‘Poetry Is Not A Luxury’, Rage Should Not Be A Privilege: The Potential Power Of The ‘Racial Imaginary’, Georgia Mcgovern

CMC Senior Theses

Female rage exists outside of the constructed masculine ideal of anger. To examine female rage, one must analyze the intersections between gender and race. I examine white women's privilege and access to female rage in reality and the fictional world. I explore Black Feminist poetry as a form of storage for rage at gender-based prejudice, racial injustice, and their intersection. Using Myisha Cherry’s term “Lordean Rage”, I recognize this specialized manifestation of female rage as an artistic, intergenerational source of energy for change.

I examine Claudia Rankine’s term “racial imaginary” as an imaginative space in which white people draw lines …

Doc/U/Ment: Affinities In 20th And 21st-Century Documental Poetics, Katherine Payne

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation presents, analyzes, and builds on the existing literary genealogy of documental poetry. In 2020 Michael Leong proposed the term documental poetry to describe the turn toward source materials in 21^st-century North American poetry, seen in longform research-based poems that explicitly incorporate documentation and seek to intervene in cultural memory. Using Ludwig Wittgenstein’s concept of family resemblance, I argue that there are clear affinities between 21^st-century poets and their 20^th-century literary forerunners, also that an expansion of the scope of documental poetics is needed. The three nodes of connection I examine are works …

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 …

A Claiming Of Kin: A Linguistic Analysis Of Southern Appalachian English In Melissa Range's Scriptorium: Poems, Jolee White

Undergraduate Honors Theses

The research studies the Southern Appalachian dialect present in five poems in Melissa Range’s Scriptorium: Poems. The linguistic phenomena characteristic of Southern Appalachian English observed and analyzed in the poems include lexicon, grammatical features, and phonological aspects. The research seeks to bring attention to this Appalachian woman writer as well as to bring understanding of her reasoning behind incorporating the dialect in her poetry. It establishes that the five poems by Range contain the lexicon, grammatical features, and phonological aspects of the SAE dialect. It holds meaning both grammatically and pragmatically within the context of the poem and Appalachia.

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, …

Deconstructing The "Woman Of Sentiment": Parody As Agency In The Poetry Of Phoebe Cary, Scottie Garber-Roberts

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The work of nineteenth-century American poet Phoebe Cary presents a complex puzzle of exigence and purpose that combines social structure, political climate, and personal history. Known for her somber and spiritual sentimental poetry, Cary shocked readers and reviewers alike when she published her collection Poems and Parodies in 1854, which contained a series of scathing and hilarious parodies based on popular sentimental poetry. In my thesis, I work to untangle the various contextual elements surrounding Cary’s writing in order to gain a better understanding of the dual nature of the poet and her work. Through an examination of nineteenth-century American …

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, …

Through The Mouth: An Essay On Appetite And Ecocide, Iemanja Brown

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is an exploration of mourning and resilient joy in the midst of ecocide. Resisting the pervasive classification of the human as inherently destructive, I look to appetite as an aesthetic procedure that includes a material desire for intimacy with the more-than-human. My study considers the intersections of aesthetic production (primarily twentieth-century poetry and visual art), climate science, geology, cultural studies, theory within the contemporary nonhuman turn, and Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy of organism. I employ an interdisciplinary approach, which helps me explore the various ways that literal and figurative appetite can be a way of sensing and exploring …

A Matter Of Life And Def: Poetic Knowledge And The Organic Intellectuals In Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry, Anthony Blacksher

CGU Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation unpacks the poetry, performances, and the production of Def Poetry Jam to explore how a performative art embodied and confronted racial discourses, including stereotypes and also, addressed the racism, patriotism, and imperialist discourses that circulated after 9/11. Def Poetry Jam contributes to the intellectual capacity of spoken word and performance poetry, and poets as intellectuals, where poets produce and disseminate knowledge, ideas, and data, in the form of narratives, that contribute to critical consciousness. The effectiveness of the series lay in the consistent blurring of entertainment, knowledge, anti-capitalism, and capitalism. This research demonstrates how Def Poetry Jam provided …

"Bachelor Buttons": Feminist And Womanist Essays And Poems, Billy E. Clem Jr.

