Poetry Commons^™

New Commandments, Jacob Sussman

Masters Theses

I reach into the earth, pull out mud-encrusted objects, and recombine them to define new meanings. With every object transposed, the past breaks down; new potentials form. “New Commandments” recombines historical symbolism through an intuitive building, destroying, and merging to reimagine or re-establish meaning.

The work critiques rites of passage, masculinity, and stereotypes by deconstructing how histories, ideologies, and preconceptions form.

As a queer person raised in-between Judaism and Christianity, social preconceptions and religious expectations festered my formation. Our choice is taken away at this moment of conception. To take back autonomy, I reimagine historical, and religious symbolism and transmute …

Spit Brimming With Futures, Penny Molesso

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

SPIT BRIMMING WITH FUTURES is an immersive video and audio installation that uses ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) to investigate the intersection of transgender and neurodivergent identity, expressing an urgent need to imagine stories about transgender, autistic people that affirm our agency and autonomy amidst a political climate that weaponizes neurodivergence to delegitimize trans experiences. The American political right’s vilification of transgender people is used to uphold structures of white supremacy and heteropatriarchy that become destabilized when rigid binary gender categories are challenged. The political right has a vested interest in keeping trans people out of public view, thus weaponizing …

From Ictus To Raptus, Andrea Abel

Senior Projects Spring 2023

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Multidisciplinary Studies of Bard College

FROM ICTUS TO RAPTUS

From Ictus to Raptus is a story about the emergence of sound. This performance is only a human attempt to capture the Event from which all existence emerges (Ictus), and an attempt to interpret and rejoice in the resulting complexity of the world, by tracing multiplicity back to singularity and reuniting it with its origin (Raptus).

Reading Life, Paige Eplin

Literacy Practice and Research

No abstract provided.

Literacy = Human Connection, Julie Luey

Literacy Practice and Research

No abstract provided.

It Won’T Be Easy, Allison Arkush

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

Interdisciplinary artist Allison Arkush engages a wide range of materials, modalities, and research in her practice. In It Won’t Be Easy, Arkush places and piles her multimedia sculptures throughout the gallery to create installations that overlap ­with her writing and poetry, sometimes layering in (or extending out to) audio and video components. This approach facilitates the probing exploration of prevailing value systems through a flattening of hierarchies among and between humans, the other-than-human, and the inanimate—though no less lively. Her work meditates on and ‘vendiagrams’ things forsaken and sacred, the traumatic and nostalgic. The exhibition title acknowledges that the …

Do You Want To Be Tender?, Leah Grant

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, you will find a body of writings and artworks that reflect Leah Grant’s art practice and research. Throughout the paper, you will see Leah alternate back and forth between her artwork and writings. Leah Grant addresses her personal experience as a Black woman and what it means it explore vulnerability through understanding how the relationships around her affects the relationship she has with herself. Leah has created a collection of poems, prints, and video and audio collages that assist her with revealing and concealing.

Before You Grow Fruit, Stella Rose Schneeberg

Senior Projects Spring 2021

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

The Barren Springs Songbook, Caroline Grace Sutphin

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

The Barren Springs Songbook is a poetry collection exploring Appalachian themes through the lens of three representative characters and my own experience. The poems presented are in blank verse and lean heavily on musicality, as each poem features an epigraph from my own Great Uncle Henry’s song lyrics. The poetry explores themes of poverty, folklore, feminism, and Christianity within the context of Barren Springs, an insular Appalachian community. The characters of Henry, India, and Myrtle provide a glimpse into how things have been in my family history, and the more modern poems representing myself show the cultural shifts that are …

Growth Theory, Samantha Leon

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

GROWTH THEORY reckons with a natural world in distress and imagines what attributes and learnings are needed for the individual to become a more beneficial part of the natural world. What does a person’s interaction with their surroundings say about them, and say about the surroundings? Violence, art, relationships, community are all examined along with the mediums through which we record our reality: speaking, writing, singing, taking photos. Despite covering a breadth of physical places and topics, a central tension that takes place between fear and curiosity colors the manuscript throughout. Poems are ordered by subject or temporal consideration, but …

