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Strategies Of Liberation And Empowerment In Maya Angelou's And Audre Lorde's Black Feminist Literature, Lydia Jernigan

Student Works

The progression of second-wave feminism in America saw Black feminist writers such as Maya Angelou and Audre Lorde utilizing literature, and notably poetry, to resist against their oppression, due not only to their gender but also to their race. Lorde states in her 1977 essay, “Poetry is Not a Luxury,” that poetry, for women, “is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.” One of the aims of Lorde’s explicitly political poems—as …

Mouth Stuff, Jacob Connor Smith

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this thesis is to explore the idea of nuance in culturally oversimplified narratives, including fraught paternal relationships, sexual assault and non-consent dynamics, childhood and young adulthood LGBTQ+ experiences, and everyday life and mental health in the climate crisis. Drawing upon the 20^th century tradition of short poetry and minimalism, this thesis attempts to demonstrate the frustration of post-internet media culture’s fixation on providing a complete account of a complex issue in extremely limited linguistic space. This collection narratively demonstrates a night of insomnia, loneliness, and depression from sunset to sunrise as the speaker recalls various memories …

Trapped By The Past: A History And Translation Of An Equatoguinean Poet, Paul A. Guajardo

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Atrapado por el pasado (Trapped by the Past in English) is a collection of Spanish-language poetry and prose by the Equatoguinean poet Zankús Mázé Menemádjimol. Menemádjimol’s work has never received an English translation, and this thesis provides a poetic rendition of three of his poems. It also offers a brief historical introduction, literary overview, and commentary on the poems. While the main goal of this project is artistic and creative, it also aims to introduce readers to an oft-overlooked culture. Equatorial Guinea and the poet’s home island of Annobón are frequently ignored in the fields of both literature and history. …

Unraveling Milk And Honey: Women’S Voice, Patriarchy, And Sexuality, Renidia Audinia Siva, Ida Rosida, Muhammad Azwar

Journal of International Women's Studies

This article discusses patriarchy and sexuality portrayed in Milk and Honey; a poetry collection written by Canadian author Rupi Kaur. Kaur is an amazing poet, artist, and performer who touches on trauma, feminism, migration, love, and loss in her works. Milk and Honey is a unique book of poetry as it combines written poetry with line art images. The collection is split into four chapters: “the hurting,” “the loving,” “the breaking,” and “the healing.” This research aims to show how the illustrations that appear alongside the poems have amplified the speaker’s voice in response to patriarchy and sexuality. This study …

The Beauty Of Hip-Hop Culture: Linguistic Connections Through Music, Poetry, And Literature, Aminah Patel

Honors Undergraduate Theses

This thesis enters the developing conversation in the linguistic domain about the culture and struggles of the Black community. It explores the collectivist perspective of the Black community in the 20^th and 21^st century through the umbrella of Linguistics and its subfields. Collectively, the literary and musical works in this study demonstrates the frustrations of the Black community—including its correlation to antebellum slavery—the lamentations of oppression, which showcases in a collection of poems and their syntactical aspects, and the Black pride emulating from the societies. Despite the clear correlation between Hip-Hop culture and literary works from the early …

“Any Means Necessary To Refuse Erasure By Algorithm:” Lillian-Yvonne Bertram’S Travesty Generator, Zach Whalen

Communication & Digital Studies Articles

Lillian-Yvonne Bertram's 2019 book of poetry is titled Travesty Generator in reference to Hugh Kenner and Joseph O'Rourke's Pascal program to “fabricate pseudo-text” by producing text such that each n-length string of characters in the output occurs at the same frequency as in the source text. Whereas for Kenner and O'Rourke, labeling their work a “travesty” is a hyperbolic tease or a literary burlesque, for Bertram, the travesty is the political reality of racism in America. For each of the works Travesty Generator, Bertram uses the generators of computer poetry to critique, resist, and replace narratives of oppression and to …

