Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Gleanlings, Natalie Stein

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

The following poems were written in sentences formed by spilling milk onto objects of ritual significance. In the epic tradition of crumbs. Surfaces offered their chamberlets with the insistence of a larynx. In the shapes of: My Father, The Dead And Their Voices. There was milk, marionette drudgery, implacable lambs. Mice feature greatly– on toast, making bags. Mouse cream. Fragments of lost texts that were divined. A lullabye. These poems inhabit the formal and rhetorical devices of woolgathering, a loculus, and marginalia.

The Book Of Ela Or Apokalypsis In Five Acts, Noah Leventhal

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

The Book of Ela or Apokalypsis in Five acts seeks first and foremost to investigate the layers of mental abstraction in which the human mind engages when thinking, and by extension, when writing. Writing and thinking do not end at the boundaries of genre. As such, I felt the styles therein should not stop at those boundaries either. Making use of influences such as Samuel Beckett, Virginia Woolf, Renee Gladman and Rosemarie Waldrop, I have endeavored to use narrative as a to form more fully and poetically explore the contours of language, and by extension, the contours of the mind. …

The Kiss Turns: A Play On Aural Manor, Meredith Higgins

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

The Kiss Turns: A Play on Aural Manor is a poetic work that explores the nature of being and selfhood as they are expressed and modulated through the hearing, speaking, and writing of language. The Manor and surrounding Grounds here are presented as a fluid junk-mosaic: colorful, clamoring, thing-filled, magical, and on the move. Seven characters reside on the Manor’s property and live out their respective longings and loves, apprehending horror, tragedy, abundance, and the possibility of play through accepting and collaborating with the unknown depths of being.

Horsonnets, Shriram Sivaramakrishnan

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

‘Horsonnets’ was conceived and written between September 2019 and December 2021. As the name suggests, the collection is centered around horses, as objects of desire, metaphor, tropes. The collection is structured into four sections: ‘the way a horse frames blueness’, ‘to nurse a hurt’, ‘horsonnets’ and ‘landscape with horns’. Together, they all address different kinds of pain (horses became emblematic of that): bodily (‘the way a horse frames blueness’), historical (‘to nurse a hurt’), cultural (‘horsonnets’), and spiritual (‘landscape with horns’).

Tsiyim, A Hiding, Aaron Lopatin

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Tsiyim is a collection of poems and poetic sequences that investigate faith, doubt, and the natural world. The poems draw on the stories of martyrs, saints, prophets, and pilgrims, entering a mimetic chain that sets language and poetry as the placeholder for a contemporary faith to take place.

Already An Archaeobotany, Sydney Britsch

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Steven Universe once sang, “I learned to stay true to myself/ by watching myself die.” This is precisely the natural journey we must all embark upon in this life; our self continually returning, remembering that which we can trust our bodies have known all along: we are not actually separate from this thing we’ve called nature. This ever-opening landscape necessitates fluidity and the recognition of other modes of knowledge and connection, sometimes only sound or space as our guide. A place where self-healing and self-sacrifice is simultaneously enacted. Each of these moments reverberates and affects the universal voice. The earth …

Three Quarters, Michael Mckee Green

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Three Quarters makes retrospection into prospection. Following its speaker from the near-present to the near-past, the text imposes a spiritual and affective pilgrimage onto nine months (three quarters of a year) of his life. Codas, pieces of parataxis, and grammatical slippages color and heighten the experiences of a young man coming to terms with himself by reliving what’s come.

Merciless: A Crude Hagiography, Lindsey Ann Klessens Appell

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is the culmination of a project that began as an attempt to explore my relationship, as a teenager, with the Main Street of my hometown, Roundup, MT. In the process of looking through the Roundup Record-Tribune archives and revisiting adolescent memories, I began to see connective tissue between the autobiographical aspects of this documentary project and the work I had been doing in reclaiming, repurposing, and “translating” folklore and mythology in my poetry. Coming out of classes in Old English and translation theory, I had also developed an interest in experimental and creative translation of early medieval texts, …

Circle Drive, Matthew Naples

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

The massively multiplayer online role playing game, World of Warcraft follows many leveling systems that spoon-feeds its players a steady and carefully calculated sense of progression, control, and power. This is part of what makes the game so appealing, as well as the intricate character creation and vast community-based elements. Millions of players share this world of Warcraft, as if it were its own real world (and in a way it is), and they do so with characters they’ve created and customized. What furthers this connection between player and character, and player and player, is how their characters move and …

Auto/Aura, Michael Wanzenried

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

I will make the poems of materials, for I think they are to be the most spiritual poems, And I will make the poems of my body and of mortality

—Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, section 6

Auto/Aura attempts to follow through on Whitman’s project by literally using materials from the world to create a situation that challenges the traditional reader-poet relationship. The poems here diverge from the page into a three-dimensional setting to continue in a largely personal and arbitrary lineage (as all poet-historical lineages tend to be according to Jerome Rothenberg) of 19th and 20th century poetic …

Kania, Indrani Sengupta

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Kania begins as a poetic revision of fairy tales, an attempt to extract the potential female narratives buried within the source texts, in their stifling archetypes. In the spirit of Angela Carter, it attempts to manipulate the most recognizable fairy tale motifs in order to explore issues of violence, deviant desire, sexuality, and monstrosity. As the text evolves, the archetypal “monster” shifts in location, becoming increasingly internal to the woman/speaker. First “he” is the abuser, then “she” is the errant woman, then finally, “it” is the interior anxiety, the self”s nightmare, ungendered and constantly in flux. The manuscript strives, through …

All The King's Horses, Christopher Caruso

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

All The King’s Horses juxtaposes the struggle of artistic creation alongside the trauma of 9/11. This collection of poetry presents the failure of language and art to define the boundaries of anxiety’s origins. Aware of these limitations the “I” in this poem struggles to find a reprieve in defining something that cannot be defined.

Conflation Or When I Say You, I Mean I, Julie Ann Strand

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Conflation or When I Say You, I Mean I is a poetic interrogation catalyzed by the ideas within Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet and Georges Bataille’s Erotism: Death and Sensuality. The interrogation takes place within a form that positions failed love poems alongside poetic analyses or reflections. By doing so the erotic relationship that exists within the genre of the love poem as well as the hierarchy created between the roles of lover and beloved is put into question.

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 …

Use(Ful In(Form)Ation, Dustin Lapray

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

I cleaned my room early in the spring of 2009, sorted laundry and cleaned off my oft-cluttered desk. In the process I found an old Mead Composition Notebook from a Film and Literature course I took at the College of Southern Idaho. Inside the back cover I discovered a page of useful information. The charts and measurements included: a multiplication table, 12 other tables intended to measure everything from paper, drugs, liquid and time, metric nomenclature and, finally, conversion tables from the metric system into American standard systems of measurement. I tore the back cover from the notebook and tacked …