Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Waiting House, Erika Marie Mueller

Theses and Dissertations

The poems in this collection, The Waiting House, use techniques associated with an evolving elegiac tradition in their portrayal of anticipatory grief born of terminal illness and impending loss. Like the melancholic mourning of modern elegies described by Jahan Ramazani, my poems often resist consolation even as they borrow from elegiac conventions like poetic substitution and repetition. Additionally, they utilize strategies and patterns of literary anger outlined by Alicia Suskin Ostriker as common in postwar American women’s poetry, to express anger that is also anticipatory grief. Finally, this collection uses illness metaphors to question the well being of a larger …

If This Heart Had A Mouth: A Forbidden Romance Narrated Through Mimesis: Poems, Julieta V. Corpus

Theses and Dissertations

If This Heart Had a Mouth consists of forty-two poems where love is the catalyst for a multitude of emotions, ranging from falling in love, to hopelessness, to a begrudging kind of acceptance at losing the beloved to somebody else. To create all forty-two poems, 23 written in Spanish, and 19 poems written in English, I employed the literary device called Mimesis which entails deriving an original poem from someone else's work.

To create each poem, I followed another poet’s original work, line by line. I imitated that poet’s rhythm through their use of meter. I counted the number of …

From A Long Line Of Thieves, Lucinda Zamora-Wiley

Theses and Dissertations

This is a work of original creative writing, containing works of poetry, prose poems, flash non-fiction, and personal essays. The primary subject areas include family relations after PTSD, love, interracial struggles within marriage and family, pride of place--including Texas and the United States, and poetic/artistic inspirations that influenced the author.

The Small Disasters Lp, Lindsay Daigle

Theses and Dissertations

THE SMALL DISASTERS LP is a book of poems that respond to the visual and audible elements of musical albums. In this way, the ekphrastic method (traditionally, poetic representation of visual art) is simultaneously utilized and critiqued in order to explore an emotional landscape of melancholy, loss, death, and self-doubt. The poems navigate through their separate worlds as the speaker attempts to understand herself among these emotions. Three sections of poems, separated by standalone “intermezzo” poems, fluctuate through disorientation, deconstruction, and reorientation of voice and, therefore, self. The critical introduction to the book situates my investigation of ekphrasis’ value within …

Smoked Blood And Lavender, Diana L. Elizondo

Theses and Dissertations

My project is a demonstration of how the Gothic genre can still have an influence in contemporary poetry as well as how the traditional forms can still be effective when developing diction and originality. This project is a collection of poems that addresses a range of issues in society and politics, as well as the deconstruction of the notions of romance in everyday life. In the introduction to my thesis, my poems are analyzed stylistically, as well as the themes they represent and the sources that influenced them. Furthermore, my poems are divided in five sections and each focuses on …

The Canción Cannibal Cabaret And Other Songs: Feminists Of A Dystopian Future Repurpose A Punk Past, Amalia L. Ortiz

Theses and Dissertations

This collection of poem-songs is an experiment in combining poetry and theatre. Focused on the theme of revolution and inspired by current issues of social justice, the manuscript is set in a not-so-distant future. After an environmental apocalypse, a refugee raised under an oppressive state, La Madre Valiente studies secretly to become the leader of a feminist revolution. Her emissaries roam the land telling her story, educating others, and enlisting allies in revolution. My goal is to transform the text into live theatrical performances so that the manuscript serves both as a poetry collection and as a script. Some critics …

Threshold, Leah V

Theses and Dissertations

This senior thesis details an exploration by Leah V into spaces and places in time—be they emotional or physical—in which an important boundary has been crossed, thereby removing the possibility of returning to that space or place. The critical introduction for this collection of poems by Leah V focuses on the esteemed voices of Robert Penn Warren and Seamus Heaney, two men whose poetry has been, and continues to be, highly influential in Leah’s own poetic quest.

The Poetry Of Wilmer Mills, Rachael Acheson

Theses and Dissertations

This paper seeks to contextualize the work of Wilmer Mills, a late, minor Southeastern American poet, within the complex and frequently misread tradition of New Formalism, as this manifested in the United States shortly after World War II. The analysis places Mills‟s work in conversation with the formalist philosophy of former U.S. Poet Laureate Richard Wilbur, and it suggests that both Mills‟s poetry and his reception amongst fellow academics who adhered to a more progressive philosophy demonstrates the continued relevance of this older, less-often discussed strain of formalism in American poetry. An appendix presents the first checklist of Mills‟s published …

Loosely Bound, Alexander Martin

Theses and Dissertations

I take a poetic approach to graphic design practice. It is a subjectivist approach, which recognizes our human right to willful interpretation. Designers navigate form, culture, and history like poets through language. We are subjective, exploratory engines drawing formal inspiration from figural and analogical associations. Subjectivity in graphic design practice is complex, however. Subjectivity privileges the interaction between object and individual. When we designers interpret the literal world with the poet’s omni-directional sensitivity, we intentionally and intuitively create objects that accrete inexhaustible, extra-literal value for their audience.

Free & Content, Victoria M. Ahmadizadeh

Theses and Dissertations

I draw on my natural interest in my family’s eclectic collections – both traditional and personal – to create poetic portraits composed of carefully made and arranged objects. The goal of my portraiture is not to convey physical likeness; superseding the imitation of appearance is psychological portrayal of the desires and disappointments of the sitter. Often, a fragmented sense of self is revealed – both in others and in myself – and I seek to depict the kaleidoscopic nature of individuals in their given situations. Possessing whimsical, playful elements as well as encounters with lack and longing, I create work …