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Trickling, Marissa Medley

Honors Projects

A collection of poetry and other writings that explore family relationships with a focus on mental illness.

The Waiting House, Erika Marie Mueller

Theses and Dissertations

The poems in this collection, The Waiting House, use techniques associated with an evolving elegiac tradition in their portrayal of anticipatory grief born of terminal illness and impending loss. Like the melancholic mourning of modern elegies described by Jahan Ramazani, my poems often resist consolation even as they borrow from elegiac conventions like poetic substitution and repetition. Additionally, they utilize strategies and patterns of literary anger outlined by Alicia Suskin Ostriker as common in postwar American women’s poetry, to express anger that is also anticipatory grief. Finally, this collection uses illness metaphors to question the well being of a larger …

Eastern Flames In The Mind On Fire: A Study Of Eastern And Qur’Anic Influences On Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mohammed Qays Khaleel Alqaisi

MSU Graduate Theses

Ralph Waldo Emerson's interest in the east is evident throughout his essays, poems and lectures. He shows his fascination with the eastern cultures, religions and poetry when he quotes from eastern texts to strengthen his ideas, such as the notion of the Over-Soul, illumination, knowledge and nature. He regards the east as an ignored territory of knowledge that contains invaluable wisdom waiting to be explored by western thinkers. As the world witnesses an increasing gap between the east and the west, Emerson represents the universal way of thinking, as he believes in seeking knowledge in every part of the world …

Understanding Poetry: Integrating Creative Movement And Dance To Enhance The Learning Process For Middle And High School Students, Toni C. Duncan

Capstones & Scholarly Projects

The focus of this thesis project is the integration of creative movement and dance to enhance the learning process for students studying poetry. This project was a descriptive pilot project designed to evaluate a piece of dance curriculum. The researcher posed the following three essential questions: How can creative movement and dance in middle and high school students’ classes be used to enhance their understanding of poetry in terms of its structure? How will creative movement and dance help middle and high school students understand the meaning of poetry? Which creative movement and dance techniques can be used to help …

Six Reflections Through Music And Poetry, Nicholas Shawn Vecchio

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Since beginning school at the University of Arkansas in 2008 I have learned many lessons both in and outside the classroom. To date, the most challenging lessons have been those that I have learned about myself. The manifestation of the person that I am today has been an adventure with many twists and turns. This piece aims to capture the essence of some of the lessons that I have learned. Each poem offers the product of that lesson.

The movement entitled “Memories” has a subdued joy in its message. The poem offers nostalgia to begin the piece with. However, it …

If This Heart Had A Mouth: A Forbidden Romance Narrated Through Mimesis: Poems, Julieta V. Corpus

Theses and Dissertations

If This Heart Had a Mouth consists of forty-two poems where love is the catalyst for a multitude of emotions, ranging from falling in love, to hopelessness, to a begrudging kind of acceptance at losing the beloved to somebody else. To create all forty-two poems, 23 written in Spanish, and 19 poems written in English, I employed the literary device called Mimesis which entails deriving an original poem from someone else's work.

To create each poem, I followed another poet’s original work, line by line. I imitated that poet’s rhythm through their use of meter. I counted the number of …

Ethnicity And Poetry: A Systems Theory Approach To Contemporary African American And Mexican American Poetry, Antonio Paniagua Guzman

Theses and Dissertations

Given the ongoing ethnic transformation of the current society of the United States, contemporary sociologists have extensively studied ethnic relations from diverse theoretical and methodological approaches. Despite the vast sociological research recently developed, the literary-based methodological approach remains partially uncultivated. This study explores motivations and patterns of minority groups’ ethnic performance in contemporary poetry by analyzing inter and intra-group similarities and differences of diverse linguistic and cultural traits. From secondary data analysis, this study examines four hundred poems authored by forty contemporary African American and Mexican American writers experientially connected to the state of Texas. Grounded in systems theory, this …

From A Long Line Of Thieves, Lucinda Zamora-Wiley

Theses and Dissertations

This is a work of original creative writing, containing works of poetry, prose poems, flash non-fiction, and personal essays. The primary subject areas include family relations after PTSD, love, interracial struggles within marriage and family, pride of place--including Texas and the United States, and poetic/artistic inspirations that influenced the author.

Past, Present, Future: How Time Affects Identity, Keith Maus

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

My project will be the creative option. I decided to use both poetry and short stories. Last semester I took creative writing and it really struck a chord with me. I find it and these tools to be an extremely valuable way to analyze oneself. Each story or poem will focus on my own self-identity and development by looking at my past, at myself today, and myself in the future.

Bright Along The Body, Ashley Michelle Roach

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Bright Along the Body is a collection of poetry that explores the nature of desire within the liminal space of marriage. The poems fuse domestic, garden, and urban wildlife imagery to explore the speaker's conflicting physical, spiritual, and emotional desires. The speaker subverts her own longings by cultivating a psychological space that is beautiful and lonely, representing transcendence that may be read as dissociation. Feminist themes of safety and independence inform the collection, which is sectioned in three parts to represent conflict, interiority, and resolution. The poems are stylistically diverse and music-rich, showing affinity for both contemporary poetry and tradition.

