Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Appropriated Voices: William Blake’S “The Little Black Boy” And British Antislavery Poetry, Brett J. Mattson

All NMU Master's Theses

British antislavery poetry in the late 1700s is well characterized by the first stanza of William Blake’s poem “The Little Black Boy” when his black speaker says “o! my soul is white; … But I am black as if bereav’d of light” (2-4). These statements that seem to exclude each other exemplify the discussions and arguments that antislavery poets had been publishing and would continue to deliberate after “The Little Black Boy” was printed in 1789. Other poets, while appropriating the voices of enslaved people or Africans, as Blake does in “The Little Black Boy,” often emphasize differences between their …

Sue, Heath Joseph Wooten

All NMU Master's Theses

Sue is a collection of poetry investigating the cyclical nature of grief through the lens of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s schemas of paranoid and reparative readings. The poems employ motifs such as hunting, disease, and human remains to capture the temporal disorientation experienced in the wake of loss. Via an extensive use of metaphor and recurring poem titles, Sue exploits the multivalence of language to conjure a dense field of meaning, meant to capture the undecidability of language noted by philosopher Jacques Derrida. This collection also employs several vectors of derivation, including erasure of text lifted from the 2002 strategy video …

Entropy, Kristin Schock

Conspectus Borealis

No abstract provided.

That Said, Karl Alderic Schroeder

All NMU Master's Theses

That Said, a creative thesis of poetry and poetics in two parts, explores points of contact between human interaction, capitalism, consciousness, and the process of meaning itself. The collection appropriates the language of business, scholarship, and politics alongside philosophical substructures from such disparate traditions as Marxism, Existentialism, and Taoism to provide a several windows of perspective into anxiety, relationships, identity, and consumerism. Through the blending of both direct and experimental forms and processes, nontraditional and everyday diction and syntax, and multifaceted content of both personal and external significance, these poems may simultaneously amuse, alienate, and inspire philosophical and critical …

Bramble And Knife, Sara Ryan

All NMU Master's Theses

This thesis is a collection of poems that center on the themes of extinction, family, the female body, and the presence of the animal. During my time in the Upper Peninsula, I found a connection with the natural world around me, and this led to my fascination with animals and extinction, both of which manifested in my poetry. As I struggled with the residual effects of toxic relationships, as well as the bleak romantic landscape of the UP, I saw my own body reflected in the bodies of animals. I specifically noticed this reflection while studying the art of taxidermy; …

Ode To The Heart, Marc Pickelman

Conspectus Borealis

No abstract provided.

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 …

Finding Tuwaqachi, And Other Essays, Cory G. Ferrer

All NMU Master's Theses

This thesis is a collection in four parts, divided by genre with the exception of the titular essay series, Finding Tuwaqachi. Insecurity, affirmation, and our need to connection emerge as the primary themes of this work. The essay series, Finding Tuwaqachi, takes a close look at intentional community and center for alternative therapy located in southern Michigan during the 1970s, by examining several lives caught up in this project. Part two of this collection comprises a series of lyric essays which explore the need to be heard, as well as the ultimate fallibility of our attempts to understand and …

War And Return, Alexander Gubbins

All NMU Master's Theses

ABSTRACT

WAR AND RETURN

By

Alexander Vartan Gubbins

War and Return is a collection of poetry that pivots on the conflict between loss of human life, sometimes even whole cities, and reinvention of cultural identity. In these poems, I search for and shape my own identity as a poet, while revealing my experiences as a soldier in the US War in Iraq and as the grandson of an Armenian who survived the 1915 Armenian Genocide in Turkey. These narrative poems are mainly in open form with a few in closed form as well. As I write in open form, I …

Her Body Breathes Into Mine, Zarah C. Moeggenberg

All NMU Master's Theses

This collection of poetry highlights the complex human experience of what it means to be a woman who loves women. Adding to the discourse of lesbian poetry, within spoken word poetry and for-the-page poetry, these poems doubly voice silenced perspectives and identities. A large portion of the work is spoken word poetry, which seeks to make the subgenre more accessible to a larger audience. Set primarily in the Midwest, these poems voice queer identity that asks us to consider what makes someone a person, as identity is much more than sexuality. Love, sex, loss, sexuality and gender expression are themes …