Creative Writing Commons^™

T.S. Eliot: A Never-Ending Exploration, Kristina Krupilnitskaya

Honors Thesis

The following thesis explores the work of T.S. Eliot before and after his conversion to the Anglican Church. While the paper explores the stylistic qualities of Eliot's poetry, the main focus of the essay lies in bridging the pre and post conversion works together in order to show that both of the periods were significant in the poet's life. While many critics viewed Eliot's early poetry as a lot more exploratory and challenging, calling his later poetry banal and bland, my essay aims to show that even though the poetry had shifted in its content, its significance, complexity, and experimentality …

Spared The Technicolor, Peter C. Friedman

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

"Persephone's Contemporary Dilemma: Consent, Sexuality, And "Female Empowerment." [2015], Cassandra Elizabeth Cerjanic

Master's Theses

Greek mythology never strays very far from Western imagination. Though every few years literature involving the infamous Gods tapers off into the back of our collective minds, a resurgence soon follows. The late Romantic literary movement (as popularized by Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelly, and John Keats) depended heavily upon Greco- Roman mythology to help illustrate characters that existed somewhere between the shadow of imagination and the truth of humanity. Perhaps in an attempt to harken back to Romanticism, contemporary poetry has once again given life to the Greek Gods. Mythological characters can be seen throughout the works of modern …

Finding Tuwaqachi, And Other Essays, Cory G. Ferrer

All NMU Master's Theses

This thesis is a collection in four parts, divided by genre with the exception of the titular essay series, Finding Tuwaqachi. Insecurity, affirmation, and our need to connection emerge as the primary themes of this work. The essay series, Finding Tuwaqachi, takes a close look at intentional community and center for alternative therapy located in southern Michigan during the 1970s, by examining several lives caught up in this project. Part two of this collection comprises a series of lyric essays which explore the need to be heard, as well as the ultimate fallibility of our attempts to understand and …

What The Fuck Is This?: Aesthetic Nature Of Being Or Ontology In The Poetry Of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Alexis Stephenson

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

“What the Fuck is This?” examines the intersection of phenomenology and poetry arguing for an aesthetic nature of Being and focuses on how we know or experience the world instead of Cartesian absolutes. This subjective knowledge does not compete against objective knowledge but simply recognizes the use that poetic language has for communicating the subjective knowledge from experience of being as it unfolds for us. The major movements of the thesis focus on aesthetic objects, aesthetic intersubjectivity, and the aesthetic self. These are labeled “aesthetic” because a phenomenological methodology reveals a dialectic between that which is unfolding and that which …

Dinosaur Nat'l, Joe Lennon

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This is a collection of tyranno-lyrical poems which force voice onto various absences and absurdities encountered in the project of constructing or deconstructing an American identity. The collection uses as a unifying conceit the personification of the four letters which have been replaced by the apostrophe in the abbreviation “NAT’L.” Iona appears as a speaking character in many of the poems, pulling an “I” character into conversation with her. Iona and I’s conversations rely on and mangle the poetic language commonly used to identify the nation and what does or doesn’t belong to it—especially the language of folk songs and …

Oscuridad Unraveled, Orlinda Pacheco

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Oscuridad Unraveled is a compilation of many stylistic poems. There are narrative poems interspersed with somewhat surreal poems that tell a story about the Oscuridad as a child and adult. As Oscuridad’s childhood story is unfolding so is her adult story causing a cyclical motion within reader and writer, or maybe a rollercoaster with many loops and turns. Nonetheless, it begins with poems that shaped a small innocent girl and leads to the creation of the adult woman who cannot have children, who embraces the passion of being “the other” and luxury of sex without consequence. This is a story …

The Secret Language Of The Desert: Poetry, Loss, And Awakening, Elisha P. Holt

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

The speaker of The Desert Survival Guide is seeking to reconcile his own disconnection, from the natural world, the cosmos, his family, and from his sense of his own humanity. The poems in The Desert Survival Guide are a healing ceremony, to come to a place of acceptance regarding the loss of my father. The semi-autobiographical speaker of these poems has lost the immediate physical presence of his father in his life but still retains a deep memory imprint of the father and an unresolved need to process the absence of the father. He is gradually establishing a new connection …

