American Literature Commons^™

A Poet Bears Witness: An Interview With M. L. Williams On The Function Of Literary Studies In Troubled Times, Leah Toth, M. L. Williams

Critical Humanities

Dr. M. L. (Marty) Williams is a poet and professor of literature at Valdosta State University, a comprehensive university in south-central Georgia. He is the author of Game (What Books Press 2021), Other Medicines (Redbone Chapbooks 2008) and co-editor of How Much Earth: The Fresno Poets (Roundhouse Press 2001). The focus of the interview that follows is the future of literary studies in the modern neo-liberal university, a daunting topic in 2026, in the face of what many administrators refer to as the "right-sizing" of literature programs nationwide in both the U.S. and the U.K. Anybody paying attention to the …

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 …

“The Right Of Black Folk To Love And Enjoy”: Black Romanticism, Pleasure, And Poetics, 1900-1920, John D. Hadlock

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores poetry written at the turn of the twentieth century in order to closely examine what I call the “Black Romantic” impulse of the Harlem and New Negro Renaissances. I argue that Black American poets turned to a Romantic notion of the poet as cultural representative and of poetry as a radical celebration of beauty that disavowed and disputed social ills, namely racist ideologies in America, while simultaneously demanding the right of Black pleasure-taking. However, I also contend that Black American poets of various backgrounds and identities used different poetic, rhetorical, and artistic strategies to elevate the status …

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

Where Did Her Torch Glow Go?, Josephine Smith

FUSION

This project is a short video presentation with accompanying written reflection connecting the poem "The New Colossus" by Emma Lazarus, a poem about immigration to the United States, to modern events regarding immigration in the country.

Ode To The Infomercial, Edward Wade

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

'Ode to the Infomercial' is a poetry collection in five sections which explores themes of contemporary American life, parenthood, and the media landscape. While primarily written in a narrative voice, the poetic approach is as diverse as the content. Interwoven throughout the collection is religious imagery and political posturing accompanied by healthy doses of self-criticism and humor.

Full Circle, Full Century: An Interview With Mitsuye Yamada, Noelle Brada-Williams, Elizabeth J. Asborno

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

No abstract provided.

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 …

Revolutionary Worldmaking: James Monroe Whitfield’S Poems In Martin Delany’S Blake; Or, The Huts Of America, Magdalena Zapędowska

Jacobson Center: Publications

Martin Delany’s Blake, serialized in the Weekly Anglo-African in 1861–62, includes five unattributed poems from James Monroe Whitfield’s volume America and Other Poems, which appear in the novel as compositions of the Cuban revolutionary poet Placido. Largely overlooked in scholarship on Blake, Whitfield/Placido’s poems are crucial to the impending revolt of the oppressed because they foster a collective emancipatory consciousness and model, through poetic form, the meticulous organization on which the revolution relies for success. Resonating with other poems and songs quoted in the novel, they speak to broader questions of poetry’s role in building communities of resistance. In turn, …

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 …

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.

‘Poetry Is Not A Luxury’, Rage Should Not Be A Privilege: The Potential Power Of The ‘Racial Imaginary’, Georgia Mcgovern

CMC Senior Theses

Female rage exists outside of the constructed masculine ideal of anger. To examine female rage, one must analyze the intersections between gender and race. I examine white women's privilege and access to female rage in reality and the fictional world. I explore Black Feminist poetry as a form of storage for rage at gender-based prejudice, racial injustice, and their intersection. Using Myisha Cherry’s term “Lordean Rage”, I recognize this specialized manifestation of female rage as an artistic, intergenerational source of energy for change.

I examine Claudia Rankine’s term “racial imaginary” as an imaginative space in which white people draw lines …

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 …

"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 …

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 …

Copper Sun, Countee Cullen

Zea E-Books Collection

Poet, playwright, novelist, graduate of DeWitt Clinton High, New York University, and Harvard University, Countee Cullen (1903–1946) emerged as a leading literary figure of the Harlem Renaissance. Copper Sun, his second book of poetry, explores the emotional consequences of being black, Christian, bisexual, and a poet in Jazz Age America—such as in the following “Confession”:

If for a day joy masters me,

Think not my wounds are healed;

Far deeper than the scars you see,

I keep the roots concealed.

