Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Smoke Of Battle Pressing, Matthew Bodett

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

the smoke of battle pressing engages the reader by requiring a sacrifice similar to that experienced in the game of chess. During a famous chess match in 1912 between Marshall and Levitsky, Marshall sacrificed his queen, the most powerful piece, in a counter-intuitive way that led to an immediate victory for Marshall. A sacrifice of similar gravity is made when the reader resigns presumptions or expectations in order to have a more meaningful experience. A sacrifice on my part is made when I remove myself from the artwork and give up my authority over the image in much the same …

Golden Flower Of Prosperity, Katelyn Elizabeth Holland

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Golden Flower of Prosperity is a mixed genre work, incorporating letters, found material, lyric poetry, narrative poetry, and prose to explore the experience of two Chinese immigrants in Eastern Oregon at the turn of the twentieth century. By combining found documents with imagined narratives and creating folktales from a few facts, the poems provide an embellished interpretation of history, building the characters of Ing Hay and Lung On into archetypal legends, while still endeavoring to make them seem like real people.

The Objectivist poets Charles Reznikoff and Louis Zukofsky inspired some of the formal aspects of the project. Reznikoff’s found …

The Grotesque Menagerie, Merin Leigh Tigert

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

The Grotesque Menagerie is an exploration of domestic and gender roles of the American West. The burlesque and the grotesque are used as the dissection tools throughout this manuscript to examine these roles, and in so doing pervert both the ideal and the abject. As the author, these poetic explorations and dissections leave me stuck in an odd androgyny: I am suspect of my own feminist preclusions and oddly obliged to interact with the established patriarchal tropes of the western poetic cannon. I do not reject the canon as a symbol of patriarchal power; I do not request the role …