Digital Commons Network^™

A Frayed Edge: A Qualitative And Poetic Inquiry Analysis Of White Antiracist Protest In 2020, Emily Katt

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This multiphasic study explored the narratives of five first-time Black Lives Matter protesters demonstrating during the historic confluence of conflicts in 2020 America. After positioning the liminal 2020 circumstances within an antiracist research lens, the author analyzed, first through grounded theory and then secondarily through poetic inquiry, how these five participants described their protest experiences. The grounded theory phase yielded an overarching theory that first-time protestors experienced a dual process of unsuturing and of calling-out, with three subthemes categorized within each of these two processes. The author moved into analysis with the poetic inquiry phase, crafting poems guided by six …

Cry Wolf, Olivia Claire Acosta

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Cry Wolf is a confessional poetry collection told in three sections about at-work stalking. This collection also alludes to the Brothers Grimm fairytale, The Little Red Riding Hood. The sections of Cry Wolf include “The Wolf,” which introduces the speaker’s discovery of work-related stalking. The second section, entitled “The Fur,” is where the speaker empowers themselves to file a Title IX report about this dilemma, and Red cloaks herself in the wolf’s skin. The final portion of the collection, entitled “Red’s Home,” gives the audience a view of the speaker's self-love as they maintain it through trauma. This section also …

And Drop, Lydia Balestra

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The following manuscript is a thesis in poetry and poetics. The goal of the thesis was to develop a sense of my own poetics which could be articulated in a critical introduction and to put these poetics into practice by using them to create a collection of poetry. Through my exploration of past poets’s poetics for the critical introduction I was able to gain an understanding of several ways to approach writing poetry and develop my own methods based on the poetics from others that resonated with me. My critical introduction emulates Rosmarie Waldrop’s essay “Thinking of Follows” through the …

Mother/God, Sarah Johnson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My collection, Mother/God, attempts to look at my own growing up and how it has affected my beliefs and self in the presence, while also looking at the choices my mother made in raising me. The central thread throughout the collection is my relationship with my mother and the love that's endured those hardships. It explores my mother's past up until the hardest parts of motherhood in section one, The Mother. Then, section two titled The Daughter focuses on my own rebellion of how I was raised and an exploration of existentialism that was, in a lot of ways, …

Blend It Like Beckett: Samuel Beckett And Experimental Contemporary Creative Writing, Sam Nicole Campbell

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Samuel Beckett penned novels, short stories, poetry, stage plays, radio plays, and scripts—and he did each in a way that blended genre, challenged the norms of creative writing, and surprised audiences around the globe. His experimental approach to creative writing included the use of absurdism, genre-hybridization, and ergodicism, which led to Beckett fundamentally changing the approach to creative writing. His aesthetics have trickled down through the years and can be seen in contemporary works, including Aimee Bender’s short story collection The Girl in the Flammable Skirt and Mark Z. Danielewski’s novel House of Leaves[1]. By examining these works …

Spontaneous Minds And Electric Romanticism: Kerouac, Ginsberg, Dylan, Joplin, Sasha Tamar Strelitz

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation postulates a sub-category of Romanticism: electric Romanticism. As opposed to its “acoustic” forebear, electric Romanticism exists in an electric age, beginning after Henry David Thoreau’s rumination on the telegraph wire as an electric rendering of the æolian harp image. Romantic poets used the æolian harp to analogize the act of writing activities set into motion by spontaneous thoughts, a central attribute of the Romantic literary movement. The modernized electric version of the æolian harp—the telegraph wire—signals that electric Romanticism branches off from its source and evolves along with technology to engage more synchronously with the spontaneous.