Ground Level: Poems, Margaret Graber

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

“Ground Level” is a full-length poetry collection situated at the intersection of ecopoetics and psychology, where the theme of “grounding” one’s self continually emerges in the midst of personal geographical changes and experiences of collective social trauma during a period of prolonged immersion in the natural world. By exploring through an array of poetic forms, structures, and experimentations including golden shovels, contrapuntals, haikus, an abecedarian, a sestina, grounding exercises, poems featuring 20th century children’s television host Fred Rogers, and a sonnet crown which also explores queerness in the 21st century Southeast, the speaker engages with a number of different methods …

Poetic Assemblages: Filipinx Method On The Transpacific, Jon Joey D. Telebrico

CMC Senior Theses

Emergent calls to revise the analytic term transpacific in relation to Indigenous-centered regional formation have emphasized the need to attend to various epistemological and historical distinctions that explain distinct orientations to the Pacific by Indigenous and migrant populations, including diasporic formations. Within these calls, I operationalize poetry, a distinctly aesthetic practice of queer diaspora, as a way of illuminating new forms of relationality that such calls require. Examining works from Jan-Henry Gray, Mark Aguhar, Kimberly Alidio, and Kay Ulanday Barrett, I posit poetry as a crucial element of generating hermeneutic possibility. I further apply postmodern conceptualizations of assemblage theory in …

Old Invisible Presence: Nonhuman Intelligence And Artificial Nature In A Coast Of Trees By A. R. Ammons And S*Perm**K*T By Harryette Mullen, Miles Jochem

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

No abstract provided.

Theory Of Care, Gabriella Ann Graceffo

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

With a backdrop of the body and its inner forms, Theory of Care is a collection of poems and lyric excerpts that explores themes of queer sexuality, physical and mental health, etymology, desire, and physicality. It coheres moments of internal reckoning with an exploration of how trauma lives in the body, particularly the queer femme body. By accessing various landscapes including the medical sphere, family dynamics, and the social environments of the South, the collection grapples with different vernaculars to question how the language used to discuss (or dismiss) trauma dramatically alters the perception of those experiences.

“Luminescent As An Anglerfish”: Creative Writing As A Strategy For Building Figurative Language Skills In School-Aged Children, Dana Fitz Gale

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This pretest/ posttest nonequivalent groups study explored the relationship between classroom-based creative writing instruction and the figurative language abilities of fourth grade students. Figurative language is widespread within the oral and written discourse of K-12 classrooms and is an essential component of higher-level language and literacy development.

Despite the prevalence of non-literal language in educational settings and its relevance to children’s academic and social success, research concerning best practices for teaching non-literal language remains scarce. A few studies have suggested that creative writing may be an effective vehicle for fostering figurative language in children. Poetry writing seems especially promising, since …

Challenges And Solutions For Native Mandarin-Chinese Speakers In Singing German Lieder, Fei Xia

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

ABSTRACT Challenges and Solutions for Native Mandarin-Chinese Speakers in Singing German Lieder Fei Xia The purpose of this research is to focus on the challenges faced by Mandarin-Chinese speaking singers singing German Lieder, as well as providing these singers with solutions for overcoming these difficulties. Singing art songs such as French Mélodies and German Lieder can greatly improve singers’ artistic and aesthetic values because of the beauty of the poetry and the language. However, it is very difficult for native Mandarin- Chinese speakers to sing German Lieder. Some of the primary difficulties faced by Mandarin-Chinese-speaking singers are German diction and …

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 …

Rite Of Identity, Youmee Lee

Theses

Rite of Identity, a graduate thesis film, is a 2D animated visual poem of deaf children’s experiences. The film follows the protagonist’s journey in navigating a visual realm and a black-and-white realm, which represent the deaf world and the hearing world. Childhood experiences of struggling to assimilate into mainstream society are conveyed through the protagonist in the black-and-white realm. The purpose of the film is to encourage the viewers to think about what it is like for a child to be underestimated and to struggle with a soundscape that is not perceived naturally in the realm. Deaf children have a …

Disrupting The Hegemonic Practices Way Of Knowing: Moving Toward A Posthuman Perspective, Jordan Gonzalez, Brett Elizabeth Blake

Northwest Journal of Teacher Education

No abstract provided.

