Poetry Commons^™

With Love, ; An Interdisciplinary And Intersectional Look At Why Creativity Is Essential, Theo Starr Gardner

Whittier Scholars Program

My Whittier Scholars Program self-designed major, Teaching Creativity, is a mixture of Art, Literature, and Education classes. My research and praxis classes have been focused on the ‘how?’s and 'why?’s of creativity, so it felt only right that my project should be a constructivist, generative project. The project I have been working on throughout my time at Whittier, and that has just fully come to fruition on April 11th, 2024, was a solo art gallery/open mic event entitled ‘With Love,’. With Love, was conceptually inspired by the research I’ve conducted on creativity and creative arts education over the past few …

H.D. And Women's Self-Image, Kristen Clay

Student Writing

This paper analyzes three works, “Thetis,” “Triplex,” and “Eurydice,” by modernist poet H.D. for the purpose of understanding how high-profile women characters can be used to explore the overarching similarities in female identity. This line of connection is found through the subject of each poem being figures from Greek mythology - Thetis, Helen, and Eurydice - and the themes in each poem being some variation of the formation of identity under male influence. In “Thetis,” the subject defines herself as a mother, and her role is shaped by the existence of her son, Achilles. In “Triplex,” Helen appeals to the …

Carol Ann Duffy And War Weariness, Ava Hickman

Student Writing

An analysis of Carol Ann Duffy's poems "War Photographer," "Last Post," and "Poker in the Falklands with Henry & Jim." These poems explore the effects of war on soldiers and civilians alike, detailing the psychological changes people go through during times of war.

Denise Levertov And Changing For God’S Presence, Jeremiah Veldhuyzen

Student Writing

This paper is about the struggles experienced as a person of faith and how to react to those struggles.

Appealing To Truancy: How Mary Oliver Escapes Americana, John Wise

Student Writing

How the work of Mary Oliver disagrees with the American Cultural way of thinking.

Adrienne Rich: Examining Change Through Individual Introspection, Alexandra Miller

Student Writing

Adrienne Rich, well known for writing about her sexual identity and feminist activism, has written poetry throughout her changing lifetime. Her unique path through life has led readers to analyze development across her works. Individual introspection can be the source of this evolution in her poetry, allowing many of her readers to relate. Adrienne Rich’s poems, “Origins of History and Consciousness”, “Diving into the Wreck”, and “Splittings” bring to light self-reflection and how we navigate change through introspection.

Honeysuckles & Irises: Effigies Of The Land, Ami` L. Hanna-Huff

English Creative Writing Theses

Here is a memoir of my paternal line through the lens of my Great-Grandmother and myself. A reclamation of the land I hail from and a connection to a history previously felt distant, this examination of race and gender explicitly focused on the African American Southern female experience; I try to make sense of the juxtaposing positions in our lives. The culture built from its creation through Tennessee personified. Here, I integrate history and theory with lyrics and prose to experience the eighty-one years of progress brought between our births and the lingering anxiety of slavery. My great-grandmother, Hazel Irene …

Poetic Portraits Of Older Women In The Great Black Swamp, Sandra L. Faulkner

ICS Fellow Lectures

Dr. Faulkner discusses the importance of oral histories and listening to older women by presenting poetic portraits of older women in the Bowling Green area that she co-created from oral histories. This was a collaborative project with The Wood County Committee on Aging, the BGSU archives, and local women Faulkner interviewed about their experiences across their life course and contributions to our community. These poetic portraits and oral histories will be archived at the BGSU libraries for all of us to learn from.

Tando-Huni Ug Uban Pang Balak | Treading Softly: Review Of Marjorie Evasco’S It Is Time To Come Home, Ester Tapia

Akda: The Asian Journal of Literature, Culture, Performance

No abstract provided.

