Digital Commons Network^™

Auden: Body/Mind, Basil Lloyd-Moffett

CMC Senior Theses

On one hand Auden appears the most cerebral of poets. It is said that when he arrived at school, aged eight, he professed himself excited to study the different psychological types, and the cryptic verse that was to emerge over a decade later bears the scars of his reading, psychological or otherwise, as clearly as the relentlessly analytical Dichtung und Wahrheit and other late works.Absorbing and repurposing philosophical, psychological, religious, and scientific works was an essential part of his artistic strategy, and led to credible accusations of plagiarism on a number of occasions.And just as his collaborators and friends mocked …

Every Person A Home Every Home A Person, Emily R. Miller

Graduate Thesis and Dissertation post-2024

Every Person a Home Every Home a Person is a collection of poems that explores the meaning of “home” and the places where our homes are made. The collection consists of intertwining thematic threads that delve into what makes a home, including those found in physical houses, cultural identities and regional areas (in this case, Florida/the American South), other people, and personal identity. Through probing poems inspired by the author’s life and experiences as a queer, neurodivergent woman*, Every Person a Home Every Home a Person asks and tries to answer the question: what makes a home, and how do …

Outside Inside: Poems, Emma Jane Sullivan

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

This creative thesis includes thirty-four poems and thirteen illustrations that investigate the topic of self-exploration, creative freedom, and liberatory pleasure. My poems are souvenirs from a failed ethical standard, a trove of misogynic micro-aggressions, a spotlight on the backward- ness of gender norms, and a surprisingly strong thread that links women to the planet and to shared language, a thread humankind continuously tries to cut. The methods of research were largely a self- study and one that required consistent reflection. The results were a collection of writings that had to be revised and edited with the guidance of my thesis …

Ukrainian Beauty, Daryna Gladun

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

‘Ukrainian Beauty’ is a collection of poetry that emerged from my two years in MALS. It confronts the misrepresentation of a female body and experience in a male-dominant society of a rising democracy.

The poetry collection commences with an essay, ‘Ukrainian Beauty—91’ and beyond,’ which delves into the historical and political backdrop of the first national pageant, ‘Ukrainian Beauty,’ held in February 1991, a pivotal year marked by the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The 20 poems in the collection reference the late 1980s-1990s artworks by the Kharkiv School of Photography and Odesa Conceptual Artists, Les Podervianskyi’s radio plays, texts …

Newly Buried Grandmother Prepares To Enter The Spirit World, J S. Absher

Inscape

Heavier than she can ever remember, the rain is falling in spades. On her roof enormous hands pound boom-lay, boom-lay.

The Covenant Path, James Goldberg

Inscape

1. And Jerusalem still dances in your dreams—rises like a wave, then leans, careens into captivity. You wake to hunger and thin Liahona-longing for a home.

My Mother's Scars, Alexandra Malouf

Inscape

I. My mother wakes to a flatness on her chest and thinks of her mother waking to that same absence forty years before. The history of a family written on the bodies of descendents. In stormy weather her nerves pulse sharply in that scar reopened over and over, where surgeons’ plows left ragged lines. My mother’s scar glares cold with past lives all purple-green

Count Me In, Darlene Young

Inscape

There are days when, visiting a depressed friend, I find her houseplants are dying in the background while she claims all is well but also days when the morning percolates in carnation pink glory behind and above the smog, dewbangling the cobwebs.

Eve At 87, Elizabeth Garcia

Inscape

—after Toni Morrison’s “Eve Remembering”

I remember still the reedy ache like the saxophone’s need swelling the tiled underground inside me—Again! I’d say if you asked.

See You Around, Edward Supranowicz

Inscape

Edward Michael Supranowicz is the grandson of Irish and Russian/Ukrainian immigrants. He grew up on a small farm in Appalachia. He has a grad background in painting and printmaking. Some of his artwork has recently or will soon appear in Fish Food, Streetlight, Another Chicago Magazine, The Door Is A Jar, The Phoenix, and The Harvard Advocate. Edward is also a published poet who has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize multiple times.

On Confirming My Daughter, Christopher Bissett

Inscape

You receive the Holy Ghost so messy— like a catastrophic glitter bomb exploded in the chapel.

Portrait Of A Lady Without Hands: A Postmortem, Scott Hales

Inscape

Lying there, she looks alive, caught mid-blink, between breaths, as if all we need to do is tug at her puffy sleeve and whisper her awake.

And Also I Ran, Lance Larsen

Inscape

I wheedled a ten-minute visit from the night nurse. This was Friday, the evening after my best friend hurtled through a windshield at 70 mph, the day before I drove to a numbing family reunion for blue-hair aunts. He had a machine to track his breaths, a tube to collect pee, and a pair of legs that would never again shuffle or glide or dance.