Universe Of Things: A Human Presentation Of Food-For-Thought., Madeline Halpern

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

I present this statement under three loose categories: People, Objects and their Environment. I consider People as human, Objects as art objects, domestic objects, and food, and Environment as the shared space of the former groups. Food directs this statement as I present each concept and creative process as a metaphorical dish. Material exploration carried me from a direct practice of reorienting acrylic paint and questioning object functionality through personified sculptures into theoretical thesis work in which I use interpersonal relations and the idea of consumption to translate tactile, gustatory and olfactory sensations into digital film. In this meal I …

Sea Squad, Liam Geary Baulch

The Goose

The Sea Squad is a band of cheerleaders against climate change. Taking action as a team in formation, they gather momentum, inviting all people to cheer with them, mimicking the infinitely expandable nature of the seas' molecular structure. The work was developed and performed as a bilingual project at Est-Nord-Est in Saint-Jean-Port-Joli, Quebec, Canada, and has since been performed and exhibited internationally. The following poems are some of the chants that Sea Squad use to get a crowd cheering together against climate change.

Mindfulness Of Minnows, Will Hollis

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Literature is a deeply personal and interpersonal act from the author to the reader. In some way the author is attempting to capture their interpretation of space and time inside the vehicle of language. Through metaphor and enjambment, syntax and imagery, this thesis attempts to render the contemporary experience of the artist as he is grounded in location and interpretation. The lens used in inspecting the world is biological and philosophical, seeking and hiding from the truth.

Nature and science are used as linking languages in the collections of poems, seeking to be united with emotion based in the bedrock …

Poetry Of Roe 8, Nandi Chinna

Landscapes: the Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language

Poetry of Roe 8

The occasion for the writing of these poems was activism surrounding the controversial highway known as the Roe 8 extension in the areas of Cockburn and Fremantle in Western Australia. Planned in the 1950s, Roe 8 is contentious for a number of reasons, including extraordinary political deals over funding, undue process regarding environmental reporting, lack of a business case, inadequate noise and traffic modelling, erasure of Indigenous heritage sites, and clearing of the sensitive Beeliar wetlands and Coolbellup banksia woodlands which were designated a Threatened Ecological Community in 2016. During the summer of 2016/2017 contractors started …

Finding Aid To The Collection Of Lilla Cabot Perry Materials., Lilla Cabot Perry, Colby College Special Collections

Finding Aids

The Collection of Lilla Cabot Perry Materials contains clippings, correspondence, two diaries, published and unpublished manuscripts, a memorial exhibit document, two portrait paintings (William Dean Howells, Edwin Arlington Robinson) and photograph items.

Lilla Cabot Perry (1848-1933) was born in Boston, a member of the prominent Cabot family. She married Thomas Sargeant Perry, a literature professor at Harvard, and through him became friends with writers such as Henry James and William Dean Howells. Perry wrote several volumes of poetry: "Heart of the Weed" (1886), "From the Garden of Hellas" (1891), "Impressions" (1898), and "Jar of Dreams" (1923). Primarily known as an …

A Familiar House, William Lenard

Theses and Dissertations

The landscapes of my home in Connecticut are important to me. When I was young, I went to the woods for seclusion and comfort. While I wandered through the woods, I discovered a passion for storytelling. Now that I no longer live in New England, I miss the familiar landscapes of home. As a way to portray my sentiment, I write poetic narratives and create objects to illustrate natural landscapes.

I combine my interests of classic Americana art and literature with brutalist architecture and modern furniture to create immersive installations. I work with concrete and hardwood to materially bridge the …

Orphan Eye, Megan Wilson

MFA Program for Poets & Writers Masters Theses Collection

These are poems written by M. M. Wilson between the dates of August 2015 and March 2018. These poems were written in Belchertown, MA and Amherst, MA.

After The Big Wind Stops I See Gentle Waves, Eunji (Jubee) Lee

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis covers my reflections on the inspirations and the motivations behind selected works including my candidacy exhibition; Resonance and my thesis exhibition; after the big wind stops I see gentle waves. It contains my life throughout my MFA studies and the development of my art practice. Through its story-within-a-story method of narration and my describing streams of my thoughts, I am attempting to explain the processes of my development and the discoveries I have made, the little things in my daily life, and the big turning points that inspired me. My work and this document have been strongly determined …

Tygr 2017: Student Art And Literary Magazine, Brianna Rose, Luke Jungermann, William Greiner, Jill Forrestal

TYGR: Student Art and Literary Magazine Archives (1985-2017)

TYGR is the student art and literary magazine for Olivet Nazarene University

Theme: Vision.

