American Literature Commons^™

The Akron Offering: A Ladies' Literary Magazine, 1849-1850, Jon Miller

University of Akron Press Publications

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From 1849 to 1850, Calista Cummings edited and published Akron's first literary magazine, The Akron Offering. At the time, Akron was a booming canal town on the verge of even greater prosperity. By turns religious, comic, romantic, and political, this extraordinary collection of early midwestern creative literature expresses a wide range of sometimes contradictory opinions on both the important questions of its day and the important questions of today: historical events such as the California Gold Rush of 1849 and the 1848 revolutions in Europe are considered alongside more timeless contemplations on truth, justice, and …

There Are Moments That Hang Suspended, Mark B. Lennon

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This project is the culmination of ten years of work in poetry. It was begun in imitation of those who impressed, not only with their fine words and dexterity with language, but also with their clear conviction in their subject material. Reflected in the works of Allen Ginsberg, Walt Whitman, and Adrienne Rich, among others, was evidence of a life lived, in Thoreau's term, deliberately. The writing of poetry seemed to be not simply a means of expression, but a goad to live a life worth examining, and to keep doing so; a progress report for a radical mind.

Politics …

America In Verse: The Laureate Project, Leah Kind, Dan Gleason, Erin Micklo, Margaret T. Cain

Understanding Poetry

The purpose of this project is to allow students to use their (developing) skills of poetic explication and close reading, combined with research and analysis, to discover and establish a solid case for a poet they will nominate as the next American Poet Laureate. Working in groups of 3-4, students will identify a published, living American poet who has not yet been designated a laureate. The project demands a wide array of skills as the students research bibliographic information on the poet: read and analyze the poet’s body of work and select one central poem to represent that poet; amass …

Love Is Just A Word For The Last Body I'D Like To Keep Vigil Over, Robert Jagger

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Love is Just a Word for the Last Body I'd Like to Keep Vigil Over is a collection of poetry that was composed during my time spent at UNLV. Comprised mostly of prose poems, it was heavily influenced by the works of Richard Hugo, Robert Coover, Joshua Marie Wilkinson and several French poets who are often categorized as being members of either the Symbolist or Decadent movement. At its best, the collection attempts to invoke a sense of Joseph Cornell's boxes--odd juxtapositions of everyday items and language that create new and uncertain circumstances. Unlike Cornell's boxes, however, the poems aren't …

About A Yellow Ball, Shannon Alice Salter

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

These are poems made from many things: color, eggs, oranges, many kinds of seeds, leaves, wind, California, the desert, birds. They are things alive in the world and alive in my heart. I cannot take them out of the world, but from my heart I can have whatever appears on its surface. The language of steam.

They are poems that like to be at home.

California is my home and so is the Mojave (and so is every desert). I live in a valley about four hundred miles from the Pacific Ocean, in the city of Las Vegas. What better …

The Sociology Of Scenes, The Sacramento Poetry Scene, Dana Nell Maher

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

For this ethnography, I use my feminist perspective, grounded theory, participant observation, and autoethnographic techniques to explore an urban poetry scene. I suggest that scene studies are a viable alternative to community studies and that we move our articulation of social experience to reflect it as it occurs, on a multitude of continuums. My goal with this project is to develop, use, and discuss the utility of a definition of scene that is intended to be useful to scene studies researchers. To this end, I both evaluate an outdated definition of scene (Irwin 1973 & 1977), and define the three …

Gestures Toward Cross-Species Reciprocal Relations In Contemporary Poetics, Mary Newell

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

In this essay, I explore some embodied bases of ethical attitudes toward human/ animal exchanges in the texts of three contemporary authors: Mary Oliver, Heller Levinson, and Adrienne Rich. Since other species share with humans varieties of agency, sentience, and purposive activity, I suggest that reciprocity is a fundamental aim in cross-species relations. Phenomenological philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty depicts the correlation between embodied actions and attitudes, for example, between the hand movement of grasping and an appropriative attitude toward the natural world. His concept of reciprocity, grounded in the experience of one hand touching another, provides a reference for encounters that …

Guillermo Gómez-Peña's "Tekno Poética" Web Verse, Lost And Found In A Webspora, Angélica Huízar

World Languages and Cultures Faculty Publications

For an author who likes to cross borders Guillermo Gómez-Peña (1955) has certainly reached audiences in both the U.S. and Mexican artistic, literary, theoretical, and political arenas. Now, with the advent of more technological mediums such as the Internet, the borderless artist makes use of the global fetish that, in theory, reaches a global community. As a prelude to his performances, workshops, conferences and lectures, Gómez-Peña’s collaborative webiste engages his readers in video-poetic selections, and hypertext poetic medley with topics that are sure to catch their interest with poems such as "Apocalypse," "Sexo," "Militias," and the video-poems "Apocalypse" and "Califas." …

Bern Porter International: Volume 7 Number 2 (February 2003), Bern Porter, Sheila Holtz

Newsletters

A Literary Newsletter and Bulletin of the Institute of Advanced Thinking

Featuring "Why I Wrong" by Joel Dailey and "Barn Full of Air" by Daniel Russell.