How To Keep House, Kate Davis

Inscape

Alternate your gaze between laptop, drywall, and churning clouds beyond the chipped French door.

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 …

Field/Museum: Poems + Studies, Em Bober

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Field/Museum: Poems + Studies is a collection interested in curation—collecting, containing, protecting, preserving, and displaying. Each set of poems becomes its own exhibition, employing experimental form and detail studies to preserve the work. Mortality, masculinity, ethics of the museum space, the concept of wildness, science, and family dynamics are scrutinized and studied throughout.

Readers learn that the author’s uncle worked at the Field Museum of Chicago throughout her childhood; so began her intimate relationship with the museum space—a deep fascination with the task of exhibiting. Later in the collection, readers are guided into the field—into a series of place poems …

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 …

The Commonwealth Of Amnesia: A Collection Of Erasure And Cut-Up Poems Exploring The Forgotten Histories Of Croatian And Yugoslav Peoples In Australia And An Exegesis Obliteration Creates More: Examining The Wreck Of History Through Whiteout, Blackout And Cut-Up Erasure Poetry, Natalie Damjanovich-Napoleon

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

This thesis consists of two parts, a collection of poems, “The Commonwealth of Amnesia”, and an accompanying exegesis. The collection explores the forgotten histories of Croatian and Yugoslav immigrants in Australia from 1901 to 1957 through the medium of erasure and cut-up poetry, re-arranging words found in nonfiction documents to posit that forgetting can be metaphorically and visually represented through erasure while also re-narrativising a text. Erasure poetry takes a textual document and using whiteout or blackout erases portions of a text, transforming that text into a poem; cut-up poetry rearranges the words of a document in a textual version …

Be: Fall/Winter 2023–2024 Issue, Be: A Journal Of Black Experimental And Interdisciplinary Work

Publications and Research

Our fall/winter issue explores, with a cool and objective eye, memory and history; it may give you some necessary de ja vu, as we think of family, books, and films we want to preserve. This is our interview/review issue, and we’ve spoken to people or reviewed work that seems necessary for building better futures. Our interview with Amos White argues for the preservation of life-giving and life-affirming trees. We’ve also included reviews of heart-opening books — Tara Christina’s “More than a Drop” and Caron Knauer’s “American Slavery on Film” — that reinforce the significance of familial and collective memory. And …

"Loving You No Matter What You Do": Ai's Dramatic Monologues, 1970s Asian American Feminisms, And Reproductive Justice, Catherine Irwin

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

This essay makes visible the 1970s involvement of Asian American and Women of Color feminists in reproductive justice. Grounded in the Asian American feminist praxis of remembering, this essay analyzes how three dramatic monologues by the Asian American mixed-race poet Ai engage with the discourses of reproduce justice set forth by Asian American and Women of Color activists leading up to the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. Using an Asian American feminist lens, this paper argues that the speakers in Ai’s monologues utilize these discourses circulating about abortion and women’s health care to construct images of the treatment of dispossessed …

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 …

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.

Fierce Allegories: Teaching Anne Finch’S Fables In A Course On Satire, Sharon Smith

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

This essay outlines an approach to integrating Anne Finch’s work into an advanced undergraduate and/or graduate course on eighteenth-century satire, focusing particularly on her satirical verse fables. This approach encourages students to question common critical assumptions about women and satire, most particularly that women avoided satire due to its association with aggression and politics—assumptions Finch’s fables are well-suited to challenge. The essay focuses particularly on Finch’s verse fables "Upon an Impropable Undertaking," “The Eagle, the Sow, and the Cat,” and “The Owl Describing Her Young Ones.” In these poems, written in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution, Finch employs violent …

Feminine Interiority And Social Protest In The Poetry Of Mary Leapor, Joanna C. Yates

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

Mary Leapor (1722-46) is one of the many under-studied women poets of the eighteenth-century. She is often described as a laboring-class poet which, while historically accurate, implies her immediate marginalization as an writer by her class and gender. Her focus of enquiry explores a new female authorial interiority, embracing her own volition, personality, and aesthetic sensibility through the act of writing itself. This nascent individualism, arising from the examination of feeling, lies at the heart of her work and heralds the social protest that will erupt later in the century. This paper hopes to offer a broader perspective on Leapor’s …

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 …

December 2023, Robert Kelly

Robert Kelly Manuscripts

No abstract provided.

Where Am I?, Bob De Smith

Pro Rege

No abstract provided.

The New Earth, David Schelhaas

Pro Rege

No abstract provided.

If My Grandfather Were A Poet, Bob De Smith

Pro Rege

No abstract provided.

It Happened In An Instant, Doretta Diekman Anema

Pro Rege

No abstract provided.