Arts and Humanities Commons^™

It's Important For Me To Get Good Light. Or "Things Which Are Happening", Elizabeth Ferguson

Pitzer Senior Theses

Artists' book utilizing cross disciplinary media.

Homefront, Stacy Elaine Pratt

Dissertations

This collection of poetry and essays explores the nature of marriage, time, and human experience. Many of the pieces center on the author's experience as the wife of a soldier deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. Others use scientific and mathematical imagery to illustrate spiritual concepts.

Facing God: Contemporary American Devotional Poetry, Sarah E. Jenkins

Theses and Dissertations

My thesis examines the connection between scripture and contemporary American poetry. Scripture is inherently poetic, employing devices that require analysis and explication. Poets drawing from scriptural text for narrative, language, or form are not looking to replace scripture, or even enhance it. Poets create new experiences in language, and their writing can illuminate the poetics of scripture. My thesis will examine work by three contemporary poets who have imitated, alluded to, and re-created scripture: Jacqueline Osherow's "Scattered Psalms" from 1999 collection Dead Men's Praise; Louise Glück's 1992 Pulitzer Prize-winning collection The Wild Iris; and Morri Creech's "The Testament of Judas" …

Welcoming The Saturated Earth, Adam Million

All Theses

Three short pieces of fiction and ten pieces of poetry compose this creative thesis, which has been submitted in partial fulfillment for the degree Master of Arts in English literature. The manuscript demonstrates the highest level of literary comprehension--creation. Through my writing, I move beyond the interpretation of literature and become a participant in both genres. I read therefore to write better. Let my writing be the judge of my knowledge of literature.

Foot Held Against The Edge, Joseph Schumacher

All Theses

The poems included in this creative thesis demonstrate a growth in the author's personal development and interpretation of the world. This collection contains 27 poems, which use a variety of styles, themes, and structures to study alternative perspectives and to scrutinize cultural norms. The purpose of this creative thesis is to show the author's proficiency in this genre while also challenging readers to examine their own interpretations of the world around them.

We Become Delicate Boats: Poems And Essays, Deja Anne Earley

Dissertations

My collection of poems and essays, We Become Delicate Boats, takes inspiration from a broad range of sources that shift into each other: paintings, pop culture, literary figures, dreams, relationships, faith, family, history. For example, some poems throw together unexpected bedfellows, like Kafka's Gregor Samsa and Marie Antoinette; others are anecdotal, like one that describes going on a blind date with a man who actually turns out to be blind, some re-imagine stories we already know, like one in the voice of Medusa, talking about which occasions call for her various snake "wigs." Although quite a few pieces are playful, …

Parliament Of Owls, Allison Renee Riddles

Dissertations

In this work of poems, I experiment with different forms (villanelles, sonnets, cinquains, sestinas, prose poems, and free verse) to create an original accompanying space for the existence of my speakers. I also use many of my poems to illustrate moments, feelings, and scenarios of relationships as well as place new perspectives on poems based on the work of other poets. Parliament of Owls provides an array of vistas on relationships, loneliness, and triumph.

On Sea-Goats, Chase Hart

All Theses

This thesis can be viewed as mediation between two processes of interpretation. Once process affirms freeplay and the continuation of the game. The other still wants a center or 'the reassuring foundation, the origin and the end of the game' as Derrida calls it. On a deep level, these poems try to realize themselves as inevitably subject to play, while also acknowledging themselves as trying to meaningfully interpret experience.

Five Kingdoms, Kelle Groom

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Five Kingdoms. (Under the direction of Don Stap.) Five Kingdoms is a collection of 55 poems in three sections. The title refers to the five kingdoms of life, encompassing every living thing. Section I explores political themes and addresses subjects that reach across a broad expanse of time--from the oldest bones of a child and the oldest map of the world to the bombing of Fallujah in the current Iraq war. Connections between physical and metaphysical worlds are examined. The focus narrows from the world to the city in section II. The theme of shelter is important to these poems, …

Mousike, Robin Moorhead

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Music Etymology: Middle English musik, from Anglo-French musike, from Latin musica, from Greek Mousikê, any art presided over by the Muses, especially music. This collection is a celebration of imagination, music, and everyday experience. It is a constant quest for new and different. It tackles the simplest of moments, Tai Chi on the Porch, with the most complex, Death-Sitting, it pulls from the abstract, The Secret Lives of Requiems, and the concrete, Driving Past Orange Groves on My Way to Work. Influences on this collection are W.S. Merwin, for his imagination and foundness of language, Philip Levine, because of his …

Elizabeth Bishop And Her Women:Countering Loss, Love, And Language Through Bishop's Homosocial Continuum, Donna Rogers

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines Elizabeth Bishop's seemingly understated and yet nuanced poetry with a specific focus on loss, love, and language through domesticity to create a poetic home. In this sense, home offers security for a displaced orphan and lesbian, moving from filial to amorous love, as well as the literary home for a poet who struggled for critical recognition. Further, juxtaposing the familiar with the strange, Bishop situates her speaker in a construction of artificial and natural boundaries that break down across her topography and represent loss through the multiple female figures that permeate her poems to convey the uncertainty …

Angels And Demons: Christina Rossetti’S Goblin Market As A Social Critique Of The Victorian Ideal Of The “Angel In The House” And The Pre-Raphaelites’ Response To That Ideal, Melissa Adams

Theses and Dissertations

Christina Rossetti’s poem Goblin Market presents a subversive critique on the socially constructed dichotomy of Angel versus Demon as depicted in Pre-Raphaelite artwork, Dante Gabriele Rossetti’s poetry, and Coventry Patmore’s poem Angel in the House. An analysis of Goblin Market in relation to Patmore’s poem and the Pre-Raphaelite paintings The Annunciation, Ophelia, Lady Lilith, Circe Offering the Cup to Ulysses, and Sibylla Palmifera and Dante Gabriele Rossetti’s poems “Soul’s Beauty” and “Body’s Beauty” illustrate the ways in which Rossetti presents a counter-image that breaks down this socially constructed dichotomy. This is additionally supported by an exploration …

An Eelnet Made For The Eel Fighting: Layers Of Obscurity And The Continuous Present In The Space Of Robert Lowell's Poetry, Alena Jones

Honors Papers

In this essay I undertake to describe how the continuous present might persist on Lowell's page. I move from "Epilogue" first to a Heideggerian critic, Adam Kirsch, and then to Heidegger, whose theory of language establishes a space where the continuous present is always possible on the page. But here, where Heidegger says it should succeed, language proves insufficient for Lowell. Lowell exposes his own failure to shape his material using literary devices like journey and climax. His attempts to align his writing with visual media allow his specific literary failures to become sites of the successful preservation of a …

The In Pulse, William L. Hall

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

A collection of poems composed as an exercise with imagination and the attempt to convey the mind as medium for experience without forgetting the reader remembers something else.

A Praxis Mundi, Ryan Mcconnell

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

.

Gypsy Soul, Wolf Spirit, Pamela Marie Davis-Allen

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Gypsy Soul, Wolf Spirit is a collection of thirty-six poems; the majority of the poems are written in - or evolved from drafts written in - iambic pentameter. Writing formal poetry was a challenge I decided to embrace because I believed that it would allow me to evolve as a poet.

The themes that connect these poems are represented by the collection's title: Gypsy Soul, Wolf Spirit. There is the dominant thematic presence of both the natural world and the spiritual realm within the collection. My intention was to lift the reader to a state of mind, through language, where …