Protest Lyrics At Work: Labor Resistance Poetry Of Depression-Era Autoworkers, Rebecca S. Griffin

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation argues that scholarly inquiry into American poetry of the Great Depression is incomplete without a critical understanding of poems produced within the labor movement. Through archival research and methodologies drawn from American studies, gender studies, cultural studies, and labor history, this dissertation demonstrates that autoworkers from 1935-1941 developed a rich poetic discourse that championed their cause. Autoworker poets—including autoworker song lyricists—used humor and borrowed extensively from popular, religious, and “folk” cultures to craft their own poetic styles and trope sets. They wrote about a diverse range of topics from their hopes for the unionization movement, to scab conversions, …

"Daring Propaganda For The Beauty Of The Human Mind:" Critical Consciousness-Raising In The Poetry And Drama Of The Black Power Era, 1965-1976, Markeysha D. Davis

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation is a literary and intellectual history of the contributions of black American theorists, poets, and dramatists in the 1960s and 1970s towards the establishment of black critical consciousness in order to lay grounds for black people to experience a fuller existence as human beings through black-centered creations and presentations. Through the following chapters, I establish the framework and evolution of black psyche-liberation theories—spanning Du Bois’s theory of double-conscious through the contributions of black artist-theorists like Baraka, Neal, and Woodie King, Jr., followed by examinations at length of the theories of black liberation in praxis by the poets and …

Wet Data: The Ocean And Its Negative Archive, Kendra M. Sullivan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper and the poetry cycle (Wet Data) it describes are in dialogue with a wide array of social and cultural histories of the sea; the production of the sea as a social, economic, and militarized space; maritime ethnographies; as well as artistic and literary projects stemming out of what are now being termed offshore art and forensic literature. The ocean is a contested territory that plays a profound and often under-examined role in defining geopolitics and nationalism under globalism. In eco-critical and creative art contexts, the sea is often represented as a metaphor for loss, the outside, …

The Strains Of Confessional Poetry: The Burdens, Blunders, And Blights Of Self-Disclosure, Lara Rossana Rodriguez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

When a provocative style of autobiographical verse had emerged in postwar America, literary critics christened the new genre “confessional poetry.” Confessional poets of the 1960s and ’70s are often characterized by scholars of contemporary poetry as a cohort of writers who, unlike previous generations before them, dared to explore in their work the personal and inherited traumas of mental illness, family suicides, failed marriages, and crushing addictions. As a result, the body of work these writers produced is often experienced as a collection of stylized, literary self-portraits. What can these self-portraits reveal to us about the connection between confessional poetry …

"The Bellows / Of Experience": The Modernist Love Poem And Its Legacy, Stephanie Spong

English Language and Literature ETDs

The vein of experimental love poetry examined in this project takes advantage of the friction generated by charging both form and content with innovation. The troubled relationship between sex and power is knit directly into the long and dynamic history of love poetry, but there has yet to be a published monograph on the modernist love poem and its implications for literary history. This dissertation fills a major gap in scholarship and speaks to the broader social concerns addressed by public discourse on sex, sexuality, and eros. The body of modernist love poetry includes allusions to traditional love poetry—a tradition …

The Poet's Corpus: Memory And Monumentality In Wilfred Owen's "The Show", Charles Hunter Joplin

Master's Theses

Wilfred Owen is widely recognized to be the greatest English “trench poet” of the First World War. His posthumously published war poems sculpt a nightmarish vision of trench warfare, one which enables Western audiences to consider the suffering of the English soldiers and the brutality of modern warfare nearly a century after the armistice. However, critical readings of Owen’s canonized corpus, including “The Show” (1917, 1918), only focus on their hellish imagery. I will add to these readings by demonstrating that “The Show” is primarily concerned with the limitations of lyric poetry, the monumentality of poetic composition, and the difficulties …

18 Dorset Ct., Allison Catherine Campbell

Dissertations

The following poems and essays were completed by the author between October 2012 and April 2016.

Envelope Elegy, Caleb P. Nelson

All NMU Master's Theses

What would it mean to understand the essence of a discipline? What would it meant to find the center of poetry? I argue in the introduction to this thesis that poetry has no center. One cannot come to know the capital “T” truth of poetry. Our language is too unstable, our intentions too vast, and our experiences are too varied. Thus, I interrogate what this might mean for the writer and the poetic experience more generally. By doing this, I ultimately interrogate what this means for me. However, I also accept T.S. Eliot’s claim that mature poetry has the unique …

A Guayaba's Heart, Melisa Garcia

English Language and Literature ETDs

A Guayaba's Heart is a poetry collection that is utilizes memory as a binding for the themes of language, family, and Central American landscapes, The poetry collection takes a close look at these themes through a generational lens and gives space to the unveiling of family secrets, the imaginary homeland, and interweaving binaries of language.