Welcome To The Planet: Fort Living Room O Rotting Sun, Michael T. Cooper

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

O Rotting Sun is a pair of long narrative poems that leap, spanning over an epic-length manuscript—175 pages of prose block, lyrical verse, and projective verse. Its chief poetic-operational modes are: inclusion, fragmentation, textual destructions, intentional omissions, intentional misspelling, large narrative leaps; all of which engage a poetics of doubt and multiplicity. O Rotting Sun is a jarring and jangly poem of resistance, intended if possible, for being read aloud and argued with: a provocation of intense meditation, reflection, and when successful, disintegration of anger & agonism—followed by a reintegration of the reader back into a community of change and …

Glass Shoulders, Carol Jean Simpson (Eva Warren)

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Glass Shoulders is a collection of poems that embody events from my life which have served as catalysts in the process of integrating myself emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually. In the poetry, the speaker searches for spiritual knowledge, and is guided toward meditation of Spirit as an internal reality to find healing. The narrative of the manuscript portrays the speaker’s deep introspection of self, exploring loss and resiliency through challenges surrounding grief, unrecovered abuses, and mood disorders. The inspiration for these poems arose from my contemplations on the incongruities between fate and free will, and how behaviors are influenced by the …

E To Em, Elizabeth M. Hogan

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

A poetry thesis exploring subjects of gender identity, sexuality, socialization, writing, and craft, and including a preface that credits Emily Dickinson and Adrienne Rich as primary influences. One-third of the manuscript features epistolary prose poems in conversation with Dickinson, while the remaining portion contains poetry written in either free verse, traditional poetic form, or field composition.

Le Flâneur Contemporain: The Wanderer In The 21st Century, Zachary Kocanda

Honors Projects

This creative project is a love letter to walking, poetry, and the French language. The flâneur is a French literary type, the most famous example being Charles Baudelaire. Baudelaire epitomizes la modernité, writing poetry about urban Paris in the nineteenth century. The flâneur's importance as a literary type continues in contemporary poetry. Through fifteen prose poems, the project examines what it means to wander in the twenty-first century.

The Recognition Of Micro Poetry As A Literary Art Form Across Time And Culture, Kaitlyn M. Dahle

Undergraduate Honors Theses

My creative thesis, titled, The Recognition of Micro Poetry as a Literary Art Form across Time and Culture, is on micro poetry and its prevalence in the literary world of today and throughout history with examples of writings from past authors, like Emily Dickinson and William Carlos Williams and even as far back as Ancient Greece’s Sappho. Examples of my own micro poetry are included in the thesis. The period followed by two dashes, or .//, mark the beginning of each micro poem I have written. The poems end with one single dash, or /, and each poem is …

A Rumba For Rothko And Other Poems, Dennis O'Connell

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

Throughout the last few years, I have been examining the role that objects play within my poetic production. My hope was to notice my own interaction with objects more precisely and to pursue poetic questions (and philosophical implications about subjectivity and objectivity) that have been asked before by modernist writers such as Gertrude Stein and William Carlos Williams. These two writers in particular had their own reasons for pursuing, through their writing, basic questions about representation of the world in art and language.

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 …

The Rebuff Of Discovery: A Collection Of Poems, Kayla M. Ireson

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This creative thesis is a retelling of events as a collection of poems. Struggling with mental illness most of my life, I base most of my writing in this odd juxtaposition—the struggle for life alternating with my delight in its splendor. I find myself writing about the most challenging times in my life along with the most magnificent.

The critical introduction explores and elaborates on the context and influences of my writing. Every line of poetry on every page has been a journey of reconciliation with my past and present—a journey deciphering who I am among all the leftovers of …

Azalea, Kimberly Renee Driggers

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This collection of poems, with its focus on home and absence, is named for the azalea, the thinking of home bush.