Electric Romantics …

This To Which We've Come., Holly Tabor

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This collection of works explores the linkages between moments, the connective thread that accumulates over time to create for each of us a unique present. The title, “This to Which We’ve Come,” attempts to convey that each moment is a point of arrival colored by the smallest of temporal fibers, our most interior histories that stretch and bend and fold back onto themselves when the present forces us into action, or inaction. Through these characters and their stories, I attempt to examine that moment of arrival. A secondary thread explored in this collection is the idea that humans are still …

I Have Questions, Lorena Matejowsky

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The poems in this thesis explore mid-life feminism, family, mental illness via anxiety and panic, identities of southern girlhood/womanhood, and the challenges of a social media saturated life. Mothering plays a large part in many of these poems, both embracing it and confronting gendered expectations about it. Telling the truth is explored through poems about white women's complicity in racist systems in the southern United States and how being quiet about it benefits us. Fear and the myriad ways it has manifested in my life is a common thread in this work, especially the fears that accompanied white girls growing …

There Must Be A Reason People Come Here, Brian James Foley

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The poems in this collection are meant to be read as a preparation of ground and ask to be connected to a larger thought beyond the discrete experience of the poem itself. That thought is that no artistic expression exists outside of the historical conditions in which it was made, and those conditions must be broadcast in concert with the poem.

I cite that these poems are the result of existential degradation developed during the production of subjectivity under modern, hegemonic structures of Neoliberal Capitalism. They were cultivated from "bits of sensitivity" drawn from an unexceptional past regulated by systems …

Poetically Composed, Educationally Imposed: Exploring Imagination And Poetics In Curriculum—A Memoir, Whitney J. Presnal

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Through the use of memoir, my work centers on how poetry is situated within public education curriculum. I explore the curricular context of poetry through the lenses of my lived experiences in early childhood, as a K-12 student, and as an early career classroom teacher. My dissertation draws upon a wide array of literature, honing in on the poetic perspectives of philosophers (Aristotle, 1996; Heidegger, 1947 & 1971/2013; Plato, 1955/2007), poets (Hall, 2003; Eliot, 1920 & 2009), and curriculum theorists (Leggo, 1997 & 2018; Pinar, 1994; Sameshima, 2007). The foundation of my work is drawn from my own circular experiences, …

Exploding Aliens And Other Offspring, Jonathan Patrick Grant

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The goal of Exploding Aliens and Other Offspring is to capture my specific surrealist world point of view provided by the closed-knit crazy community I grew up in alongside my love for cartoonish melodrama. The collection progresses in order of images and the evolution of such themes as the venture from childhood to adulthood, societal obligations, religion, parenting, death and the hereafter.

Choking Hazards, Tessa Hathaway

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The following manuscript is a creative writing thesis in poetry. The goal of the thesis was to expand my abilities as a poet and find a cohesion in my work. I wanted to utilize some skills gain in a fiction workshop and apply them to poetry, as well as gain influences in various fields of expertise through the other courses I’ve been taking in the English department. Essays for a poetics class, novels for an American literature class, and short stories for a fiction workshop gave me a base from which to work from and draw inspiration. Not only was …

Hearing Through Walls, Bradley Marshall

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The photographer discusses work in “Hearing Through Walls”, a Masters of Fine Arts thesis exhibit held at downtown Tipton Gallery from February 19th through March 2nd, 2018. The exhibition consists of 15 archival inkjet prints and one two-channel video piece, representing the artists three-year exploration into narrative forms in image making. Using non-traditional approaches to photographic portraiture and experimental exhibition layout, the artist forms questions around themes of domesticity, lost youth, and American masculinity. Among these themes is an investigation into photographic issues, including the cultural role that photographs play in perpetuating, miming, and disrupting the facades of everyday life. …

Nothing Buried Stays Buried, Stephanie Porven

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Nothing Buried Stays Buried is a collection of poems that embraces raw imagery, threads of magical realism, and allusions to classical mythology in an attempt to make sense of the tangible and intangible losses experienced by its speakers. Told through the voices of confessional speakers who struggle with loneliness, identity, faith, and death, the collection aims to delve into contrasting themes that have long been perpetuated by Greek and Roman mythology: passionate love and violent death, liberation and violation, the natural alongside the celestial. Poems such as "What You Left Behind," "Loneliness Braids My Hair," and "If You Die First" …

Now You See Me: A Black Feminist Autoethnographic Poetic Polemic Of Radical Reflexivity And Critical Arts-Based Inquiry, Myntha Anthym