Bern Porter International: Volume 7 Number 1 (January 2003), Bern Porter, Sheila Holtz

Newsletters

A Literary Newsletter and Bulletin of the Institute of Advanced Thinking

Featuring poems by Anna Carroll and David Stone.

Review Of Nine Horses, By Billy Collins, Arthur Mcmaster

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

No abstract provided.

Bern Porter International: Volume 6 Number 19 (August 31, 2002), Bern Porter, Sheila Holtz

Newsletters

A Literary Newsletter and Bulletin of the Institute of Advanced Thinking

Featuring "Conspiracy Theory" by Natasha Bernstein.

Bern Porter International: Volume 6 Number 18 (August 24, 2002), Bern Porter, Sheila Holtz

Newsletters

A Literary Newsletter and Bulletin of the Institute of Advanced Thinking

Featuring "Dictatorship at Your Doorstep" by James R. Elwood and Jarret B. Wollstein and poetry by David Spiering.

Bern Porter International: Volume 6 Number 16 (August 10, 2002), Bern Porter, Sheila Holtz, Natasha Bernstein

Newsletters

A Literary Newsletter and Bulletin of the Institute of Advanced Thinking

Featuring poems by Cyril A. Dostal and found art by Hugo Pontes.

Bern Porter International: Volume 6 Number 15 (August 3, 2002), Bern Porter, Sheila Holtz, Natasha Bernstein

Newsletters

A Literary Newsletter and Bulletin of the Institute of Advanced Thinking

Bern Porter International: Volume 6 Number 17 (August 17, 2002), Bern Porter, Sheila Holtz, Natasha Bernstein

Newsletters

A Literary Newsletter and Bulletin of the Institute of Advanced Thinking

Featuring poetry by David Napolin and "Who Cares?" by Bern Porter.

Bern Porter International: Volume 6 Number 14 (July 15, 2002), Bern Porter, Sheila Holtz, Natasha Bernstein

Newsletters

The Bulletin of the Scholars of the Institute of Advanced Thinking

Featuring:

Zippy the Pinhead cover art by Bill Griffith
An Illustrated Introduction to Ray Johnson 1927-1995 by Mark Bloch

Bern Porter International: Volume 6 Number 13 (July 1, 2002), Bern Porter, Sheila Holtz, Natasha Bernstein

Newsletters

A Literary Newsletter and Bulletin of the Institute of Advanced Thinking

Featuring art by Sheila Holtz and poetry by Nguyen Ducmanh.

Bern Porter International: Volume 6 Number 12 (June 15, 2002), Bern Porter, Sheila Holtz, Natasha Bernstein

Newsletters

A Literary Newsletter and Bulletin of the Institute of Advanced Thinking

Featuring "How Many Times Can the System Repeat Itself Before the Metaphysical Takes Over" by Gregory Famum and mail art by CA Conrad.

Bern Porter International: Volume 6 Number 11 (June 1, 2002), Bern Porter, Sheila Holtz, Natasha Bernstein

Newsletters

A Literary Newsletter and Bulletin of the Institute of Advanced Thinking

Featuring mail art by Gerry M. and "Days in the Early Eighties" by Bern Porter.

Bern Porter International: Volume 6 Number 9 (May 1, 2002), Bern Porter, Sheila Holtz, Natasha Bernstein

Newsletters

A Literary Newsletter and Bulletin of the Institute of Advanced Thinking

Featuring art by Bern Porter and poetry by Sheila Holtz.

Bern Porter International: Volume 6 Number 10 (May 15, 2002), Bern Porter, Sheila Holtz, Natasha Bernstein

Newsletters

A Literary Newsletter and Bulletin of the Institute of Advanced Thinking

Featuring mail art by Maureen Neville and collage by Sheila Holtz.

Bern Porter International: Volume 6 Number 7 (April 1, 2002), Bern Porter, Sheila Holtz, Natasha Bernstein

Newsletters

A Literary Newsletter and Bulletin of the Institute of Advanced Thinking

Featuring "Quantum Tantra" by Nick Herbert and "Do Art" by Nguyen Ducmanh.

Mechanical Angel: Carolyn Forché And The Material Projection Of Messianic History, Alan Clinton

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

The work of Carolyn Forché has always retained a political edge, with works such as the exploration of her Czech background in Gathering the Tribes (1976) and her account of visits to El Salvador in The Country Between Us (1981). Forché has been one of the leading poets who, in her own words, has combatted the self-censorship operative among American poets and writers that seemed to preclude writing about...historical events when those events were still unsafe (qtd. in Stein 147). Her third book of poems The Angel of History (published 13 years later), however, represents a new turn …

Bern Porter International: Volume 6 Number 6 (March 15, 2002), Bern Porter, Sheila Holtz, Natasha Bernstein

Newsletters

A Literary Newsletter and Bulletin of the Institute of Advanced Thinking

Featuring poetry by George Gott and "The Document" by Blair Ewing.