The Sorcerer, William Carlisle Goehring

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

A collection of poems from 2011-2015.

The Knowledge Weapon: Ways Of Knowing, Annette Christine Boehm

Dissertations

This collection of poems explores the language of knowledge and instruction. While it can provide a sense of security, what we are given as ‘knowledge’ is frequently unreliable or even misleading, and used much like a weapon.

Learning To Speak: Poems, Celina A. Gomez

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

This project is a collection of poetry that weaves together past, present, and the hopes of a future that causes change. It is set in South Texas and discusses borders spanning from social class, language, and identity. The collection primarily focuses on the Chican@ voice and the shame that comes from the borderlands. I have drawn from the Rio Grande Valley as a source of inspiration while also using family experiences, my own reaction to shame, and the possibilities of an empowered voice.

A Wingless Flight, Marilynn Skeggs

Masters Essays

No abstract provided.

According To The Gospel Of Haunted Women, Judith Roney

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

According to the Gospel of Haunted Women is a collection of seventy-five poems divided into four sections. The voices speaking within, are, indeed haunted by varying definitions. They bespeak complex, troubled emotions such as guilt, shame, and anxiety, yet work towards expressions of courage. The dead and the living are cajoled and accused, while others are provided a format through which they may be heard long after their mouths have closed. The poems are arranged in four sections. Section I, “We Begin,” consists of memoir pieces from the poet's early life. Section II, “We Speak,” is a dedicated space for …

Romantic Ideals In Contemporary Folk Music, Brett Schwartz

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines contemporary folk music from no earlier than 2006, specifically music of the bands The Decemberists, Fleet Foxes, and Bon Iver. Providing a close reading of select songs, I prove that modern music is seeing a revival in the Romantic Era and Transcendentalist ideals and philosophy. The works and philosophy of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), William Wordsworth (1770-1850), John Keats (1795-1821), as well as Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), among others and their critics are all considered for points of comparison to the modern lyrics. The reason for this revival is considered in the conclusion …

Two Tongues, Lana Ghannam

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

"Two Tongues" is a collection of poems that explores the societal norms that mixes American and Middle Eastern cultures. The use of sensory language empowers the speaker of these poems to break the barrier between both cultures and mold them into one significant place—the individual. Within these poems lie the exploration of identity—both religiously and culturally—through the speaker's family upbringing and her social settings, as well as the use of spoken language. This collection attempts to convey the struggles of a bicultural background through use of pure metaphor and sound play where language—Arabic and English—is an essential element to the …

Sky Lifting His Skirts, Thaddeus Harmon

Graduate Thesis Collection

An imbecilic invocation uttered by glass-fingered mannequins jaggedly gesticulating forgotten ballet moves in a future where skin is optional, and computers sneeze.

Beer Stein Poem, True Poem, Sick Poem, Erotic Poem, And Other Poems, Margaret Bower

Honors Theses

A collection of poems dealing with subjects like absurdity, strange love, and adulthood.

Instant Conductors, Mary Petralia

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Instant Conductors is a collection of poems meant to engage the reader in conversation about the imperfect nature of the world in relation to the imperfect nature of readerly experience. Walt Whitman wrote, “I have instant conductors all over me whether I pass or stop / they seize every object and lead it harmlessly through me.” And so the things on these pages are intent on transmitting what one experiences in the minutiae of memory and routine: the sounds that surround a blackwater tidepool, what one imagines happens behind the closed doors of the friendly neighbors, or what's heard in …

Is This Fire, Gregory Sherl

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Is This Fire is a collection of poems dealing with the themes of faith and loss. In one section, "The Third Testament," parts of the Bible have been reimagined. There are poems about Joan of Arc, as well as poems that touch on miscarriages, as well as the Columbine massacre. There are, of course, also love poems.

Cautery, Aaron Brossiet

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Cautery works with the tools of language and archetypes exploring memory, imagination, ecstasy, and suffering as well as life and death. The poems work to cauterize wounds and give scarred shape, but shape nonetheless, toward the future.