Poetry Commons^™

Happy Objects And Bloom Spaces: Investigating The Potential Of Rupi Kaur's Poetry, Miguel Vega

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

In response to the movement of what is considered and labeled as “Instagram poetry,” poet and critic Rebecca Watts argues that to consider “artless” poetry as “poetry” we are denigrating the artform. This project centers around Watts’ claim that “the reader is dead” due to their encounter with such poetry. This project acts as a conversation that seeks to understand why certain forms of art are considered a “threat” to those who engage with them, as well as to their respective fields. Using affect theory (specifically the theory of the happy object) we can begin to understand why we gravitate …

Chronic Poetics: A Waiting Room Of One's Own, Madeleine Simmons

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

This article explores chronic poetics, through my personal lens I take readers on a walk- through of poetry and the discussions surrounding chronic illnesses. I examine the current state of chronic illness and the nuances to its discussion. I analyze chronic illness in the context of disability studies, and touch on the tensions of categorizing chronic illness as a disability. As well as how to best navigate reading chronic poetics, as poets engage in new territories as they form a new language to describe their circumstances. While analyzing multiple poems from different authors, I explore why specifically the vessel of …

Crafting The Fever, Andrea Nikki Harlin

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

The Hibiscus Snake is a collection of poetry investigating the female experience encountering danger. She explores psychic landscapes descended in the unconscious uncanny, the feminine body within the context of horror, and lyrical poems about living in working class communities in San Bernardino. The collection attempts to subvert the presentation of the female body in Horror genres, moving it from a position of victimization to empowerment. In other poems, the speaker ventures into horror-like psychic landscapes filled with images representing the anxiety experienced growing up in a city where danger is quite real. The protagonist risks these journeys to overcome …

A Meditation On I, We, And Consciousness In "Only We Can Pull", Allyson Elizabeth Jeffredo

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

In a society focused on the individual, how is community formed? As individuals predisposed to the built-in barrier of our body, our skin, how do we mediate between the self and the external? During this mediation on the barriers between our body, ourselves, and the outside world, how is consciousness simultaneously conflicted and built upon? What does it mean to be alive, to be a complex individual surrounded by a multitude of complex individuals? Can we, as a society, learn to focus balance the community and the individual? ONLY WE CAN PULL attempts to answer these questions through a series …

Wild Embrace, Timothy Hatch

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

WILD EMBRACE is a collection of poetry that explores the themes of abuse, survival, and fragility. The speaker of these poems, older and distanced from the abuse, asks what it means to be a survivor, and explores our obligation of compassion that, as human beings, we owe one another.

While much of the work in this collection is rooted in personal experience, it is not intended to be read as memoir or autobiography. Many of these poems may have begun as lived experience, but between memory, the transcription of memory, and their final form on the printed page, they have …

Vs, Bolin Jue

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

VS is a poetic exercise in rhyme and rhythm. An exercise attempting to camouflage ideas in humor, in song, in lyrical overtures, and in social media pop culture lingo to highlight the damaging effects technology and social media have on the human relationship with the earth. VS is a mirror, is an attempt to selfie the world we have lost touch with by contemplating where our role as caretakers for our planet lies. Through varying poetic forms, VS displays and critiques the limited perspective forced upon us when we socialize and experience life solely through phones and screens.

In this …

The Bronx Cocked Back And Smoking Multifarious Prose Performance, Alex Avila

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

The Bronx Cocked Back And Smoking is a collection of multifarious prose performances recounting the historical, personal, social, political and cultural constructs of a city birthed by violence. This body of work is accompanied by video, audio, photography, and theatre performance texts. St. Mary’s Housing project, in the Bronx, is the foundation where most of this literary work takes place. The modern day Griot (storyteller) is a Poet, guiding his audience through the social inequalities and disparities that plague St. Mary’s community. The Poet shares personal traumatic insights while simultaneously utilizing writing as a form of survival to the conditions …

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 …

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 …

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 …

La Llorona Don't Swim The L.A River: A Trickster's Guide To The Poetics Of The Pit, Rosie Angelica Alonso

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

La Llorona Don’t Swim The LA River is a collection of poems that explore the issues of growing up in East LA as a young, bilingual Chicana. These poems are an attempt to capture my experiences through story telling by blending Spanish, English, street slang, and the casual spoken diction. The speaker embodies several versions of the trickster figure: linguistic tricksterism, cultural tricksterism, gender tricksterism, and religious tricksterism. She navigates linguistic tricksterism through the code switching of English and Spanish, using Spanglish as her main dialect, and often blending in slang, creating Slanglish. In cultural tricksterism, she focuses on the …

Identity And Energy In Poetry Tiny House. Tell Me A Secret., Chance D. Castro Jr

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Tiny House. Tell Me a Secret. is a poetry manuscript that deals with establishing identity based on the relationships one is involved in, the loss of someone significant, and then coping with that loss. In the book, the speaker who grows up in the care of women becomes sensitive to their pains and questions the necessity of the overt ideas of machismo in his culture and deliberately cultivates chivalry in his romantic relationship as a result. The speaker loses his wife early in their marriage and must cope with her death while continuing to re-learn/establish the identity that she played …

The Lemon Tree: My Tree Of Life, Meghan E. Mccarthy

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

The Lemon Tree is a collection of poems that arose from my attempt to capture memories of influential experiences in growing up. The poems are written in prose blocks and move in and out of childlike and adult sensibilities, creating the disillusion of time and memory. The poems themselves are comments on the unreliability and limited scope of memory and compare remembrance to dreams. This suggests that time moves more fluidly than the waking world accepts. Through looking back, through prisms, the speaker remembers experiences that impacted her development as we follow her on a journey to coming-of-age. The Lemon …

Confessions Of A Hip-Hop Hippie, Tristan D. Acker

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

This Statement of Purpose does not give a history of hip-hop or hip-hop poetry but rather how this particular poet fits into the current phase of hip-hop and performance poetry. In it, I discuss and explain the new pro-working class hip-hop performance poetic. This includes extensive discussion of how rap poetry conveys meaning through sound. Also discussed is the socioeconomic context for the suburban southwestern topics found in the manuscript. This statement is a parallel piece to the manuscript itself in that it explains a brown kid from San Bernardino’s journey of connecting words and music for purposes of personal …

Americhicano, Isaac R. Escalera

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

The title of my manuscript, Americhicano¸ is a play on the words American,Americana, and Chicano. It was my goal to write poems that would capture the shared experiences of Chicanos, Latin Americans and the vast people group we identify as “American.”

In the first part of my Statement of Purpose, I go into the politics and social commentary of why I chose this as the focus of my project. “Why I Write” is a continuation of that conversation, but more focused on my own personal experience and journey as a writer. In the Section titled, “On Narrative Poetry” I explore …

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, …