They shall bear blossoms with the fall;

I have their word for this,

Who tend my roots with rains of …

Caroling Dusk: An Anthology Of Verse By Negro Poets, Countee Cullen , Editor

Zea E-Books Collection

CONTENTS:

FOREWORD

PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR • Ere Sleep Comes Down to Soothe the Weary Eyes • Death Song • Life • After the Quarrel • Ships that Pass in the Night • We Wear the Mask • Sympathy • The Debt

JOSEPH S. COTTER, SR • The Tragedy of Pete • The Way-side Well

JAMES WELDON JOHNSON • From the German of Uhland • The Glory of the Day Was in Her Face • The Creation • The White Witch • My City

WILLIAM EDWARD BURGHARDT Du BOIS • A Litany of Atlanta

WILLIAM STANLEY BRAITHWAITE • Scintilla • Rye …

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.

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 …

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.

Twentieth-Century Feminine Visionary Poetics : Vulnerable Visions Of Survival And Healing:, Lucyna Prostko

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

H.D. and Denise Levertov, two visionary poets of the twentieth century, represent both female poets’ awakening of political and historical consciousness and their engagement with the poetics of vulnerability and survival. H.D. and Levertov offer lyrical visions that dismantle the binaries of real and unreal, earthly and transcendent, and individual and communal. The subject of this project is visionary imagination and its various reverberations, limitations, and potentialities. What is at stake in feminine visionary twentieth-century poetics is the creation of imaginative worlds, the space of possibility, and the shaping of a lyrical form that encompasses the voices of survival, vulnerability, …

Movement Upstream, Downstream: A Lyric Essay, Mong- Lan

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

Early on, without knowing I was part of a movement, I was part of the movement of the Asian American cultural and literary phenomenon.

Because it was necessary to bear witness, to tell my story, my stories, our stories, the collective story, my observations, which keeps on unravelling, I began to write.

We Are Here, Susan K. Ito

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

No abstract provided.

Deconstructing The "Woman Of Sentiment": Parody As Agency In The Poetry Of Phoebe Cary, Scottie Garber-Roberts

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The work of nineteenth-century American poet Phoebe Cary presents a complex puzzle of exigence and purpose that combines social structure, political climate, and personal history. Known for her somber and spiritual sentimental poetry, Cary shocked readers and reviewers alike when she published her collection Poems and Parodies in 1854, which contained a series of scathing and hilarious parodies based on popular sentimental poetry. In my thesis, I work to untangle the various contextual elements surrounding Cary’s writing in order to gain a better understanding of the dual nature of the poet and her work. Through an examination of nineteenth-century American …

The Charles Chesnutt Archive: Charles Chesnutt And The Black Community Who Aided Him, Bianca Swift, Bianca Swift

UCARE: Research Products

A pioneer of African American literature and the first to reach a national audience with his writings, Chesnutt wrote nine novels, eighty-five short stories, and more than seventy essays and speeches. As a prolific writer Chesnutt often interacted with other black intellectuals and academics including; W.E.B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, Walter F. White, and Kelly Miller. This poster makes the argument that his connections to these figures aided him in his writings and his presence in history. As well as comparing his standing in history as a black person speaking about race to the 21st century view through poetry.

The Figure Of The Animal In Modern And Contemporary Poetry By Michael Malay, Brian Bartlett

The Goose

Review of Michael Malay's The Figure of the Animal in Modern and Contemporary Poetry

Dickinson At Thirty, Philip Pardi

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

When we say there are “no Mozarts in literature,” we point to an enticing fact: writers become. Pick any text you love or revere, and there was a moment earlier in the author’s life when it could not have been written. The writers we remember develop over time; they change and are changed. Their careers divide, if not always easily, into a before (often thought of as a kind of apprenticeship) and an after (a work or body of work that has a significant claim on our attention). Personal relationships, lived experiences, social and political contexts, readers real and imagined, …