Digital Commons Network^™

"And No Birds Sing": The Environmental Ethics Of Carson, Keats, Sagan, And Oliver, Savannah Bloom

Undergraduate Theses

This project aims to create resonances and synchronicities between the works of science writers Rachel Carson and Carl Sagan and poets John Keats and Mary Oliver. It puts their environmental ethics in conversation with one another with a focus on shared literary practices and ecocritical and ecocentric sensibilities. Is the work of poetry, particularly poetry participating in the Romantic tradition, compatible with science writing? The ultimate goal is to demonstrate the symbiosis between science and literature and the necessity of bridging scientific and poetic discourse in regard to addressing climate and the environment. Each chapter pairs a science writer with …

Beyond The Looking Glass: Dreams And Somnial States And Spaces In Nineteenth-Century British Literature, Anne N. Nagel

Dissertations and Doctoral Documents, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2023–

Poised between a waning magico-theological tradition of symbolic dream interpretation and the rising influence of scientific dream theories, which equated dreaming with disorder, the dream occupied a unique space in nineteenth-century Great Britain. Dreams were coming untethered from signification, as natural philosophers deemed their content indecipherable and chaotic. Yet vestiges of early modern beliefs could still lend supernatural power and polyphony to dreams.

This was not simply a matter of making a binary choice between two ways of thinking about dreams but instead a site of collisions and coalescences. I contend that the ways in which dreams were conceptualized in …

Paul Celan And The Processes Of Survival In Post-Shoah Jewish Writing, Ari Savage

Theses

The following is a study of the poetry of Paul Celan as a representation of psychological and social processes present in the written works of Shoah survivors. It begins with an analysis of the place of writing in Jewish culture, then identifies three primary processes which operate in sequence: alienation, individuation, and integration. By examining Paul Celan’s highly personal and autobiographical texts in the context of his life experience as a Shoah survivor it is possible to discern the social and psychological forces at work which compel survivors to express their traumas in written form, and to gain a better …

A Poetics Of Entanglement: The Enmeshed Creation Of Interrogative Space, Phil Spotswood

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation theorizes and deploys a poetics of entanglement as a creative practice for questioning relationality and its role in meaning-making. The dissertation includes a critical preface that explores a poetics of entanglement by analyzing poetry by gay cis male US poets whose work is thematically linked by their creative disruptions of the feeling of shame. The dissertation’s creative chapter is a collection of original poems titled It Bears Repeating; the poems deploy a poetics of entanglement to open questions in the shamed body. The dissertation concludes with considerations for how a poetics of entanglement might be taught to undergraduate …

Recuerdos Efímeros, Karewith A. Casas

Theses and Dissertations

The following 12 poems were written in 2023 leading up to my MFA thesis exhibition at Hunter College. Each relate and were inspired by or inspired the visual works in the exhibition. My writing, the music I make, and the visual works I create are all intertwined and feed off of each other. The relationship between my works of art and poetry are not in the tradition of ekphrasis, but are instead extensions of each other. Each mark, material, color, or image are words, sounds, sentences, movements, and pauses. And vice versa as well. Moments on a picture plane or …

Unha Vez Tiven Un Cravo (Once I Had A Nail), Roslie De Castro, Scott Cooper

Obsculta

Rosalia de Castro was a nineteenth-century Spanish Catholic writer now best-known for her novels, but her poetry is widely admired in the Spanish-speaking world as well. This devotional poem is written in the language of her native region of Galicia, and the translator hopes that this new version will awaken interest in Castro's work in the English-speaking world.

(Di)Versification: Transgressive Poetics In The Twenty-First Century Classroom, Ronnie K. Stephens

English Dissertations - Archive

(Di)versification: Transgressive Poetics in the Twenty-First Century Classroom pairs literary analysis with pedagogical implications in an attempt to argue for the increased use of poetry in the classroom as a mechanism to subvert anti-ethnic and anti-LGBTQ censorship efforts. I argue in favor of a structuralist approach to analyzing early twenty-first century poetry in the transgressive classroom as a site of resistance against legislative efforts to censor or prohibit discussions of structural racism in public education. The work is separated into five chapters, each of which interrogates distinct formal traditions in American poetry: received forms, invented forms, erasure, nontraditional forms, and …

"And I / Am The Arrow": The Narrative, Personae Construction, And Language Ideology Of Confessional Poets' Identity Performance, Madison Fuchs