Desire: A Case Study, Shelby Perlis

Toyon: Multilingual Literary Magazine

None. :)

I, Discomfort Woman: A Fugue In F Minor, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Queer Ecologies: A Final Syllabus/Zine Product Of Our Independent Study, Yeh Seo Jung, Ray Craig

Crossings: Swarthmore Undergraduate Feminist Research Journal

This zine is the product of our independent study course Queer Ecologies, which is an exploration of bio-social systems using a queer and feminist theoretical lens. We aim to look critically at knowledge formation and construct alternative visions for more just and sustainable relationships between science, nature, and ourselves. While queer theory most directly interrogates the normative structure of heterosexuality both in humans and in biology more broadly, these studies include analyses of hierarchy, power, and value. Queer Ecology can be used to examine phenomena such as climate change, extinction, pollution, species hierarchies, agricultural practices, resource extraction, and human population …

Muele Las Palabras Con Canela: How Queer Xicanx Writing Practices Reclaim Indigeneity, Karen Zurita

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

My thesis project is a multi-genre story in itself, dedicated to my community. By using Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza and Luz Calvo and Catriona Rueda Esquibel’s Decolonize Your Diet, I emphasize the importance of Xicanx writing needing to reflect their Indigenous identity by intertwining the spiritual and physical in their writing practices. In the process of creating this thesis project I was able to heal my own writing and have it shapeshift into creating a summer poetry class for high school students in the Humboldt County Area. In all, I found these writing practices to be crucial …

The Kin-Ship, Zheng Moham Wang

Comparative Woman

This is a group of two English poems the author composed separately in 2019 and 2021 about the imaginary scenes of his grandpa and mother from a Iu-Mien family of Southeast Asia and Southwestern China. The group was submitted to the upcoming Kinship volume of the Comparative Woman journal of Louisiana State University.

Kinship Poems, K. Avvirin Gray

Comparative Woman

In the appended collection of three poems, canopied under the title, ”Kinship Poems” I explore the possibilities for and practice of kinship between Native and African American women. In my first poem, ”Auntie,” a prose poem, I center non-sanguineous kinship affiliation in the decolonial project. In my final poem, I give equal consideration to biological kinship, by staging a speaker’s direct address to her unborn child.

“Something Large And Old Awoke”: Ecopoetics And Compassion In Tracy K. Smith’S Wade In The Water, Kaitlin Hoelzer

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

Susa Young Gates Award Essay

First Place

Both historical and contemporary Black poets have used their work to identify, condemn, and suggest solutions to problems stemming from racism in American society. Indeed, as Arnold Rampersad notes in his introduction to The Oxford Anthology of African American Poetry, many Black poets use “poetry as a vehicle of protest against social injustice in America.” Art is inherently political, even when its arguments do not overtly engage in political debates. As Lorraine Hansberry argues, all art is rooted in a particular social and political consciousness. The choice is “not whether one will …

"Dear Stanford: You Must Reckon With Your History Of Sexual Violence" By Seo-Young Chu, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

In 2000 a Stanford professor raped me. My rape is now older than I was. (I’m still not as old as he was.) The more time passes the more I’m struck by Stanford’s apathy and fecklessness about sexual violence. I wrote a letter asking Stanford to stop compounding the abuse and to reckon with its rape culture. This letter—including the “Incomplete Compilation of Links to Sources Documenting Stanford’s History of Sexual Violence, in Chronological Order”—should be mandatory reading for administrators, faculty, students, alumni, and stakeholders at both Stanford and CUNY. #MeToo #MeTooAcademia

Womanist Poetics: Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, And Audre Lorde, Aya Telmissany

Theses and Dissertations

Today, the sentimentality associated with poetry is often condescendingly dubbed in a patriarchal society as “feminine poetry.” The first women poets who dared to attempt the pen were often met with attacks on their femaleness and harsh critiques of their writing which was likened to sorcery and witchcraft. Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, and Audre Lorde are three American women poets who countered these attacks and turned them inside out in favor of their own womanist poetics. They wrote about experiencing the world as women and most importantly about experiencing poetry as women. What happens to poetry when a woman appropriates …

