Poetry Commons^™

Queer Ecologies: A Final Syllabus/Zine Product Of Our Independent Study, Yeh Seo Jung, Ray Craig

Crossings: Swarthmore Undergraduate Feminist Research Journal

This zine is the product of our independent study course Queer Ecologies, which is an exploration of bio-social systems using a queer and feminist theoretical lens. We aim to look critically at knowledge formation and construct alternative visions for more just and sustainable relationships between science, nature, and ourselves. While queer theory most directly interrogates the normative structure of heterosexuality both in humans and in biology more broadly, these studies include analyses of hierarchy, power, and value. Queer Ecology can be used to examine phenomena such as climate change, extinction, pollution, species hierarchies, agricultural practices, resource extraction, and human population …

Cicadas & Other Hauntings, Miriam J. Anastasi

Senior Projects Spring 2020

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.

Nature's Paths, Chloe Switzer

Senior Theses

This creative writing thesis contains a lyric essay, short story, and poetry by Chloe Switzer.

• Love of Place
• Lost in Venice
• The Willow's

Juneau: Notes From The Bus, Cara Makuh

Senior Theses

This creative writing project is about a week I spent alone in Juneau, Alaska. All time and travel was spent on foot, bus and boat. Alone, I had many different experiences, and every time I interacted with a new person, that isolation became a shared experience, if even for a minute. Each day started out a blank slate, and eventually wrote itself into a story with a unique identity of its own as each day does as we travel through seconds and minutes that build up into completed days. Social interactions with so many different people turns them from strangers …

Dreams And Reality: A Storyteller's Look At Life, Sara K. Bennett

Creative Writing Minor Portfolios

These pages tour the wanderings of a storyteller's mind and snippets of life in the forms of non-fiction, fiction, and poetry, though not always in that particular order. The topically arranged pieces first delve into the meaning of being a storyteller. This involves having half of one's mind in another place and putting on the mantles of different characters. After finishing with the theme, the collection turns to fiction with a selection of stories and poems. Turning from fiction, the collection touches upon real life pain, struggles, grief, and growing. Each provides snippets of life adding a backdrop to the …

Branches Over Ripples: A Waterside Journal, Brian Bartlett

The Goose

Branches Over Ripples: A Waterside Journal is a fifty-entry plein-air writing project drafted between April 2013 and October 2014 by various bodies of water—rivers, brooks, lakes, bays, marshes, waterfalls, a vernal pond, a Japanese koi pond. Most of the writing was done in Nova Scotia locations, but some entries were drafted in New Brunswick, Montreal, Missouri, Manhattan, and London, England. I often walked from an hour to four or five hours, then sat down on bare earth, grass, sand, stone, or wood, and wrote, keeping attuned to my surroundings but also letting my mind and memory wander.

Brushfire, Ariel Gordon

The Goose

“Brushfire” concerns itself with how people use urban forests, from indecent exposure to poaching to teenage drinking party-bonfires that get out of control. Though it could be construed as a manifesto on walking-in-the-woods, it also touches on some of the conflicts inherent in urban/nature experiences.

Evening At Juniper Knoll, Lois J. Shipley

Manuscripts

Oh, the glory of it all! The sun was a magnificant ball of flame as it descended low in the heavens. Small fluffy clouds of gold floated around the huge flaming ball, but kept their distance as though there was some fear of it. Occasionally, a graceful swallow Hew across, lending his profile to the glory of the heavens, and the cry of night birds as they took to flight gave the woods that necessary note of evening time. As I strolled through the woods, the sticks crackled beneath my feet and one little squirrel in the tree top took …

Three Silent Things, Ann Holloway

Manuscripts

Things that cause the eardrum to vibrate are relatively unimportant in the Universe. Nature's thunder, the boom of the cannon on the battlefield, or man-made machinery in operation create sound, but the very fact that they do so has no bearing on their significance in the world. Trees, wind, stupendous buildings, books, music, and art possess audibility or visibility, but these objects and elements in themselves are meaningless. The silent, intangible factors that allow the trees to exist, the wind to blow, or the artist to paint are the foundations on which the plan of creation is laid.

D Minor, Jean Siskel

Manuscripts

With stealthy passion
The music filled the room,
Brushing with mystic melody
His throbbing heart.

Outside the stony window frames
Were trees,
Rustling excitedly,
Bowing with frantic grace.

Do trees have hearts? Can they too
Feel the stirring touch of tone?
For trees, there is wind;
For men, music.

A Penny For Your Thoughts, Alfonse Tapia

Manuscripts

"A Penny for your thoughts."
What could I answer, when, in reality, I had been thinking of absolutely nothing. I was just looking at nature; nature who has always done something to me. I cannot put my finger on it, but I can feel it vaguely with a certain weakness that causes a disengagement from the powers of description. As mysterious as night itself; like the flame glowing in the fireplace, or the tobacco smoke, lazily drifting along to nowhere. It is in that way that I watch the always vanishing 'something' that is forever there in nature.

From The Inside Out, And Through., Dominique Ovalle

The STEAM Journal

These photographs describe “Science” born of consumerism, hijacked by me, economically disenfranchised, or rather—temporarily embarrassed, artist. I was putzing around Malibu—my old college stomping ground, looking for free food; maybe a sample of some gourmet $5 chocolate, and all I got were these photographs.