American Literature Commons^™

Hope, Incorporated: Welborn Hope As B.A. Botkin's "Promising" Oklahoma Poet, Cullen Whisenhunt

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

In 1927, a letter by then-professor at the University of Oklahoma, Roy Temple House, was published in the Ada Evening News complimenting Ada, OK, poet Welborn Hope and suggesting Hope get in touch with folklorist and literary scholar BA Botkin, also an OU faculty member. That same year, Botkin published “Oklahoma Poets, Inc.,” in which he detailed what he believed to be the three stages of a state’s literary development: the pioneer stage, the popular rhymesters stage, and finally, the union of art and life (30-31). In 1935, Botkin presented a lecture in Tulsa in which he cited Hope among …

Profound And Absurd Poems By E. Stewart Saunders, E. Stewart Saunders

Libraries Faculty and Staff Creative Materials

A collection of poems written between 2020 and 2026

Midlife, Michael Sevcik

Poetry MFA Theses

Abstract

Midlife by Michael James Sevcik is a collection of poetry that explores issues of age, gender, sexuality, identity, desire, family, and loss within a predominantly domestic space while addressing broader social, cultural, and philosophical issues using a phenomenological poetics grounded in everyday experience. The collection is organized into three distinct yet interrelated “movements:” the first movement, “Anchored,” establishes an existential yearning amidst professional and amorous stasis and familial pressures. The second movement, “Liminal,” explores temporality and its relationship to place and memory. The third movement, “Renewal,” incorporates travel, family history, and art, transforming them into critical modes of aesthetic …

What Will We Do With The Christmas Pudding?: Joy Davidman, William Lindsay Gresham, And "Christmas In The Workhouse", Gabriel C. Salter, Clark Sheldon

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

The poem "Christmas in the Workhouse" archived in William Lindsay Gresham's papers at first appears to be a random transcript in his files. Exploring the work's publication history and Gresham's contributions to War Poems of the United Nations, a book edited by his second wife Joy Davidman, suggests that in fact "Christmas in the Workhouse" is part of the larger story of how they informed each other's work in the 1940s.

How We Survive: A Poem Analyzing Life, Death And Necessity, Pierce H. Dornink

FUSION

This poem is an analysis of the short story "Living Like Weasels" by Annie Dillard. It focuses on life and death, as well as how life is fleeting, and draws on themes expressed in the source work.

This poem was created as part of a multimodal project for an American Literature class in the Fall of 2024 using the following prompt:

You are responding to literature using creative techniques in two phases. In the first phase, you will compose a 2-4 page piece of creative writing that includes a theme we’ve studied in the class that has significance to you. …

A Mirror Of Us, Amber J. Chrones

FUSION

This is a project of empowerment. "A Mirror of Us" embraces patriarchal liberation, while celebrating divine femininity. Inspired by “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, this multimodal project aims to shatter conformist ideologies that are all too common.

This poem was created as part of a multimodal project for an American Literature class using the following prompt:

You are responding to literature using creative techniques in two phases. In the first phase, you will compose a 2-4 page piece of creative writing that includes a theme we’ve studied in the class that has significance to you. That creative writing …

Just A Memory, Shakila Arab

FUSION

This poem is a response to “I Felt a Funeral, in My Brain” by Emily Dickinson. It was written for a World Literature class using the following prompt:

You will imitate at least five elements of an original text we read this semester. Following your imitation, you will write a paragraph describing the five elements you imitated and how your imitation exemplifies the literary movement of the piece you are imitating.

“Women Who Don’T Know How To Stay Married”: The Poetic Afterlives Of The 1927 Bristol Sessions, Aubrey R. Adkins

Honors Theses

This project begins from the understanding that song lyrics can have lasting impacts on the poetic work that proceeds from them, and can and should, therefore, be read as literature. In the cultural context of Southern Appalachia, a historically underserved and academically underrepresented region, this understanding is intertwined with Audre Lorde’s idea that “For women...[poetry] is a vital necessity of our existence.” The women of Southern Appalachia, denied access to particular modes of expression as a result of external circumstances such as poverty and sexism, need poetry, according to Lorde, to take “tangible action” in their lives. What came before …

The Dirt Underneath My Fingernails: The American Pastoral And 21st-Century Food System Reform, Annabella Isaacson

Scripps Senior Theses

The following is an amalgamation of my experiences personally and vested interests academically, and is meant to be read as just that. As a thesis that combines Environmental Analysis and Writing & Rhetoric degrees, this project challenges traditional academic forms by integrating creative nonfiction and poetry with academic writing and analysis. This thesis attempts to fuse the academic and personal essay into one cohesive piece. The inconclusive nature of the narratives and explorations that follow are intended to represent my process in grappling with the histories and significance of American pastoral literature through the ways in which this genre has …

‘‘I Am Not This, Not Here, This Time’’: Claudia Emerson’S Infusion Suite As A Compelling Account Of The Lived Experience Of Cancer, Chris Foss

English & Linguistics Articles

Claudia Emerson’s Infusion Suite section within her poetry collection Impossible Bottle is a significant contemporary literary representation of cancer. In this twelve-poem sequence, Emerson dispenses with the typical martial metaphors so often used to represent this lived experience. Instead, she focuses on more mundane everyday moments in a way that acknowledges and respects the humanity of all those at the treatment center—especially that of the patients. Emerson refuses to airbrush out the daunting, debilitating aspects of cancer, but she also preserves space for light and life.