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

In this critical and creative dissertation, I sketch a brief study of selected multicultural hybrid texts in contemporary US Anglophone literary studies; discuss their implications for reading, writing, and teaching; and present my own hybrid text.

Second-wave feminist and womanist theories and practices opened literary and cultural studies to new and exciting ideas and methods for reading, teaching, and writing both canonical and non-canonical Anglophone texts. One genre emerging anew by these theories, practices, and practitioners is the literary hybrid text, a multi-genre form composed of a variety of prose genres, poetry, drama, and/or visual imagery. Hybrid texts ask readers …

The Return Of The Dead: Resurrecting Chappell's Family Gathering, Jonathan Moore

Master's Theses

This thesis examines Fred Chappell’s virtually overlooked collection of poetry Family Gathering (2000), and how the poems operate within the mode of the grotesque. I argue that the poems illuminate both the southern grotesque and Roland Barthes’s theory of photography’s Operator, Spectator, and Spectrum. I address Family Gathering as a family photo album full of still shots, snapshots, and even selfies, which illumines how Chappell’s use of the grotesque in this collection derives more from its original association with visual arts rather than only depicting the grotesque typically associated with characteristics deemed explicitly shocking or terrifying. I argue that …

African-American Poetry, Music, And Politics, Tyler H. Macdonald

Honors Theses

The 2016 decision to award songwriter and musician Bob Dylan the Nobel Prize in Literature sparked a worldwide debate on the relationship between music and poetry and raised many questions about music’s place in literary canon. However, this debate is nothing new. Questions about the relationship between music and poetry have long been debated. Some scholars believe the two disciplines should be studied separately, while others prefer to consider the connections between the two.

My project begins with a question: if Bob Dylan’s songs can be considered poetry, what other forms of music might also be considered poetry? Rap implements …

“That Dark Parade”: Emily Dickinson And The Victorian "Cult Of Death”, Carol M. Degrasse

English Department Theses

The elegiac poems of Emily Dickinson provide what is perhaps the clearest depiction of the conflicting emotions inherent to the death-conscious nineteenth century. In one such poem, Dickinson’s oxymoronic phrase, “Dark Parade,” encapsulates the spirit of a social movement that was born of a desire to comfort the grief-stricken and to beautify the horrific. Throughout Dickinson’s corpus of elegiac poetry, the speaker echoes these sentiments and crafts an insightful portrait, juxtaposing the stark horror of death with the ethereal beauty of ceremony. As Dickinson’s elegies are traced over time, the poems develop as microcosmic representations of a grieving nation, as …

Cold War New York: Postmodernism, Lyricism, And Queer Aesthetics In 1970s New York Poetry, Jared James O'Connor

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the poetry of Joe Brainard and Anne Waldman, two poets of the critically neglected second-generation New York school. I argue that Brainard and Waldman help define the emerging discourse of postmodern poetry through their attention to cold war culture of the 1970s, countercultural ideologies, and poetic form. Both Brainard and Waldman enact a poetics of vulnerability in their work, situating themselves as wholly unique from their late-modernist predecessors. In doing so, they help engender a poetics concerned not only with the intellectual stakes but with the cultural environment they are forced to navigate. Chapter 1 explores Brainard's …

Weird Propaganda: Texts Of The Black Power And Women’S Liberation Movements, Marie Buck

Wayne State University Dissertations

“Weird Propaganda: Texts of the Black Power and Women’s Liberation Movements” examines texts of the Black Power and Women’s Liberation Movements: the early Black Arts Movement anthology For Malcolm; the now-canonical texts Our Bodies, Ourselves; The Black Woman; and Sisterhood Is Powerful; a number of pamphlets and other small press works; and the Black Panthers’ newspaper. This project argues that writers and activists used senses of the uncanny, along with elements of science fiction and fantasy, to negotiate the day-to-day uncertainties of political organizing and, more broadly, political hope. The texts examined here convey particular political views in an explict …

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 …

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 …

Multiplicity, Marianne Leslie Chan

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This manuscript, Multiplicity, is a collection of poems that addresses the varying dimensions within human interactions and the multiple nature of the self. The speakers in these poems confront the “arbitrary constraints” and the categories that define our identities, as well as how these categories are almost always blurred by the complexities of the self and the differences between people. These categories include gender, sexuality, ethnicity, siblinghood, daughterhood, and religion. Two of these poems— “Really, It is All Arbitrary Constraint” and “Other Stories,” which appear in the second section—attempt to dismantle these constraints and/or categories by breaking from traditional poetic …

