Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Teleios, Sandra Edwards

All Graduate Reports and Creative Projects, Fall 2023 to Present

This thesis is a collection of poetry that mixes formal and free verse in order to convey the speaker’s spiritual journey in content as well as form. The work introduces a speaker who is deeply religious and who expresses her spirituality in the form of formal poetry such as sonnets as she adheres to certain principles of faith. The use of form in the thesis represents her adherence to those principles, while breaking form is symbolic of her breaking away from those principles. Through the work, the speaker experiences a shift from frustration with the world and its apparent obfuscation …

Desert Body, Lauren Mckinnon

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This thesis is a collection of poems examining certain paradoxes of my body. As a survivor of sexual violence, my body relives trauma which makes it feel uninhabitable. I compare my experiences with the Southern Utah desert. The physical beauty, destruction and inhabitability of the desert teaches me to accept my body as both beautiful and full of grief. The poems move chronologically through my life, beginning with an abusive relationship at the age of sixteen, a move to Moab at nineteen, and becoming a mother at twenty-five. Ultimately, with the desert as my guide, I learn to accept my …

The Body Seeking Magnificence, Taylor Franson Thiel

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This thesis focuses on how my time as a college athlete, my relationship with my mother, and my experience of an abusive relationship have intersected to impact my personal relationship with my body as I have fluctuated between trying to make it perfect, trying to ruin it, and trying to love it. The collection of poems examines how these forces collided in various ways to change how I thought about myself and my identity. After dealing with the idealized version of what a college athlete should look like and act like, inherited trauma from a mother, and trauma from a …

The End Of The Known World, Madeline Thomas

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

This thesis forms the foundation for a poetry chapbook infused with Norse mythology and pain. It builds itself on two distinct strands. In the first, I reclaim the story of Hel, goddess of death, and attempt to humanize a figure historically branded as monstrous. Her life forms a narrative line through the collection that attempts to capture the whimsy and horror in myth. Intertwined with the goddess are poems centered around a contemporary speaker who suffers from chronic migraine, an autoimmune disease, unexplained tachycardia, and OCD. The poems in this personal strand vary heavily in both form and content but …

Portrait Of Rich County, Adrian Thomson

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

Portrait of Rich County presents the small town of Randolph, Utah in poems describing its wildlife, recreational activities, and the perspectives of citizens in the contemporary rocky mountain west. Special attention to the imagination of the poems’ speaker toward the more dreamlike qualities of Rich County establishes itself throughout, in order to convey a feeling of hope within harsh terrain. This collection examines the theme of salvaging items not often considered, such as rusted junk, ancient houses, or roadside garbage, both in the actions of the speaker and through the act of naming these items upon the page. An over-arching …

A Collection For A Better Misunderstanding, Mark Smeltzer

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

What if being understood becomes even more dreadful than being isolated? This collection of poetry stands between two extremes, using form and language to reflect the struggle of living on a continuum between being understood and being alone. By echoing the direct style of poets like Charles Bukowski and Mark Strand, as well as more abstract figures like May Swenson and Sylvia Plath, this collection asserts that the contradictions we carry can coexist, and even complement one another. Part One features original poetry that relies on the senses to recover old memories. A direct style in Part One seeks to …

Harvest: Poems, Brittney Allen

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

Louise Glück wrote, “the actual making of art is a revenge on circumstance.” The risk, she goes on, is in the possibility of shame. Writing poetry then becomes an act of courage, purchased with sacrifice or loss. “Courage, in this usage, alludes to a capacity for facing down the dark forces.”

In Harvest, a poetry chapbook, the speaker takes revenge on the circumstances of her life by being blunt, bare, and brave on the page. She contends with a male-dominated society and abusive childhood as she moves into adulthood and the supposed saving grace of a marriage. The speaker confesses …

Synthetic, Julia L. Prince

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

Throughout her life, the poet May Swenson concerned herself with communicating pathways to personal improvement and self-discovery by navigating the distinct social and psychological challenges specific to her historical context, personality, and gender. Though deceased, Swenson is still able to communicate these notions successfully, as many of her poems’ speakers do not conceal their intentions, but rather “force the truth.”

Synthetic, a poetry chapbook, similarly “forces the truth,” as the speaker – like Swenson’s – craves to bare all and discover more about who she is, as she contends with her own social and psychological challenges regarding beauty-gestures, practices, …

A Stiff, Brocaded Gown: Patterns In The Life Of Amy Lowell, Emily Jinju Cottam

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

Amy Lowell's poetry serves as a reflection of the challenges and struggles that permeated her life. Her late entry into the world of published poetry at the age of 38 resulted in the presentation of already-solidified beliefs that she had developed since childhood. Although the techniques she employed and the quality of her writing varied in the last decades of her life, Lowell's focus on imagery, rhythm, and mood remained consistent in many of her works. Published in 1916, the poem "Patterns", from Men, Women, and Ghosts, contains themes that are of particular note when placed into the context of …

Those Who See: Emily Dickinsons And May Swensons Poetic Language Of Spiritual And Scientific Possibility, Samantha Latham

