Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Teleios, Sandra Edwards

All Graduate Reports and Creative Projects, Fall 2023 to Present

This thesis is a collection of poetry that mixes formal and free verse in order to convey the speaker’s spiritual journey in content as well as form. The work introduces a speaker who is deeply religious and who expresses her spirituality in the form of formal poetry such as sonnets as she adheres to certain principles of faith. The use of form in the thesis represents her adherence to those principles, while breaking form is symbolic of her breaking away from those principles. Through the work, the speaker experiences a shift from frustration with the world and its apparent obfuscation …

Desert Body, Lauren Mckinnon

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This thesis is a collection of poems examining certain paradoxes of my body. As a survivor of sexual violence, my body relives trauma which makes it feel uninhabitable. I compare my experiences with the Southern Utah desert. The physical beauty, destruction and inhabitability of the desert teaches me to accept my body as both beautiful and full of grief. The poems move chronologically through my life, beginning with an abusive relationship at the age of sixteen, a move to Moab at nineteen, and becoming a mother at twenty-five. Ultimately, with the desert as my guide, I learn to accept my …

The Body Seeking Magnificence, Taylor Franson Thiel

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This thesis focuses on how my time as a college athlete, my relationship with my mother, and my experience of an abusive relationship have intersected to impact my personal relationship with my body as I have fluctuated between trying to make it perfect, trying to ruin it, and trying to love it. The collection of poems examines how these forces collided in various ways to change how I thought about myself and my identity. After dealing with the idealized version of what a college athlete should look like and act like, inherited trauma from a mother, and trauma from a …

The End Of The Known World, Madeline Thomas

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

This thesis forms the foundation for a poetry chapbook infused with Norse mythology and pain. It builds itself on two distinct strands. In the first, I reclaim the story of Hel, goddess of death, and attempt to humanize a figure historically branded as monstrous. Her life forms a narrative line through the collection that attempts to capture the whimsy and horror in myth. Intertwined with the goddess are poems centered around a contemporary speaker who suffers from chronic migraine, an autoimmune disease, unexplained tachycardia, and OCD. The poems in this personal strand vary heavily in both form and content but …

Portrait Of Rich County, Adrian Thomson

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

Portrait of Rich County presents the small town of Randolph, Utah in poems describing its wildlife, recreational activities, and the perspectives of citizens in the contemporary rocky mountain west. Special attention to the imagination of the poems’ speaker toward the more dreamlike qualities of Rich County establishes itself throughout, in order to convey a feeling of hope within harsh terrain. This collection examines the theme of salvaging items not often considered, such as rusted junk, ancient houses, or roadside garbage, both in the actions of the speaker and through the act of naming these items upon the page. An over-arching …

A Collection For A Better Misunderstanding, Mark Smeltzer

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

What if being understood becomes even more dreadful than being isolated? This collection of poetry stands between two extremes, using form and language to reflect the struggle of living on a continuum between being understood and being alone. By echoing the direct style of poets like Charles Bukowski and Mark Strand, as well as more abstract figures like May Swenson and Sylvia Plath, this collection asserts that the contradictions we carry can coexist, and even complement one another. Part One features original poetry that relies on the senses to recover old memories. A direct style in Part One seeks to …

Harvest: Poems, Brittney Allen

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

Louise Glück wrote, “the actual making of art is a revenge on circumstance.” The risk, she goes on, is in the possibility of shame. Writing poetry then becomes an act of courage, purchased with sacrifice or loss. “Courage, in this usage, alludes to a capacity for facing down the dark forces.”

In Harvest, a poetry chapbook, the speaker takes revenge on the circumstances of her life by being blunt, bare, and brave on the page. She contends with a male-dominated society and abusive childhood as she moves into adulthood and the supposed saving grace of a marriage. The speaker confesses …

Tomorrow's Living Room, Jason Whitmarsh

Swenson Poetry Award Winners

May Swenson Poetry Award Volume 13, with foreward by Billy Collins. Tomorrow's Living Room offers a pleasantly disorienting verbal territory. The collection is alternately wry and dark, hopeful and bleak, full of unexpected light and laugh-out-loud incongruities. We begin to see that the shape and the furniture of Jason Whitmarsh's world reflect our own world (and may in fact be universal), but we're considering them through completely new terms of engagement.

Mrs. Ramsay's Knee, Utah State University Press

Swenson Poetry Award Winners

May Swenson Poetry Award Volume 12, with foreward by Harold Bloom. Mrs. Ramsay's Knee offers fresh and elegant poems by Idris Anderson, many of them ekphrastic considerations of visual works of art. Among her subjects are paintings by Rembrandt, Rousseau, Pollock, and Chagall, yet she equally explores a set of news photos from the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah.