Steven Patrick Fernandez’S Transcreation Of Poetry And The Integrated Performing Arts Guild’S Sugatula/Crossing Poetry: An Autotheoretical Analysis, Onnah Pierre P. Talle

Akda: The Asian Journal of Literature, Culture, Performance

This is an analysis of Steven Patrick Fernandez’s transcreation of poetry through the Integrated Performing Arts Guild’s SugaTula. I use autotheory as I retell, examine, and reflect on my experiences on SugaTula and on Fernandez’s transcreation of poetry. From my autotheoretical analysis, I then situate Fernandez’s and IPAG’s SugaTula in the field of translation studies. The study reveals that Fernandez’s transcreation of poetry through SugaTula is a concept which is not only significant for theater practitioners but also for reading and literature teachers. Transcreation can also be used as a method to explore not only poetry but other various literary …

After "The Auroras Of Autumn", Daniel Schwartz

The Quiet Corner Interdisciplinary Journal

I originally set out to write a ‘poetical translation’ of Ecclesiastes. “Therefore I hated life; because the work that is wrought under the sun is grievous unto me: for all is vanity and vexation of spirit.” I wanted to capture the unwavering self-possession of one in the grip of a thoroughly abstract disgust with life. A disgust without bitterness or resentment, measured and controlled, a studied disgust, so languorous as to verge almost on supreme pleasure, pleasure unhaunted by thought. I soon abandoned this idea and decided instead to ‘translate’ Wallace Stevens’ “The Auroras of Autumn” into a language—a symbolic …

Understanding Toxic Cycles And How To Defeat Them: How Poetry Can Heal, Tosha Marie Brown

Masters Theses

Cathartic writing dates back millennia. Poetry, as a form of therapy, has been used in history to nurture the soul. Its effects go deeper than spiritually, and has been shown to aid in dealing with depression, anxiety and negative behaviors.

Language And Meter, Ian Cornelius

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

From a visual standpoint as well as a semantic and functional one, Middle English lyrics were often absorbed into their co(n)texts. In what sense, then, is a “Middle English lyric” a thing? I seek in this essay to show what metrical analysis may contribute to that question. Context is not all. If contextual analysis has tended to dissolve the presumed thing-hood of Middle English lyrics, metrical analysis shows that verses are robust enough to sustain that. Metrical structuration sets verse apart from its surround; it defines the verse object as a distinct entity, distinguished by a specifiable compositional craft.

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 …

A Finding Place: Social Justice Poetry Toward Empathy In The Secondary English Language Arts Classroom, Patricia Vicino

Theses and Dissertations

This study examined the effects of a combined reader-response and close reading approach to social justice poetry on the empathy levels of secondary level English Language Arts students in my classroom. This action research study occurred over a six-week period during a Fall 2021 English elective course with six student participants in a high school within South Carolina. Research was conducted via a mixed methods approach that analyzed both quantitative and qualitative data from prestudy and poststudy Likert scales along with surveys, interviews, observation notes, and artifacts. The data revealed that student empathy levels were elevated after the study unit …

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 …

Trauma And Poetry. The Case Of Primo Levi, Ilona Klein

Faculty Publications

Most North American readers have come to know and appreciate Primo Levi by his major works in prose. His The Periodic Table (1984) catapulted Levi onto the American stage of scientific-humanistic authors, having the New York Times named it among the Best Books of the Year in 1985. Instead, American readers will likely stumble upon Levi’s poetry by accident, simply because every now and then one of his poems in translation appears in print somewhere. Compared to Levi’s prose, his poems inevitably evoke a sense of unease, for their tone, their style and their content are so unlike the familiar, …

Experimenting With History: Confronting The Archive Through Poetry And The Historical Graphic Novel, Gerina Xhiherri