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

Emily Dickinson and May Swenson are major American poets who use scientific language in order to explore the productive tension developed when core spiritual beliefs are challenged by new scientific observations and theories. Rather than shrink from the uncertainty resulting from the challenge to faith posed by Darwin in nineteenth-century America, Dickinson and Swenson blend scientific and spiritual language to move beyond the binary opposition often seen as separating these discourses. Dickinson responds most immediately to the advent of Darwinian thought, while Swenson builds on the work of Dickinson as she examines twentieth-century scientific discoveries ranging from the microscopic (the …

Crossing Borders: Cultural And Linguistic Passages In The Poetry Of Pat Mora And Gary Soto, Amber Christine Bowden

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

Poets Pat Mora and Gary Soto have long been a presence in anthologies citing their multicultural content, yet their work has not been placed as part of the classroom canon. By leaving their work out of the classroom, we have lost the benefit of their diverse poetry. As the demographics of Utah shift, including works such as Mora and Soto’s becomes more essential for student success. In a close textual analysis of seventeen poems by Mora and Soto we can see that each poet uses a variety of themes to frame their verse. Not only does an overall analysis show …

Innocence Lost: The Tension Of Contrary States In Blake And Milton, Andrew M. Spratt

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

Though writing more than one-hundred years apart, the poetic works of John Milton and William Blake interacted with one another to such an extent that they have become increasingly entwined within the critical imagination of scholars over the past two centuries. Despite the recognition of the influence of Milton upon Blake, and subsequent examinations of Blake’s opinions of Milton as an artist, a thorough examination of Blake’s opinion of Milton as the narrator of Paradise Lost has heretofore remained unattempted. This essay examines Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience as a lens through which to interpret the narrator of …

The Sleepy Hero: Romantic & Spiritual Sleep In The Gawain-Poet, Erin Kathleen Turner Hepner

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

This thesis examines two accepted styles of writing in the Middle Ages, the romance and religious genres, and what purpose they perform in the Gawain-poet’s religious poem, Patience, and his romance poem, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (SGGK). One recently popular line of research among medieval scholars is examining the way medieval authors, such as the Gawain-poet, combine elements of romance and spiritual writings. By funneling the Gawain-poet’s intermingling of the medieval romance and religious genres through the specific lens of sleep, which is represented differently in medieval romance texts than in medieval religious …

Rhyme And Reason In Language Acquisition: Incorporating Poetry Into The Esl Classroom, Kimberly Call Gleason

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

Utah is seeing a rapid increase in K-12 students whose native language is not English. With this increase, teachers face the challenge of finding new and effective teaching methods to reach their ESL (English as a Second Language) students. This research explores the study of poetry as an instrument to improve ESL students' pronunciation of English. When read out loud, poetry can be an exercise in pronouncing consonant sounds (from alliteration), decoding vowel sounds (from rhyme), and acquiring the natural speech rhythm of the English language (from meter). Poetry was selected not only because of its exaggerated sound elements (alliteration, …

Yankee, Go Home!: Translations And Poems With Critical Introduction, Devin Jay Hepner

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

This paper attempts to outline the various influences and similarities of my poetry to other poets and poetry of the twentieth-century. The critical introduction will cover those influences and the research I have done on the poets. It also contains individual poems that I feel have a connection with my own poetry and poetic translation. After the critical introduction, I include my poetry in stylistic order followed by Russian translations in chronological order. I will first describe how I came to write and read poetry and its value for me.

Under The Bridge: Poems By Faith Shepherd With Critical Introduction, Faith Shepherd

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

The first poem with which I became fully engaged--that is, the first poem with which I interacted beyond one or two readings--was Wallace Stevens' "Autumn Refrain" my senior year in high school. At this point in my life, I was already enamored with literature, and I had written fair amounts of "poetry" for my high school creative writing classes. However, even though I occasionally enjoyed reading poetry and understood that its language tended to be more compact than other types of literature, if I didn't understand a poem after reading it through once or twice I set it aside and …

Articulation, Kendra Evans

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

As my major is Art with an emphasis in Graphic Design, and my minor is English, with Departmental Honors and a focus on poetry, my Honors Senior thesis, ARTiculation, exists as a link between these two arts. This collection of essays explores the similarities and relationships between painting and poetry, and the influences each has on the other. The format in which I have chosen to present my writing in is editorial layout of periodical publication, a medium of communication where the visual and written arts overlap in technique and style.

Graduate Recital, Donna Gatlin Davis

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

Preparation for the graduate recital provides the Master's candidate an opportunity to exercise a variety of musical skills. Choosing the best possible program requires not only a working knowledge of the available repertory, but a personal assessment of the particular voice with its characteristic strengths and weaknesses. The final selection must reflect a fine balance of material difficult enough to provide a musical challenge and material with which a singer can feel comfortable in communicating.

Working toward the performance involves both intellectual preparation through research and physical preparation through vocal conditioning. It is not enough to anticipate vocal difficulties and …

A Study Of The Amount And Quality Of Poetry Read On The Primary Grade Level In Selected Utah School Districts, Betty Farnsworth Spencer

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

The primary grade teachers of the Cache, Logan, and Box Elder School Districts were used in this study. A questionnaire was developed that would be an effective measurement of the information needed to evaluate or substantiate the hypothesis which was: It is believed that less than 50 percent of the primary grade children have poetry read to them daily as part of the curriculum. Furthermore, it is believed that much of the poetry read does not meet the standards of "good poetry for children" as measured by experts in this field of learning.

The study revealed that only 11 percent …