Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Tinker Bell Jar, Kayla Berryman

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

This poetry thesis is a collection of poems thematically linked together. Each poem revolves around characters from fairy tales and children’s books who are stuck in situations with abusive or harmful family members and crave an escape. In Part One of this collection, the poems take place in what readers might identify as the real world. In Part One, the poems have elements of fairy tales in them, and the speaker, or narrator of the poems, uses fairy tales to understand and relate the relationship between her parents and brother in a way that she can understand. The speaker of …

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 …

Eclipsed By Culture, Andrea Diamond

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

The purpose of this thesis is to explore through poetry my conflicted relationship with an abusive, narcissistic father, a father who passed down to me the after-effects of generations of inherited trauma and traditions of patriarchy. In a narrative arc unfolding through domestic scenes and deepened with metaphor, I offer readers the story of my struggle to accept the personal and psychological damage I experienced as a child, to forgive, and to achieve a measure of healing so that my experience might benefit others. Using poetry enabled me to distill elements of my circumstances that, in my lived experience, were …

Secondson, Jonathan Blake Heaton

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

This author’s introduction is an analysis of graphic literature and poetry, and the combining of the two to create graphic poetry. Themes are explored of what it means to be a second son in a world permeated by traditional values, regarding the prominence of the first son.

This thesis was split into five sections: Finding My Story—in which the author explains how he came to the main narrative content behind Secondson; Finding My Themes—in which the author discusses the four themes that are included in Secondson and the inspiration received from outside works of poetry; Finding My Genre—in which the …

I No Longer Hear The Wind, Robert Tyson Steele

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

I No Longer Hear the Wind is a collection of poetry that explores an unnamed narrator's relationship with nature and civilization. The poems follow this narrator through his fragmented journey of trying to find nature in its most authentic form. As the narrator jumps in and out of civilization, he realizes that he ultimately cannot find nature, even in the most wild of places. Understanding this dilemma, the narrator seeks to connect with society while simultaneously avoiding, resisting, and even undermining civilization, technology, and authority.

The collection draws its influence from nature poets like Rumi, Whitman, Thoreau, and many others …