similarities are especially noticeable in Swensen's work. This thesis examines several operational modes that are present within the …

Delinquencies, Bryan Thomas Rice

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Delinquencies brings together forty-eight poems that reflect some of the aesthetic, philosophical and cultural interests I've attended over the last five years or so--namely, ideas related to failure and abhorrent behavior.

Goddesses And Doormats, Elizabeth Kicak

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The following is a collection of original poetry written over a span of two years while attending the University of South Florida. The poetry is divided into three numbered sections, marking the major thematic divisions. Preceding the poetry is a critical introduction to the work which outlines the author's developing thematic ideology.

The Rapid Unexpected, Daniel Pantano

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

These lyric poems were written between August 2003 and June 2005 and bear witness to the human condition in all its facets, from birth and the first taste of lemon ice to exile and suicide. Within a landscape that encompasses many locales, the poems included here attempt to portray the particular to denote the universal and are always confronted by the ineffable connection between the two.