Creative Writing Commons^™

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 Bedroom And The Barnyard: Zoomorphic Lust Through Territory, Procedure, And Shelter In ‘The Miller’S Tale’” & Haunchebones, Danielle N. Byington

Undergraduate Honors Theses

“The Bedroom and the Barnyard: Zoomorphic Lust Through Territory, Procedure, and Shelter in ‘The Miller’s Tale’” is an academic endeavor that takes Chaucer’s zoomorphic metaphors and similes and analyzes them in a sense that reveals the chaos of what is human and what is animal tendency. The academic work is expressed in the adjunct creative project, Haunchebones, a 10-minute drama that echoes the tale and its zoomorphic influences, while presenting the content in a stylized play influenced by Theatre of the Absurd and artwork from the medieval and early renaissance period.

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 …

A Negotiation In Meaning: Identifying American Cultural Touchstones, Jayne Jaya Todai

Honors Theses

How can discussing a poem lead to a meaningful conversation? What if Americans used common poems as their nation's cultural touchstones? In my essay, I will explore how poems that serve as American cultural touchstones might develop better communicators within the United States. I will propose a template that determines which poems would qualify as these national touchstones.

Impact Of Ekphrastic Poetry Upon My Writing, Lacy C. Snapp

Honors Theses

This thesis contains an introduction in which I will define ekphrastic poetry and provide an explication of some ekphrastic poetry written throughout history, followed by a conclusion in which I will include my own poetry, both ekphrastic and non, followed by an explication of my progress. The first section will be about questioning how the selected poets use their chosen image to enhance their own writing, and the true purpose of ekphrastic poetry. The second section will show how my poetry has developed since this project began and I started focusing on ekphrastic poetry. When I write ekphrastic poetry, not …

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.

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.

Shot Away, Quincy Scott Jones

Writing Theses

No abstract provided.

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.

Who I Am Through The Lens Of Distortion, Mackenzie Alena Boyer Ms.

Capstone Projects

Who I Am Through the Lens of Distortion is a work of fact and fiction, mixing some of Mackenzie’s actual life events with surrealistic/dreamlike details. During Mackenzie’s time at Otterbein she has loved blending her loves of fiction writing and poetry into one beautiful art form. This project is a culmination of just that. Mackenzie has chosen to focus on her life as a college student, in regards to her memories and her growth as an independent adult, feminist, woman, and writer with distortion of place and time to spice things up. In this project she attempts to answer the …

A Wingless Flight, Marilynn Skeggs

Masters Essays

No abstract provided.

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 …

Aina: A Modern-Day History Chant Of A Hawaiian Place, Helen Dano

Dissertations and Theses

No abstract provided.

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.

Santa Cruz, Paden Grey

Dissertations and Theses

No abstract provided.

Un-Becoming: A Confluence Of The Poetic Voice And The Sociological Imagination, Stephanie Walls

Department of Writing and Communication Theses

No abstract provided.

The Monster That Can't Be Defeated Here, Aaron Theodore Morris

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

This thesis is a poetry manuscript that establishes its footing in multiple poetic traditions, particularly blank verse and free verse, in order to discuss general themes of separation, isolation, and alienation on both the personal and social fronts in an imaginative light that proves aesthetically pleasing and points the reader in the direction of solutions to these problems. While the poems of the first section generally speak to issues of both the struggle to tame language to one’s own desires and to issues of personal alienation, the poems of later sections branch out more into the world in general and …

Hard Luck Baby, Tanya Lipscomb

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Hard Luck Baby is a collection that elucidates the life of a southern, black mother as she grapples with her culture, family, love and the complex reality of black life in America. Hannah, is a woman who was born in the bubbling 40s, raised in the racial 60s and raptured in the drug-infested 80s. It is through these decades that the rough edges of America are exposed. She discusses her life experiences in a manner that allows readers to touch, as much as empathy will allow, the feelings that contour the deepest areas of her barrel. She shares her first …

In The Dream House, Tamzin F. Elliott

Senior Projects Spring 2015

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College

"I Looked Here; I Looked There; Nowhere Could I See My Love." The Problem Of "Presence" In The Black Riders And Other Lines, Nat Gustafson-Sundell