The Sleepy Hero: Romantic & Spiritual Sleep In The Gawain-Poet, Erin Kathleen Turner Hepner

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

This thesis examines two accepted styles of writing in the Middle Ages, the romance and religious genres, and what purpose they perform in the Gawain-poet’s religious poem, Patience, and his romance poem, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (SGGK). One recently popular line of research among medieval scholars is examining the way medieval authors, such as the Gawain-poet, combine elements of romance and spiritual writings. By funneling the Gawain-poet’s intermingling of the medieval romance and religious genres through the specific lens of sleep, which is represented differently in medieval romance texts than in medieval religious …

Yankee, Go Home!: Translations And Poems With Critical Introduction, Devin Jay Hepner

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

This paper attempts to outline the various influences and similarities of my poetry to other poets and poetry of the twentieth-century. The critical introduction will cover those influences and the research I have done on the poets. It also contains individual poems that I feel have a connection with my own poetry and poetic translation. After the critical introduction, I include my poetry in stylistic order followed by Russian translations in chronological order. I will first describe how I came to write and read poetry and its value for me.

Neck Of The World, Daniel F. Rzicznek

Swenson Poetry Award Winners

May Swenson Poetry Award Volume 11, with foreward by Alice Quinn. Neck of the World is the eleventh volume in the prestigious May Swenson Poetry Award series. In it, Daniel Rzicznek offers poems that, in quick angular language, capture the natural world and at the same time extend it into a surreal vision, sometimes dream-like, sometimes dark. Alice Quinn, judge for the 2007 Swenson Award, says this of Rzicznek's work: "Throughout, the language pulsates, always vigorous, by turns knotty and crystalline. . . . In Neck of the World, we have a poet with a striking new vision--challenging, rewarding, and …

Haywire, Utah State University Press

Swenson Poetry Award Winners

May Swenson Poetry Award Volume 10, with foreward by Edward Field. "This poet, you knew from his very first lines, didn't fall for anything phony—his own language is irresistibly no-bullshit down to earth, even sassy.... Coming from one of the ethnic, industrial cities, his work has a gritty element. He recalls all the sorrows of a life—the drunken father, the parents' divorce, his mother's death, his unremitting horniness, his own divorce—nothing special, just what we all have to deal with one way or another. And yet he ends on an almost contented note. Haywire is remarkable for being an essentially …

The Beautiful Lesson Of The I, Utah State University Press

Swenson Poetry Award Winners

May Swenson Poetry Award Volume 9, with foreward by Rachel Hadas. Frances Brent's poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Notre Dame Review, Yale Review, and in many other journals. She was born in Chicago and was educated at Barnard College. She studied poetry at Columbia University and the University of Illinois, Chicago. From 1984-1991 she co-edited the literary journal Formations. In 1987 she co-translated Beyond the Limit: poems by Irina Ratushinska-ya She has taught at Yale, Northwestern, Loyola University, and Barat College. She lives with her family in New Haven.

Under The Bridge: Poems By Faith Shepherd With Critical Introduction, Faith Shepherd

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

The first poem with which I became fully engaged--that is, the first poem with which I interacted beyond one or two readings--was Wallace Stevens' "Autumn Refrain" my senior year in high school. At this point in my life, I was already enamored with literature, and I had written fair amounts of "poetry" for my high school creative writing classes. However, even though I occasionally enjoyed reading poetry and understood that its language tended to be more compact than other types of literature, if I didn't understand a poem after reading it through once or twice I set it aside and …

Where She Always Was, Frannie Lindsay

Swenson Poetry Award Winners

May Swenson Poetry Award Volume 8, with foreward by J. D. McClatchy. In his Foreword, McClatchy speaks of the musical qualities of Lindsay's work: "It is impossible, reading her poems, not to hear a musical hand at work. This is not just a matter of delicacy or virtuosity. It is also a matter of knowing how to phrase a line... Lindsay moves from detail to trope with utter poise, with an intuitive sense of what to sustain or emphasize. Her language is crisp. I can pick a stanza at random... and praise its plosive energy, its modulated vowels, its variety …

She Took Off Her Wings And Shoes, Utah State University Press

Swenson Poetry Award Winners

May Swenson Poetry Award Volume 7, with foreward by Alicia Ostriker. Nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize, Ms. Bishop's credits include publications in Antioch Review, 13th Moon, Eratica, Aries, The Little Magazine, and many other literary journals. As a poet and writing teacher, she gives many readings, as well as workshops for gifted children, seniors, and other writers on the US-Mexico border; she has worked with at-risk youth and with the rural Hispanic community.