Robert Frost And The Myth Of Adam And Eve, Theo Johnson

CMC Senior Theses

What exactly it is about the story of Adam and Eve that fascinated Robert Frost is hard to say. Of course, he is not the first to engage with it in writing – for much of recorded human history, the Genesis account of man’s creation has held a place of unparalleled importance in our understanding of what it is to be human, provoking innumerable exegetic responses. In popular literature, too, it has served as inspiration for some of the most celebrated English and American poems. From the “bloodless myth” of Geoffrey Hill’s “Genesis” to the great theodicy of John Milton’s …

The Stark Surrealism In Spectra’S Soulfulness, Zach Blair

English: Student Scholarship & Creative Works

Arthur Davison Ficke and Witter Bynner were American poetry's first Surrealists, preceding Breton and his founding of Surrealism, with the publication of its first manifesto, in France in 1924. Though the creative merits of 1916's "Spectra: A Book of Poetic Experiments" are many, most scholars and critics regard it as a hoax intended to mock Imagism and the like. But Ficke and Bynner, using the pseudonyms Anne Knish and Emanuel Morgan, respectively, blazed trails no poets had priorly dared to venture down.

Friar Jack, The Science-Fiction Apologist: Exploring “The Friar Of Oxford” By William Lindsay Gresham, G. Connor Salter, Sørina Higgins

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

Few Inklings scholars have explored William Lindsay Gresham’s life outside of the fact that he was married to Joy Davidman. His poem “The Friar of Oxford,” published here for the first time, shows a surprising level of engagement with C.S. Lewis’s ideas, combining war imagery with references to the Ransom Cycle and a “mushroom cloud” reference that may show he explored one of Lewis’s literary influences. The poem’s contents add to existing Gresham-Inklings scholarship, and show Gresham accomplishing the same goals that the Inklings and their associates like Dorothy L. Sayers accomplished in their “escapist” or mythopoeic works.

Detroit Poet Laureate: A Local And National Necessity, Rosemary O'Meara

Rushton Journal of Undergraduate Humanities Research

From 1981–2020, Detroit officials appointed a city-recognized poet laureate. Though the position has been vacant since the 2020 death of Naomi Long Madgett, this essay advocates for reinstatement of a Detroit poet laureate to help spotlight important Detroit artists and to ensure that the words and ideas of Detroiters are sustained and celebrated. A poet laureate would continue to uniquely serve Detroit to help preserve its complex history and contribute to a literary canon specific to the city.

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 …

Making Then Meaning, Ben Denzer

Masters Theses

This is an artist talk contained within a book. It is 816 pages and 49 minutes long. Closed captions run across the spreads. A video of this talk can be watched on bendenzer.com/making-then-meaning

At RISD, I’ve been prompted to expand the scope and tools of my practice and to reflect on questions of meaning in my work.

I spend my days making things, but I’ve never really had good answers to questions of why I make the things I make, or what their meaning is. I don’t think there are simple answers to these questions.

I think meaning comes from …

Music Lessons, Cecilia-Rose Louise Bender

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

music lessons is a digital chapbook that explores the relationships between James Baldwin’s writing and Beauford Delaney’s paintings through music. From Delaney’s “Composition 16” (1954-56) to Baldwin’s “The Uses of the Blues” (1964), their collaboration with the core elements of jazz music gives their work rhythm and melodic contour that any/body can vibe with. Absorbing the influences of artists Ella Fitzgerald, Miles Davis, Ray Charles, and putting them to paint and text, music lessons demonstrates how music not only transforms the ways we experience and move our bodies but also the ways that we perceive space, relationships, and time. What’s …

Nothing About Us: Three Models Of Disability In Three Works Of Literary Fiction, Mary Lipiec

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

This project explores how the three umbrella models of disability (medical, functional, and social) are shown in several disabled characters from three novels published after the passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act: Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler, The Fault in Our Stars by John Green, and Good Kings, Bad Kings by Susan Nussbaum. Through the utilization of literary analysis from a cultural studies perspective, this project shows that the models of disability, despite the various flaws in their respective designs, prove to be useful lenses to see disability through, both in these novels and in real life, …

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 …

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.