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

This thesis argues for consideration of linguistic features in service of raising the postmodern confessionalist poet identity as an utterance and an act of loyalty to performance. The embodiment of the confessionalist identity, attributed to the features used to adhere to the confessional mode, is realized through the invention of confessional personae. These confessional personae merge the responsibilities of the speaker and the narrator to convey a pseudo-autobiographical utterance to a designated audience. In this thesis, I analyze a sequence of poems that either possess taboo subjects or utilize linguistic functions, like indexicality and audience design, that mark its mode. …

Exploring The Role Music Can Play In Improving The Teaching Of Poetry In One Secondary School In Uganda, Fortunate Letaru

Master of Education

This study explored the role of music in improving the teaching of Poetry. Employing a Qualitative approach through Action Research design, the study utilized interviews, classroom observations, focus group discussions, and document analysis to gather data on students' responses to the music integration, teacher challenges, and strategies for overcoming them. The study found that music increased engagement, interest, and emotional connection, but challenges like lack of gadgets, administrative support, and infrastructure were addressed through strategies like providing technology, involving students, and incorporating diverse genres. These results suggest valuable contributions to the development of innovative pedagogical approaches that seamlessly integrate music …

Cutbank 100

CutBank

No abstract provided.

Imaginary Margins: Disability Poetics & Reinventing The Page, Audrey T. Heffers

Graduate Publications – English

Disability poetics resist marginalisation by centralising disabled words and experiences, both literally and figuratively. In a world that prioritises ability, disabled bodyminds are marked as deviant from norms and conventions. Disabled poets have the opportunity to resist the normalised ‘body’ of the poem on the page. Conventions, rules, and norms can shape poetry – not just rhyme and metre, but line breaks, line arrangements, and limiting poems to the written linguistic mode. Disability poetics can include techniques such as poems written sideways, prose poems, and multimodally-composed texts, as explored in Tonguebreaker by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Wound from the Mouth of …

The (Still) Unexplored Possibilities Of A Poetics Of Law, Naomi Mezey

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In this contribution to the symposium celebrating the Fiftieth Anniversary of James Boyd White’s The Legal Imagination, I have accepted White’s invitation in the last chapter of his magisterial book to think about poems and judicial opinions as compatible acts of imagination and meaning making. White asks brilliant questions, and his book is full of them, each a nugget of insight and also a prod that asks the reader to think harder, think deeper, revisit her first thoughts, to perhaps change her mind, and above all, with guidance, to educate herself. In this chapter of the book, White is …

There Is No Substitute For A Lifetime: A Study Of Metaphor And Linguistic Autonomy In The Lives And Works Of Selected American Poets, Richard Tony Thompson

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

Metaphor is not only figurative language, but also a way of understanding reality and creating truth. This study describes how selected American poets, including Tom Andrews, Patti Smith, and Natasha Trethewey, engage the concept of creation through metaphor in their poetic and autobiographical writing. Theories of signification, symbolism, and metaphor as defined by philosophers of language, including George Lakoff, Charles Sanders Peirce, and Roman Jakobson, are combined with complementary theories from philosophers of poetry, including Wallace Stevens, Jorie Graham, and Federico García Lorca, and used as a lens through which to view the agency of the language user as a …

Brat Olympics, Caroline Ganci Patterson

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

brat olympics is an exploration of feminine disgust, apprehension, and disorientation contextualized through interpersonal relationships and societal shapeshifting. It pays particular attention to gender performance, surburban queerness, and strangerness. The manuscript plays on the history of the bildungsroman, but instead of one consistent singular timeline, it provides three separate attempts at a characterization of a life. These disparate approaches to a singular life’s characterization stress the mundanity of documentation.

This multinarrative approach satirizes the ideal of the singular confessional, and presents a discursive approach to the way we choose to build our worlds. Building off the works of the New …

Teaching Anne Finch In "Partisanship In Restoration And Eighteenth-Century Britain", Jennifer Wilson

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

The works of Anne Finch, a writer doubly exiled as a female poet and Jacobite, stand out as eminently teachable examples of a compelling political outsider view that provokes us to consider how we can better attend to perspectives of principled opposition. Her poems in response to what has been called the "first modern revolution," together with her odes upon the deaths of King James II and Queen Mary Beatrice, showcase the subversive power of indirect articulation, expressing values through emotions and affects in veiled forms such as allegory and alternate history.

Finding Words For God: Poetic Foraging In Louise Glück's The Wild Iris, Rachel Cardall

Theses and Dissertations

The primary speaker of Louise Glück's The Wild Iris is a wanderer in her own garden. She relentlessly searches for God among her foxgloves and daisies, straining to hear God's voice. Two other speakers, God and the collective plants of the garden, offer their perspectives without acknowledgement by the human speaker. Many critics read these two other speakers as, in fact, narcissistic projections of the human speaker, a God and a world made in her own image. In this thesis, I clarify that the kind of narcissistic projection that occurs in The Wild Iris is actually productive for genuine spiritual …

What The Unburied Said, Katharine Rees

English Undergraduate Honors Theses

"What the Unburied Said" is a short collection of documentary poetry written during the waning years of the COVID-19 pandemic. In conversation with T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, it seeks to exalt the beauty of humans who help each other live within an often-tragic, always-fascinating world.