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is an autoethnographic poetic illness narrative based on the author's year-long ordeal with unrelenting undertreated chronic pain. The project is grounded in the epistemological tradition of Black Feminist Thought and presented in alignment with the emergent methodological paradigm of critical arts-based inquiry. The purpose of the project is for the author to develop and articulate a radical reflexive praxis within the paradigm of critical arts-based inquiry while demonstrating the value of lived experience as a source of knowledge and poetry as a method of inquiry in revealing subjugated truths about the experiences of marginalized people. The dissertation lives …

Arc, Lisa Fountain

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My collection, Arc, is about the struggle to become a human being and to find one’s own identity. Also, it is about how humans fall apart and come together on a regular basis – that we must find forgiveness – we must learn to love in even the most difficult circumstances – and we must, above all, continue to grow, and challenge our personal limits. Life does not contain us –it welcomes us – and that is part of the message I seek to convey through my writing. The imagery in my writing is grounded in my memories of my …

Only The Earth Remains: Exploring The Machine In Selected Lyric Poetry Of Robinson Jeffers, Mark Hutton

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Idea in America, Leo Marx “evaluates the uses of the pastoral ideal in the interpretation of American experience” (Marx 4). While Marx explores ways that pastoralism has been impacted by factors such as industrialism, it is the purpose of this project to explore Marx’s assertion regarding the presence of the figurative and literal machine within the poetry of Robinson Jeffers.

Jeffers’ poetry is generally located within the landscapes of California. His lyric poetry has a distinct connection to the land and is driven by inhumanism, which works to shift …

The Sleepless Ouroboros, Grant Bohl

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The poems in The Sleepless Ouroboros are about the obsessions which come to define a person. These obsessions are memories, dreams, objects or ideas that cannot be separated from the whole. Poems such as "Thinking of Big Moe" and "It Begins with a Fox" grapple with the limitations of memory, while poems such as "The Python" and "Heirloom" counterpoint memory's weakness with the supposed permanence of physical artifacts. Depression and anger, the anxieties of identity and displacement, and representations of the people and animals that leave lasting impact on a life are all addressed as vital components of the completed …

Because You Are Beautiful And Dead, Yvonne Amey

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The poems in Because You Are Beautiful and Dead deal with dysfunctional people, substance abuse, loss, and death and dying. The poems also highlight the struggle of the poet/speaker finding her place in a hideous world, which, paradoxically, she really doesn't want to belong. The poems are influenced by the playful and sad imagery and subject matter of poet Matthew Dickman. These poems, like Dickman's, are assessable and quirky. Michael Earl Craig and Terrance Hayes are two other influences. Hayes' work is artistic and experimental. Michael Earl Craig's poems have a brilliance that isn't fueled in its complex or radical …

Poetry Is Dead, Jeffrey Lance

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Poetry is dead and I'm a fucking necromancer.

Reflection And Acceptance: Small Town Ghosts Represented In Poetry, Adam Junker

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis discusses the theories of ethnography and ethnographic verse and applies these two theories in an original narrative in verse. Ethnography and ethnographic verse have a complicated relationship when it comes to a poet’s authority representing a certain place. Yet authenticity is never obtainable, since perceptions of a place are always subjective. That subjectivity allows a poet creative expression, as he or she shapes his or her relationship with a place and the people within it. The poet then must rely on elements like unifying imagery, dialect, surrealism, and empathetic insights. With these elements, a poet can identify with …

To Write A Life : Three Women In History., Justy Louise Engle

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This creative and critical hybrid dissertation explores the spiritual connections between three women in distinctly different time periods: contemporary America, nineteenth century America and early fifteenth century France. The overall dissertation explores the autogenealogobiography, what the author defines as the self-writings of women composed within a specific time period in relation to the current moment and generations of ancestral women. The objective of the creative texts is to record the spiritual journeys of life for the women who will come after for the purpose of encouraging careful observation of history so that women will be able to note and internalize …