Fashioning The Flapper: Clothing As A Catalyst For Social Change In 1920s America, Julia Wolffe

Honors Program Theses

Fashion has been a catalyst for social change throughout human history. Fashion in 1920s America in particular reflects society's rapidly evolving attitudes towards gender and race. Beginning with how corsetry heavily restricted women for nearly four hundred years up until the twentieth century, this thesis explores how clothing has acted as a tool for societal progression following World War I and Women's Suffrage and during the Jazz Age and The Harlem Renaissance. Specifically, this thesis examines how the influence of jazz music and dance that originated from Black American communities led to the creation of the flapper evening dress. The …

Joanne Kyger And “The Kook Strain” In Olson: A Reading, Patrick James Dunagan

Gleeson Library Faculty and Staff Research and Scholarship

Jerome Rothenberg's "that dada strain" at once hilarious grandiose epic lyric historical and ever adventurous charts the highs discovered in his reading of the dada era. In like occurrence this writing seeks to poke around in the occult cupboards of Olson's mystical leanings. Looking not only at his work and assorted readings/engagements but delving also into the works of various others (Joanne Kyger, Jack Hirschman, Paul Blackburn, Gerrit Lansing, David Meltzer, Robert Duncan, Diane di Prima, Robin Blaser et al) who fell in alongside as well as after his work's star-eyed haul. Loquaciously gifted as a talker, how much (if …

The Legacy Book In America, 1664–1792, Roxanne Harde, Lindsay Yakimyshyn

Zea E-Books Collection

Legacy books in colonial America were instruments for the transmission of cultural values between generations: the dying mother (usually) instructing and advising children on the path to salvation and heavenly reunions. They were a popular and influential form of women’s discourse that distilled the ideologies of the religious establishment into practical and emotional lessons for lay persons, especially the young.

This collection draws together legacy texts written by colonial American women and girls: five mother’s legacy books and two legacies by children, organized here chronologically. These legacies were writ­ten in anticipation of dying, making awareness of death central to the …

Emily Dickinson In The 21st Century, Corbelli Lorena

Honors Program Contracts

No abstract provided.

Review Of Chath Piersath's On Earth Beneath Sky, Loom Press, 2020, George Chigas

Journal of Southeast Asian American Education and Advancement

A critical analysis and review of Chath pierSath's 2020 collection of poems and sketches entitled On Earth Beneath Sky published by Loom Press

Odd Botany, Isaac G. Lauritsen

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Odd Botany engages with the concepts of the wild and the domestic in poetry to create whimsical, humorous poems that contend with the darker aspects of living. Varied in form, many of these poems are persona poems and use animals other than humans as speakers. Using distortion, surprise, and word-play, the poems attempt to create a psychic-turbulence to be pleasurable and enlivening to the reader.

'Disembodied Bones': Recovering The Poetry And Prose Of Elinor Wylie 2021, Sarah R. Bullock

Master's Theses

Picking a book to read is like diving for a pearl, writes Elinor Wylie, a 20th Century American poet, novelist, essayist and prominent magazine literary editor. In her essay "The Pearl Diver", she writes that it is the diver that risks the unknown- unaided by diving equipment in the form of library indexes-who gains the greatest joy, Wylie states (Fugitive Prose, 869). Wylie explains:

I venture to perceive an analogy between the rebellious pearl diver and myself, in my slight experience with public libraries...how much more delightful, how much more stimulating, to abandon the paraphernalia of card indexes and mahogany …

The Space Between “Seen” And “Unseen:” Queer People And The 1915-1945 New Negro Renaissance, Claudia R. Campanella

Dissertations and Theses

In November 1926, a group of Black artists, writers, and activists created the first and only edition of Fire!!, edited by novelist Wallace Thurman. Fire!! was created by a younger generation of New Negroes and “devoted to the younger Negro artists” who dissented from the mainstream ideas of the New Negro Movement and used the magazine to spread their own views on the 1915-1945 New Negro Renaissance. Fire!! and other texts speaking to this dissent against a Black intellectual middle class image of the movement will be studied in reference to showcasing the multi-faceted elements of the movement touching …

“Nobody” Speaks In A Bog: Emily Dickinson’S “I’M Nobody Who Are You?”, Mei Fujie

International Programs

No abstract provided.

I Didn't Know Aiiieeeee, But It Knew Me, Adrienne Su

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

"I Didn't Know Aiiieeeee, But It Knew Me" is a poem that reflects on the influence of both the anthology and the word Aiiieeeee on the writer's development. It uses an adaptation of the ghazal to explore both the continuities and discontinuities of becoming a writer when Asian-American literature was mostly inaccessible.