Poetic Tracks And Treading On Indigenous Lands: Examining Marlatt And Warland’S And Akiwenzie-Damm’S Literary Travels To Australia And Aotearoa, Christine C. Campana

The Goose

This paper considers the work of poets who travel from the area of the Indigenous land of Turtle Island now known as Canada to the Indigenous territories of Australia and Aotearoa. The poets engage in different forms of movement on the land that reveal varying degrees of awareness of and respect for Indigenous sovereignty. In particular, I put “17:00 / coming into Port Pirie” and “30/5 8:50 / past Menindee” from Daphne Marlatt and Betsy Warland’s 1988 Double Negative, an understudied collection of poetry in which the lesbian poets traverse Australia by train while reflecting on travelling through “(ab) …

Clark Student Voices Literary Magazine, Issue 2: Nostalgia (Fall 2023), Clark Student Voices Literary Magazine Contributors

Clark Student Voices Literary Magazine (2023-present)

Issue 2 of the Clark Student Voices Literary Magazine, published in the Fall 2023 semester. The theme of the issue is 'Nostalgia'. A semesterly publication curated by Clark University students, CSVLM creates space for students to share their creative writing including poetry, prose, and artwork. Organizing and distributing Clark Student Literary Voices builds community by uniting the many creative students on the Clark campus. The magazine's e-board describes the choice of theme:

"It might be a little surprising that we voted on the theme of ‘Nostalgia,’ when the club is made up of young adults and has itself only existed …

Clark Student Voices Literary Magazine, Issue 2: Nostalgia (Fall 2023), Clark Student Voices Literary Magazine Contributors

Clark Student Voices Literary Magazine (2023-present)

Issue 2 of the Clark Student Voices Literary Magazine, published in the Fall 2023 semester. The theme of the issue is 'Nostalgia'. A semesterly publication curated by Clark University students, CSVLM creates space for students to share their creative writing including poetry, prose, and artwork. Organizing and distributing Clark Student Literary Voices builds community by uniting the many creative students on the Clark campus. The magazine's e-board describes the choice of theme:

"It might be a little surprising that we voted on the theme of ‘Nostalgia,’ when the club is made up of young adults and has itself only existed …

When Words Weave Wings: Just Beyond The Bars, Barbara Bethea

Expressive Therapies Dissertations

Narrative and storytelling creates a formidable foundation for individuals to convey their lived experiences. Utilizing indigenous arts-based research (ABR), poetics as an inquiring and exploratory tool, and an ABR interviewing technique called poetic emergence by the researcher, this study asked two essential questions: What are the lived experiences of individuals in and outside of carceral states? Will these experiences reflect certain aspects of an individual’s life journey? The purpose of this study was to explore the embodied voices and lived experiences of adult Black Indigenous People of Color (BIPOC), diagnosed with mental health issues who were formerly incarcerated (n=3) …

Doc/U/Ment: Affinities In 20th And 21st-Century Documental Poetics, Katherine Payne

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation presents, analyzes, and builds on the existing literary genealogy of documental poetry. In 2020 Michael Leong proposed the term documental poetry to describe the turn toward source materials in 21^st-century North American poetry, seen in longform research-based poems that explicitly incorporate documentation and seek to intervene in cultural memory. Using Ludwig Wittgenstein’s concept of family resemblance, I argue that there are clear affinities between 21^st-century poets and their 20^th-century literary forerunners, also that an expansion of the scope of documental poetics is needed. The three nodes of connection I examine are works …

Rekonstruksi Sejarah Dalam Kumpulan Puisi Dari Batavia Sampai Jakarta Melalui Pembacaan Jauh Berbasis Korpus, Ananda Bintang Purwaramdhona, Mochamad Irfan Hidayatullah, Lina Meilinawati Rahayu

Paradigma: Jurnal Kajian Budaya

By applying the mixed research methods combining new historicism and digital humanities with AntConc-assisted distant reading techniques, this research aims to explore a reconstruction of Jakarta's history offered in From Batavia to Jakarta (1619–1999), a collection of poems by Zeffry J. Alkatiri. Results show that history can be reconstructed through the physical structure of narrative poetry represented by the dominant usage of pronoun "they" and intra-sentence conjunctions and prepositions such as "and", "in", and "the" instead of licentia poetica which can violate language rules. However, in the structural analysis, AntConc was not able to detect several linguistic aspects such …

Ekstasen: Love Poetry By Felix Hausdorff, Kimberly Gladman

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

Four poems by the mathematician Felix Hausdorff are presented in English translation, together with their German originals and commentary about Hausdorff’s multidisciplinary achievements.

