Creative Writing 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 …

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 …

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 …