The Weak, The Wicked, The Divine: A Collection Of Poems, Grace Hedin

University Honors Theses

The Weak, the Wicked, the Divine is a collection of thirteen original poems based on the female figures of the Iliad and the Odyssey with scholarly analysis. The Introduction gives background on Homer and his works as well as their impact on both modern day and myself. The second section contains both the original work of Grace Hedin and the author's scholarly analysis of both their own work and the figure the poem is based upon. The Conclusion will hold the final thoughts and dedications from the author. An audio reading of all poems is attached to this thesis, with …

“But For Those Of Us Who Live Here”: Performance Of Work And Community By Women Employed In Rural, Predominantly White, Small-Town Schools, Telena M. Turner

Masters Theses, 2020-current

Rural, small towns are incredibly complex cultural centers. Although rural places are consistently portrayed as unchanging, the operation of cultural and identity within these locations is consistently on the move. Using reflexive interviewing, poetic transcription, autoethnographic writing, this project (re)presents poems on community and identity from five women employed in schools in rural, mostly White, small towns in the Central Appalachian region. Analyzing the poems through concepts in performance studies and work on space and place, this project positions movement and change at the center of small towns and examines how notions of rural place and community are performed through …

Anatomy: The Makings Of Me, Janey Locander

Women's and Gender Studies: Student Scholarship & Creative Works

Anatomy & the Makings of me:

(A Chapbook)

Back in 2020 quarantine took a mental toll on many, including myself. I was already overwhelmed with academics, personal issues, and an overall pessimistic outlook. For years I've struggled with my body image, and for the past year or so I've been trying to improve on my self-love and acceptance. Taking back my body and my feelings towards it by keeping centered on my thoughts, not the thoughts of others. Hence the concept for this chapbook project.

Anatomy is a look at all the squishy bits of matter and emotion I’ve been …

1% Left Of 100: Taino History And Puerto Rican Identity, Alanis Gonzalez Torres

Undergraduate Research Symposium

1% left of 100 is a documentary poetics research project exploring the confluence of identity, family, and language. Crafted in a hybrid format that mixes Spanish and English according to my personal idiolect, which is itself a product of my heritage as a Puerto Rican, Africa, native Taino American, this poem engages with exciting new approaches to thinking about race which liberate us from talking about physical features and takes us instead toward race as a social fact, a product of culture, history, and family. I seek to intervene in a narrative of American history that, though it teaches about …

We: Women In A Traditional (Zapotec) World, Ida Day

Modern Languages Faculty Research

This chapter focuses on the female roles and relationships in Natalia Toledo Paz’s bilingual collection of poems, Ca gunaa gubidxa, ca gunaa guiiba’ risaca/Mujeres de sol, mujeres de oro (2002). The author sets her poems in a world, where all the themes and plots are performed by women. Natalia is the daughter of Francisco Toledo, a prominent Mexican painter, sculptor, and graphic artist, and Olga de Paz, a Zapotec weaver and hammock maker. In 2004, she was awarded a prestigious Nezahualcóyotl Prize for Indigenous-Language Literature. Her bilingual works (Zapotec/Spanish) have been recognized in numerous anthologies all over the world and …

Fashioning The Flapper: Clothing As A Catalyst For Social Change In 1920s America, Julia Wolffe

Honors Program Theses

Fashion has been a catalyst for social change throughout human history. Fashion in 1920s America in particular reflects society's rapidly evolving attitudes towards gender and race. Beginning with how corsetry heavily restricted women for nearly four hundred years up until the twentieth century, this thesis explores how clothing has acted as a tool for societal progression following World War I and Women's Suffrage and during the Jazz Age and The Harlem Renaissance. Specifically, this thesis examines how the influence of jazz music and dance that originated from Black American communities led to the creation of the flapper evening dress. The …

Great River Legs, Laura Madeline Wiseman

Zea E-Books Collection

Great River Legs is a lyric collection of prose poetry, creative nonfiction, and found poetry. This creative response documents my 1,398 mile, 25-day bicycle ride from Muscatine, Iowa, to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, between October 2017–March 2018. The journey took place in legs over breaks during the school year, with two additional back-to-back weekend rides that started the adventure.