Put Down That Book! Producing Poetry To Center Students As Organic Intellectuals, Jacqueline E. Boland

Master's Projects and Capstones

Schools are often sites of hegemony, where certain knowledge and voices are prioritized over others. This hierarchy frequently discounts students as producers of their own knowledge, ignoring the wisdom gleaned from their lived experiences, diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds, and cultural communities. While the study of literature inside a high school English classroom can be fruitful for students to acquire empathy and perspective, it is only effective when it is equitable. Educators must implement diverse representation in narratives, characters, authors and texts to represent students whose identities exist at the margins. Positioning work by Women of Color in the classroom …

Goddess Of., Megan Childs

Departmental Honors & Graduate Capstone Projects

My chapbook, “goddess of.”, is a compilation of poems that channel the larger-than-life personalities of the Ancient Greek gods and goddesses. I completed this project over the course of a semester in my ENGL470 course, Seminar in Creative Writing: Poetry. Professor Bylenok, who sponsored this project, was instrumental in the development of my poetry into a fully-fledged collection. My chapbook explores disillusionment, love, loneliness, and fear. At its core, it’s about having to live with yourself – even if it’s embarrassing, ugly, or painful. It’s a chance to feel as powerful as the gods themselves, or as pathetic as their …

Why Poetry Comics? An Overview Of The Form's Origins, Creative Potential, And Pedagogical Benefits, Mara Beneway

Journal of Creative Writing Studies

Abstract: Poetry comics are a subgenre or hybrid form that appropriate elements and techniques from its foundational genres: poetry and comics. A form that braids literary traditions with visual art, poetry comics’ rich history and metaphorical possibility make for innate and deep engagement. This paper offers a brief history of visual poetry, an explicit definition of poetry comics along with theoretical context for engagement, and pedagogical approaches to using poetry comics in the creative writing classroom. In a discussion focused on interpretation and individual meaning-making, I reference Bianca Stone’s creative work, Sarah Minor’s scholarship on “textual reading” vs. “visual seeing,” …

Irreverent Womanhood: The Healing Of Intergenerational And Cultural Trauma In The Chicanx And Latinx Sonic Poetry Of Amalia Ortiz And Melissa Lozada-Oliva, Yasmine A. Gomez

Theses and Dissertations

The connections between nontraditional forms of literature and spiritual activism lie within the resistive practices of Chicanx Feminism. This thesis argues that cultural healing and social change is dependent upon the recognition of trauma as a step towards enacting social justice. Additionally, this thesis focuses on the figure of Coyolxauhqui and indigenous motherhood to reveal procedures for change. Through the theory of trauma, this thesis examines the nontraditional Chicanx/Latinx poetry of Amalia Ortiz’s sonic rock opera, Cancíon, Cannibal, Cabaret, & Other Songs and Melissa Lozada-Oliva’s novel in verse, Dreaming of You.

My investigation into the breaking of gendered …

The Birds That Embrace Both Illusions: An Intersemiotic Translation Of All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace By Richard Brautigan, Veronika Yadukha

Comparative Literature M.A. Essays

This essay analyzes the influence of various worldviews on Richard Brautigan's poetry, which form his particular language. A combination of Zen Buddhism, Japanese aesthetics, American poetic tradition, and echoes of the philosophy of absurdism are some of the core themes that serve as mechanisms for Brautigan's poems.

For each chapter of the book All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, I make an intersemiotic translation transposing Brautigan's poems into ceramic tea bowls. By combining different art forms and translating from an abstract symbolic art – poetry – to a form of applied art that is much more physically …

The Poetry Of Prompts: The Collaborative Role Of Generative Artificial Intelligence In The Creation Of Poetry And The Anxiety Of Machine Influence, James Hutson, Ana Schnellmann

Faculty Scholarship

2022 has been heralded as the year of generative artificial intelligence (AI). Generative AI like ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion, along with a host of others, launched late in the year and immediately disrupted the status quo of the literary and art worlds, leading to outcries to ban “AI Art” and spawning an entirely new market of NFTs. Fears over the “death of the artist” and the “death of college composition,” however, are unfounded when considering the historical adoption of emerging technologies by creatives and the reconsideration of authorship that began with post structuralism and the Foucauldian Death of the Author …