[Historical Muse] The Tyger -- William Blake, p. iii.

The Makings Of An Ep: From Silence To Portable Sounds, Emily Ream

Senior Honors Theses

The creation of an EP is a process that requires skills in multiple areas. Once, creating an EP was only available to those who garnered resources and support from a record label. However, an increasing number of aspiring musicians are writing, recording, and making their music available for download or purchase without the assistance of a record label. Doing this successfully and excellently requires application of knowledge in areas such as literature, theology (for Christian artists), music theory, music technology, and marketing. This thesis will describe one process used to turn inspiration into a tangible product that one can purchase …

A Window The Color Of Her Sunburn, Joana Stillwell

Theses and Dissertations

I use video and material fragments to investigate the collapse of virtual and physical spaces as memories, lived environments, and digital interfaces become overlaid and interchangeable. I am interested in the capacity for technology to propose alternative strategies in which to engage with the world as we continue to extend ourselves in new and enduring methods. Seemingly unremarkable fragments offer new potentials in questioning meaning, worth, and care within spaces of downtime, boredom, and play.

This document accompanies my thesis exhibition a window the color of her sunburn. It provides background information on selected fragments and residues from my own …

Explaining Poetry To The Open Heart, Matthew Wayne Larrimore

English Theses & Dissertations

“Explaining Poetry to the Open Heart” is a creative writing thesis of poetry. It makes use of lyric and narrative poems that utilize sound, imagery, and other creative devices in order to communicate the narrator’s relationships with place, others, and self to the reader. A shifting point of view alternately restricts and expands the reader’s perspective in order to direct attention toward the reader’s own perceptions of the narrator, the world, and ultimately herself.

Tygr 2016: Student Art And Literary Magazine, Jill Forrestal, William Greiner, Patrick Kirk, Brittlee Cadle

TYGR: Student Art and Literary Magazine Archives (1985-2017)

TYGR is the student art and literary magazine for Olivet Nazarene University

Theme: Elements.

[Historical Muse] The Tyger -- William Blake, p. 1.

Vex, A Rawlings

The Goose

"Vex" is a visual poem from the serial work Dump. The series focuses on language discarded at rural Canadian landfill sites. "Vex" was sourced at Kennisis Lake Landfill Site, July 2014.

Tygr 2015: Student Art And Literary Magazine, Jill Forrestal, William Greiner, Patrick Kirk, Katelyn Oprondek

TYGR: Student Art and Literary Magazine Archives (1985-2017)

TYGR is the student art and literary magazine for Olivet Nazarene University.

[Historical Muse] The Tyger -- William Blake, p. vi.

Memoric Form: Poem As Memory, Lawrence V. Eby

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Machinist in the Snow is a narrative long poem, much like a novel in verse that deals with the loss of memory and environmental rebirth. In the book, the narrator exiles himself into a frozen nature and attempts to return the frozen wasteland into its former, flourishing environment. The poems take on the memoric form of memory in a wide range of poetic forms from the traditional sonnet, haiku, or villanelle, to a scattered projective verse. In the center of these poems is an attempt to mimic the mind in the way that it shifts, in its moments of clarity, …

Codemakers, Dawn Manning

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Codemakers is a book of poems by Dawn Manning divided into three sections: "Topophilia," "Goodwill," and "Women's Work."

A Turkish Dictionary, Andrew Wessels

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The poems in this manuscript, A Turkish Dictionary, probe a number of related issues: What is the relationship between a word and its object? What is the connection between meaning in two different languages? How do we live in a city overwhelmed with history? What is necessary? How do we accept knowing that we cannot know? These and other questions constitute the investigative purpose of the manuscript as specifically and actively an exploration of the questions rather than an argument for a final, singular answer. Structurally, the manuscript uses two poetic forms: dictionary poems and prosaic poems. The dictionary poems …

From Excess Exhibit, Zach Kleyn, Amaranth Borsuk, Kate Durbin

SPECS journal of art and culture

No abstract provided.

Hands, Holly Butchyk

Holly Butchyk

No abstract provided.