In her latest book, Great River Legs, Laura Madeline Wiseman takes you on an intimate journey as she weaves in and out of a cross-country, long distance bike ride. In this beautifully curated book that includes prose poetry, creative non-fiction and …

The Legacy Book In America, 1664–1792, Roxanne Harde, Lindsay Yakimyshyn

Zea E-Books Collection

Legacy books in colonial America were instruments for the transmission of cultural values between generations: the dying mother (usually) instructing and advising children on the path to salvation and heavenly reunions. They were a popular and influential form of women’s discourse that distilled the ideologies of the religious establishment into practical and emotional lessons for lay persons, especially the young.

This collection draws together legacy texts written by colonial American women and girls: five mother’s legacy books and two legacies by children, organized here chronologically. These legacies were writ­ten in anticipation of dying, making awareness of death central to the …

Looking Back, Or Re-Visioning: Contemporary American Jewish Poets On “Lot’S Wife”, Anat Koplowitz-Breier

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Although mentioned only twice in Genesis (19:17, 26), Lot’s wife has been a topic of much discussion amongst both traditional and modern commentators and exegetes. The traditional midrashim seek to explain why she chose to disregard the instructions she was given and the nature of her punishment. In doing so, they follow two principal directions, representing her a) negatively as a wicked sinner, a Sodomite who acted as such even before disobeying the divine decree not to look backwards—thus linking her disobedience with her intrinsic character (e.g., curious, greedy, inhospitable, faithless); or b) positively as a loving mother and daughter. …

Poems Of Debate And Praise: Women As Published Authors In Sixteenth-Century France, Anna Soo-Hoo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Non-fictional, published poetic exchanges between men and women in sixteenth-century France provide new perspectives into how women writers operated in a literary culture whose main producers and dominant voice were male. Contrary to the notion repeated by many critics that women of that period were supposed to stay out of the public sphere, my study finds that publishing a woman’s poems did not destroy her reputation, and there appears to have been no major backlash when a man decided to include poems by a female contemporary in his book. My study takes as its point of departure the notion that …

'Disembodied Bones': Recovering The Poetry And Prose Of Elinor Wylie 2021, Sarah R. Bullock

Master's Theses

Picking a book to read is like diving for a pearl, writes Elinor Wylie, a 20th Century American poet, novelist, essayist and prominent magazine literary editor. In her essay "The Pearl Diver", she writes that it is the diver that risks the unknown- unaided by diving equipment in the form of library indexes-who gains the greatest joy, Wylie states (Fugitive Prose, 869). Wylie explains:

I venture to perceive an analogy between the rebellious pearl diver and myself, in my slight experience with public libraries...how much more delightful, how much more stimulating, to abandon the paraphernalia of card indexes and mahogany …

Poetry Beyond The Page: A Case For Spoken Word Poetry In Florida's Secondary Classrooms, Sarah Matherly

Senior Honors Theses

Florida’s B.E.S.T. Standards, Florida’s most recent K-12 educational standards to promote literacy, lack the rising art of Spoken Word Poetry. However, Florida’s Department of Education should integrate Spoken Word into Florida’s Secondary curriculum. Spoken Word Poetry, by its definition, holds researched benefits that align with the B.E.S.T. Standard’s poetry recommendations and literacy-centered goals. In light of such benefits, Florida’s Department of Education should consider various Spoken Word poets and poems to include in Florida’s Secondary Curriculum, as well as explore the resources and integration methods included in this thesis for both teachers and students.