The Owl Question, Faith Shearin

Swenson Poetry Award Winners

May Swenson Poetry Award Volume 6, with foreward by Mark Doty. The Owl Question underscores and relishes life's transitions from young girl to woman, from child to wife to mother, and from isolation to connection this poet's bright sense of abundance and awe, here expressed in finely tuned detail and refreshingly open observation, reads like a collective memory. Though private and closely held, these questionings are as familiar as our own souls, and in their transformation to poetry, Shearin has created the very "map" she wishes to guide her when she "can't learn the world fast enough."

Newe Hupia: Shoshoni Poetry Songs, Beverly Crum, Earl Crum, Jon P. Dayley

All USU Press Publications

This collection presents written texts of songs in Shoshoni and English, with both figurative and literal translations, and is packaged with a CD containing performances of the songs by Earl and Beverly Crum. The songs fall into several categories based on the contexts of their performances, such as dance songs, medicine songs, and handgame songs. The texts are framed with an introduction and commentary discussing the cultural background, meaning, forms, and performance contexts of the songs; Shoshoni language; and methodology. Glossaries of Shoshoni terms are appended. As the first major linguistic study of Shoshoni songs, Newe Hupia is an important …

Borgo Of The Holy Ghost, Stephen Mcleod

Swenson Poetry Award Winners

May Swenson Poetry Award Volume 5, with foreward by Richard Howard. An accomplished poet with credits in such literary magazines as APR, Paris Review, Ploughshares, and many others, Stephen McLeod is the 2001 recipient of the May Swenson Poetry Award. Judge for the competition was Richard Howard, internationally known poet and winner of the Pulitzer and many other poetry awards. Formerly of Dallas, Mr. McLeod lives in Brooklyn, where he is an Assistant District Attorney. He was educated at Southern Methodist University, Columbia University, and the Fordham University School of Law.

All That Divides Us, Utah State University Press

Swenson Poetry Award Winners

May Swenson Poetry Award Volume 4, with foreward by Maxine Kumin. Although the poems in this collection are not narrative, they do present a narrative, gradually unspooling the tale of the poet's rebel aunt, who left the family "to marry a Chinaman" in the 1930s. It's an old story, full of poignancy, mystery, family pride, and doubt. When the aunt returns to die, the poet, now grown, discovers in herself the need to reclaim the connections that her family had severed. She travels to China several times—to learn. Gradually, through wide-eyed insightful poems, we see the poet rebuild with her …

Necessary Light, Utah State University Press

Swenson Poetry Award Winners

May Swenson Poetry Award Volume 3, with foreward by Mary Oliver. "I think the two attributes that will most impress readers are, first, the almost shimmering gladness with which Ms. Fargnoli replies to the gifts of beauty and of human love; and, second, the compassion with which she addresses whatever is beyond her own intimate surroundings. Whatever it costs her, whatever it takes, there seems to be for Ms. Fargnoli only one world and only one way to live within it: with a ferocity of attention, care, and response." Mary Oliver

Hammered Dulcimer, Lisa Williams

Swenson Poetry Award Winners

May Swenson Poetry Award Volume 2, with foreward by John Hollander. Lisa William's poems are infused with what John Hollander calls "a guarded wonder." A poet of unique vision, she seems always to be "looking at," with special attention to the experience of the senses. Moreover, Williams is equally concerned with epistemology—the how of seeing. And it is perhaps this quality of attention that informs her interest in the formulations of poetry itself, in its constructed dimension. Her control of the line, of rhythmic possibilities, of structures both formal and free, is evident in every poem. Together, William's original voice …

Plato's Breath, Utah State University Press

Swenson Poetry Award Winners

May Swenson Poetry Award Volume 1 with foreward by Herbert Leibowitz. Freisinger's new poetry collection is inhabited alike by bright, tangible images and thoughtful, intricate meditations. Pumpkins, poultry houses, sperm tests, a vacuum cleaner salesman, a father's damaged brain, an anatomist's tools, a baby falling from a fourth-story window-all of these come to the page distinct and palpable. At the same time, the work finds a central inspiration in theoretical work like Jeremy Rifkin's social criticism. Poetry of both the mind and the heart, Plato's Breath embraces the power of imagination to transform the ordinary into an extraordinary affirmation of …