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

Although the poems of The Black Riders and other lines, by Stephen Crane, have often been treated as if they are simple--easy to interpret and easy to categorize--these poems actually support a multiplicity of interpretations. The multiplicity of interpretations available in the poems informs the possibility of tracing a variety of interrelationships through the poetry. While a few previous scholars have treated the poems as if they are interrelated, the interrelationship of the poetry has not been explicitly and substantially addressed as a feature of the poetry. The poems, in fact, support a combinatorial complexity only previously hinted at in …

White Shadows: Perception And Imagination In Poetry, Madison Chartier

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

In the spring of my sophomore year, I enrolled in the introductory course to writing poetry here at Butler University. I am not naturally a poet, but I have an appreciation for reading poetry and, at the time of the course, was curious to try my hand at the craft, despite having had little experience prior to the collegiate level. As may be expected, I ran into obstacles.

I enjoyed playing with language in experiments of sound and rhythm, but, despite the vast array of assonance, consonance, enjambment, and every other technique I employed, the poems I created throughout the …

Übermensch: A Feminist, Literary, & Artistic Rebuke To Modern Patriarchy In The Institution Of Liberal Arts Education, Virginia Valenzuela

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Projects

Übermensch: a Feminist, Literary, and Artistic Rebuke to Modern Patriarchy in the Institution of Liberal Arts Education is a multi-genre, multi-dimensional hybrid project that revels in and manipulates conventional forms of literary analysis, creative expression, and feminist politics. Through a feminist literary analysis of Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons, accompanied by a creative companion of poems and personal essays, the author intends to elucidate society’s tactics of dominating, silencing and exploiting the female sex. In this way, her project intends to rationally and passionately describe the inescapable power of conformity in the lives of American college students, as well …

Fire In The Garden, Troy A. Myers Mfa

All Student Scholarship

Fire in the Garden is a collection of poems primarily confessional in nature that deal with changes during mid-life: moving to a new house, having a son go to college and the subsequent abandonment of the marriage by one partner. The biographical experiences are often accompanied by landscape details taken from the garden and yard of the new house where the speaker lives.

Her Name Is Quintana Roo: Essays, Poetry, Memoir, Linda Q. Lambert Mfa

All Student Scholarship

Her name is Quintana Roo is a collection of essays, poetry, and memoir through the lens of the author's experience as a child, mother, wife, journalist, and librarian. The dominant thread is the establishment of a septuagenarian's enchantment with words and writing.

Eyre, Andrea Lesley Adams Mfa

All Student Scholarship

Charlotte Bronte's semi-autobiographical 1847 novel Jane Eyre is the source inspiration for EYRE, an illustrated adaptation . EYRE takes the protagonist Jane, an orphaned governess, and places her in a fantastical construct which bridges the worlds of 19th century Japan and England. Jane's story becomes one of an unexpected warrior battling the dark demons of alienation and desire which populate her psyche. Characters are reinterpreted as mythological creatures from within the Japanese spiritual pantheon.

No Invented Mystery, Blake Love Mfa

All Student Scholarship

This collection of poems is comprised of many recollected experiences that are personally revealing about me, both as poet and person. I often explore the dynamics of domesticity between queer men and detail the dissolution of coming together with another. Laughter as a means of subverting or avoiding trauma is a theme that runs throughout my thesis. It is intended to be read like one might view a mosaic. The narrative threads tie together by its end to tell a story that speaks to a sense of abjection and otherness many of us carry. To temper the intensity of the …

Woodlawn: A Collection Of Working Class Poems, Anthony Travis Shoot

Masters Theses

This thesis includes a collection of working-class poems that explore such issues as poverty, work, racism, family, and substance abuse through the lens of class. It also includes a critical introduction that gives a brief overview of the history and current state of working-class studies, specifically poetry. In this thesis I relate the work of contemporary poets such as Jim Daniels and Simon J. Ortiz to my own work, while explaining the themes of contemporary poets compiled in anthologies such as Working Classics: An Anthology and American Working Class Literature.