Transplants, Denise Weber

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

transplants is a body of poetry that joys in migration and grafting; in change and self-destruction; in cycles of survival and death; in resurrection and reincarnation. In this collection, I write of saints and prophets as regular people, faulted and accessible, transposed into the landscapes I’ve inhabited: from the deserts of Las Vegas and Mesa Verde in the U.S. to the coasts and jungles of Belize and Costa Rica in Central America. Through their eyes, one may find the profound within things overlooked, and the vulnerability of our mortal condition. transplants draws on not only stolen and transformed identities, but …

Kenneth Koch's Postmodern Comedy Revisited, John Campbell Nichols

Masters Theses

This thesis describes and analyzes the postmodern comedy of New York School poet, Kenneth Koch and discusses the changes this comedy underwent throughout his lengthy career. The thesis is divided into four chapters. Chapter I explains the aesthetic of the New York School of poets as contrasted to the dominant New Critical compositional aesthetic embodied by poets such as Robert Lowell in the mid-century United States. Chapter II develops Koch’s comedy as expressing an emergent postmodernism. Chapter III discusses the various aspects of Koch’s comedy, sampling poems from across his career. Chapter IV traces the development and maturity of Koch’s …

"I Looked Here; I Looked There; Nowhere Could I See My Love." The Problem Of "Presence" In The Black Riders And Other Lines, Nat Gustafson-Sundell

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

Although the poems of The Black Riders and other lines, by Stephen Crane, have often been treated as if they are simple--easy to interpret and easy to categorize--these poems actually support a multiplicity of interpretations. The multiplicity of interpretations available in the poems informs the possibility of tracing a variety of interrelationships through the poetry. While a few previous scholars have treated the poems as if they are interrelated, the interrelationship of the poetry has not been explicitly and substantially addressed as a feature of the poetry. The poems, in fact, support a combinatorial complexity only previously hinted at in …

Dirty Modernism: Ecological Objects In American Poetry, Michael D. Sloane

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation examines how early-to-mid twentieth century American poetry is preoccupied with objects that unsettle the divide between nature and culture. Given the entanglement of these two domains, I argue that American modernism is “dirty.” This designation leads me to sketch what I call “dirty modernism,” which includes the registers of waste, energy, animality, raciality, and the sensual. Reading these registers, I turn to what I call “ecological objects,” or representations of how nature and culture come together, which includes trash, natural resources, inanimals, and tools. Through an ecocritical mode of analysis, I introduce dirty modernism with the Baroness Elsa …

The Vastness Of Small Spaces: Self-Portraits Of The Artist As A Child Enclosed, Matthew John Burgess

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A tent of bed sheets, a furniture fort, a corner of the closet surrounded by chosen objects--the child finds or fashions these spaces and within them daydreaming begins. What do small spaces signify for the child, and why do scenes of enclosure emerge in autobiographical self-portraits of the artist? Sigmund Freud's theory that the literary vocation can be traced to childhood experiences is at the heart of this project, especially his observation that "the child at play behaves like a writer, in that he creates a world of his own, or rather, re-arranges the things of this world in a …

Black Lazarus: Conjure Book, Melissa Anne Morrow

Theses and Dissertations

Black Lazarus: Conjure Book is a hybrid-genre collection of poems (including lyric, narrative, graphic, prose, and combinations of these four forms) uttered in the voices of fictitious personas based on the participants pictured in, the historical circumstances surrounding, and one inscribed artifact of a postcard depicting the lynching of Allen Brooks in Dallas, Texas on March 3, 1910. The theoretical scaffold for the manuscript is "triangulation," a method used by qualitative researchers to validate their studies by exploring research issues from multiple perspectives. Triangulation is also a mapmaking method used to verify the position of waypoints by measuring them against …

Shape-Note Singing, Traci Rae Letellier

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Shape-Note Singing is a collection of poems about what is loved, lost, and being lost. Placed in the landscape of the Ozark foothills in the northwest corner of the state of Arkansas, the collection explores the poet’s connection to kin, land, and lore. Shape-Note Singing is the story of plain-spoken folks of simple origins telling the truth as they see it and as best they know how.