Del Entusiasmo Al Desencanto: Ironía Y Modernidad En La Obra De Tres Poetas Tzántzicos, Juan Carlos González Granja

Spanish and Portuguese ETDs

In this dissertation I study the poetry of the Tzántzicos, an Ecuadorian cultural movement that in the 1960s intended to subvert the social order and assert the role of literature in the destabilization of the capitalist society. I analyze the poetry of Ulises Estrella, Raúl Arias, and Humberto Vinueza as a biography of a generation of leftist intellectuals engaged with the Revolution, and as a meaningful moment in the history of Ecuadorian modernity. I identify two moments in the continuum of this poetry across the decades from the 1960s to the present: enthusiasm and disenchantment. The moment of enthusiasm registers …

The Bronx Cocked Back And Smoking Multifarious Prose Performance, Alex Avila

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

The Bronx Cocked Back And Smoking is a collection of multifarious prose performances recounting the historical, personal, social, political and cultural constructs of a city birthed by violence. This body of work is accompanied by video, audio, photography, and theatre performance texts. St. Mary’s Housing project, in the Bronx, is the foundation where most of this literary work takes place. The modern day Griot (storyteller) is a Poet, guiding his audience through the social inequalities and disparities that plague St. Mary’s community. The Poet shares personal traumatic insights while simultaneously utilizing writing as a form of survival to the conditions …

A Meditation On I, We, And Consciousness In "Only We Can Pull", Allyson Elizabeth Jeffredo

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

In a society focused on the individual, how is community formed? As individuals predisposed to the built-in barrier of our body, our skin, how do we mediate between the self and the external? During this mediation on the barriers between our body, ourselves, and the outside world, how is consciousness simultaneously conflicted and built upon? What does it mean to be alive, to be a complex individual surrounded by a multitude of complex individuals? Can we, as a society, learn to focus balance the community and the individual? ONLY WE CAN PULL attempts to answer these questions through a series …

Palestinian Rights: A Literary Multiple-Genre Approach, Marwa Mahmoud

Theses and Dissertations

The year 1948 marked a turning point in the Palestinian history and a shift in the process of art production. Nakba constituted drastic changes on the political, social and demographic contexts of the Palestinians. That was necessarily followed by a similar alteration in the forms of expression adopted to articulate the new status quo of the land and its people. The artistry of the Palestinians emerged as surmounting the imposed limitations of Israeli occupation and opened up new spaces for freedom of expression denied to Palestinians. The fragmented Palestinians functioned creatively as they articulated their diverse experiences of displacement and …

A Beautiful Apocalypse: A Collection Of Poems, Emily M. Kesler

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

My project consists of three poems on the subject of life in the year 2050. These poems explore and speculate the effects that air pollution, water contamination, deforestation, the government, and the economy will have on humans living in 2050.

The American Nightmare: Land Of The Incarcerated, Jamara Bernard

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

A collection of poems focusing on the mass incarceration of African-American men and how the prison industrial complex is designed to legally exploit prisoners specifically for profits. Along with a reflective essay about the history of legal discrimination and the creative process by which the poems were created. Then how it ties in with the capstone course theme of race, gender, class, feminist theory, and social justice.

Linework, David Felton

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

This collection of poems engages the experience of the workplace in the changing telecommunications field.

Python Crown Girl, Jade Hurter

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Oh Sinnerman, Where You Gonna Run To?, Semein Washington

Theses & Honors Papers

Semein Washington. OH SINNERMAN, WHERE YOU GONNA RUN TO? (Under the direction of Mary Carroll Hackett, MFA) Department of English and Modern Language, April 2016.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine the growth of personal identity via poetry. “Oh Sinnerman,” is a run of thirty-eight poems in which the speaker learns survival through experience, and the underpinning ideas, whether traditional or modern, for which life is preserved. In theme, the poems tend to separate his experience into personal and social humanity. In poems such as “No Good Being,” “Sunday Tennis” and “How One Loves,” personal humanity shows through …

Teacher Reflective Practice As A Response To Technical Rationalism, Xylecia Fynn-Aikins

Educational Policy Studies Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to examine how an African American teacher in an urban school used reflection to inform her pedagogical practice for her second grade, African American students. In this research, reflection functioned as a response to technical rationalism, a theoretical perspective that relies solely on scientific processes, calculability, and empiricism to determine norms and prescriptions for practice. Practice that emerges solely from technical rationalism often disregards the needs of urban, African American students. As a reflective pedagogical practice has long been theorized as a method to combat injustice through conscious rationalization, in this autoethnographic study, the …

New Rust, Lauren Walter

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

A poetry thesis exploring issues of loss, death, creation, imagination, family, interpersonal relationships, nature, sexuality, and writing. The manuscript includes a preface that discusses literary influences such as Ai, H.D., and Sharon Olds, as well as writing in forms such as the dramatic monologue, imagistic poem, and confessional poem. Three main sections organize the manuscript's poems.