Theses and Dissertations

While there is general agreement among scholars about the violence of archives and the danger in engaging with them, there is also dispute about how to challenge the power of official records—whether such a thing is possible—and how literature might be a means to recover some of the lost stories, experiences, and personal histories of enslaved people. The stakes involved in preserving the deepest truths of slavery are high, especially for people of color, who remain both under-represented and hyper visible in objectified terms, and for whom there is ever the threat of a collective erasure as subjects in both …

Disorienting Object Oriented Ontology: Queer Landscapes And Ecological Bodies In Richard Siken And Harryette Mullen., Andrew N. Hutto

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis focuses on a recent development within the study of metaphysics, known as object oriented ontology (OOO), and works out questions of being alongside contemporary poetry. Recognizing the post anthropocentric purchase afforded by OOO’s claim that everything is an object and that these objects are impossible to correlate with, this thesis will look at the use of objects in Richard Siken’s War of the Foxes and Harryette Mullen’s Recyclopedia. Drawing heavily from Sara Ahmed’s queer theory of disoriented objects and Timothy Morton’s ecological insights, this thesis will argue that despite OOO’s advancement, there are critical gaps to fill in …

As Above, So Below: Magical Poetics And Queer Alchemy & A Planetary Spell.., Robert Eric Shoemaker

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

"Words have power": no more obvious statement has perhaps ever been made in an essay. However, the nature of that power is quite complicated, with a long and contentious history. I think of poetry as magic. Poetry is magical in the sense that it has ineffable qualities to it that enable readers to experience new thoughts and feelings when experiencing poetry, but when I say magic I mean that I think of poetry as actual, practical magic. As I will argue, poetry has magical qualities to it regardless of who is weaving the words, while intentional use of a self-aware …

A Claiming Of Kin: A Linguistic Analysis Of Southern Appalachian English In Melissa Range's Scriptorium: Poems, Jolee White

Undergraduate Honors Theses

The research studies the Southern Appalachian dialect present in five poems in Melissa Range’s Scriptorium: Poems. The linguistic phenomena characteristic of Southern Appalachian English observed and analyzed in the poems include lexicon, grammatical features, and phonological aspects. The research seeks to bring attention to this Appalachian woman writer as well as to bring understanding of her reasoning behind incorporating the dialect in her poetry. It establishes that the five poems by Range contain the lexicon, grammatical features, and phonological aspects of the SAE dialect. It holds meaning both grammatically and pragmatically within the context of the poem and Appalachia.

Empower! A Poetry Curriculum For The 21st Century Learner, Misty Maina

Honors Theses

By providing today’s high school students with a multimodal curriculum centered around critical inquiry, worldview, personal relevance, and by providing students will many opportunities to respond to these principles with their own writings, students will be empowered to engage with their learning and the world in meaningful and intentional ways. Empower! poetry curriculum is designed to help students ask questions about themselves, their immediate surroundings and influences, and about the world around them. Students will be encouraged to take the time and energy for deeper thinking and reflection as they engage with the activities of Empower! While there will be …

The World, Rebecca Dawn Billings

Theses and Dissertations

A poem comes into the world when an obsession takes hold of a person who must write about it. These twenty-eight original poems are products of obsession and pleasure.

Seeds - 2022, Jim Jones

Seeds

Contributors include: Alexander Jarvis, Alexis Sanchez, Maribel Cruz, Sally Dao, Hannah Grajciar, Drehna, Matt R., Jesus Robles, Zinnia Nguyen, Brandi Nevarez, Savannah Owens, Ayushi Kumar, Raul Dorado, Kellie Jarr, Marshal Stewart, Jacqueline, Jim Jones, Leslie Lozado, Clay Cofre, Warda, Amina Murati, Michael Cainghug, Tuvinh Nguyen, Cynthia G., D.B., Timothy Garrison, Saarah Junaid, Rebeca Ruiz, Frances Cltally, Jaritza Delgado, Itzel Linarres, Log Kya Kahege, Sara Weiner,