New Game+, Bobby Rich

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This is a creative thesis composed of two components: 1) a critical introduction that contextualizes and supports the project of the second component, 2) a book manuscript of poetry. The project explores genre concerns of poetry by developing experimental prose poems that incorporate video game themes, language, and instructional writing. The project presents the interplay of the notions of control and failure to examine the borders between simulation (games) and reality (the world outside of games). The poems are constructed around the idea of designed failure, through which, the introduction argues, their status as poetry is inherently threatened, and they …

Pearl Necklaces, Jordan Redmond

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Pearl Necklaces aims to excavate raw moments of connection and find beauty in the depravity of self and situation. Set in the Deep South, this collection of poems thrives on lusty nights, hard love, and the twinge of memory. The voices within range from youthful to jaded as they speak across pages, flowing into one another to create a pain-body which ultimately seeks closure in relationships with objects, family, drugs, lovers, body parts, heroes, and setting. Tuned to the lyrical voices of poets Kim Addonizio, Lynn Emanuel, and Dorianne Laux, poems such as "Learning Shapes," "Things that Make Me Feel …

A Poetic Response To Cancer: Scars, Mortality, And The Doctor-Patient Relationship, Jodi Andrews

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis I enter the medical poetry conversation, specifically focusing on scars, mortality and the doctor-patient relationship. I argue that the body standards society sets for women complicate how women wear scars; people read scars as imperfections on the female form. Because scars are visible markers on the body, they speak for themselves; I, therefore, encourage poets to write their own truth on their scars, to (re)write their meaning. In the mortality chapter, I argue that the isolation of death and burial and the dominant belief in the finality of death increases modern fear of death. This makes patients …

Romantic Ideals In Contemporary Folk Music, Brett Schwartz

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines contemporary folk music from no earlier than 2006, specifically music of the bands The Decemberists, Fleet Foxes, and Bon Iver. Providing a close reading of select songs, I prove that modern music is seeing a revival in the Romantic Era and Transcendentalist ideals and philosophy. The works and philosophy of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), William Wordsworth (1770-1850), John Keats (1795-1821), as well as Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), among others and their critics are all considered for points of comparison to the modern lyrics. The reason for this revival is considered in the conclusion …

Hard Luck Baby, Tanya Lipscomb

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Hard Luck Baby is a collection that elucidates the life of a southern, black mother as she grapples with her culture, family, love and the complex reality of black life in America. Hannah, is a woman who was born in the bubbling 40s, raised in the racial 60s and raptured in the drug-infested 80s. It is through these decades that the rough edges of America are exposed. She discusses her life experiences in a manner that allows readers to touch, as much as empathy will allow, the feelings that contour the deepest areas of her barrel. She shares her first …

Other: Poems, Catherine Pritchard Childress

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This creative thesis is a collection of original poems entitled Other. The poems in Other reflect my study of the aesthetics of poetry as well as that of how women are represented as poets and as the subject of poems. Some of these poems are the product of my particular interest in the use of persona. Most reflect my desire to achieve self-reflection, to write from my experiences and perception, while still maintaining the universality that is an essential element of successful poems.

The critical introduction situates my poems within the framework of the poetic mode Personal Classicism—poetry that …

Editorial Collaboration And Control: Laura Riding And The Seizen Press Years, Christina Cain Whitney

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

With the founding of Seizin Press in 1927, Laura Riding began a new epoch in her career as poet and literary theorist. Along with her partner, Robert Graves, Riding worked among and with important literary tastemakers of the Modernist era, such as Gertrude Stein, Len Lye and James Reeves. Riding's demanding and intense editorial and collaborative style resulted in some unique and fascinating works, such as the bizarrely beautiful Life of the Dead and the egomaniacal The World and Ourselves. Beyond close literary examination of the above works, this study looks at the pressures both within the Seizin Press …

Eruv, Eryn Green

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Eruv is a collection of poems exploring the interstices between the Judaic concept of Eruvin and the poetic traditions of dictation, field and personist poetics. The poems that represent the body of this work are explorations of the ways in which poetry empties and fills a space, and what might be implied for our shared conceptions of ‘Home’ and ‘Self’ by these tendencies.