Poetry Commons^™

The Kiss Turns: A Play On Aural Manor, Meredith Higgins

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

The Kiss Turns: A Play on Aural Manor is a poetic work that explores the nature of being and selfhood as they are expressed and modulated through the hearing, speaking, and writing of language. The Manor and surrounding Grounds here are presented as a fluid junk-mosaic: colorful, clamoring, thing-filled, magical, and on the move. Seven characters reside on the Manor’s property and live out their respective longings and loves, apprehending horror, tragedy, abundance, and the possibility of play through accepting and collaborating with the unknown depths of being.

Horsonnets, Shriram Sivaramakrishnan

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

‘Horsonnets’ was conceived and written between September 2019 and December 2021. As the name suggests, the collection is centered around horses, as objects of desire, metaphor, tropes. The collection is structured into four sections: ‘the way a horse frames blueness’, ‘to nurse a hurt’, ‘horsonnets’ and ‘landscape with horns’. Together, they all address different kinds of pain (horses became emblematic of that): bodily (‘the way a horse frames blueness’), historical (‘to nurse a hurt’), cultural (‘horsonnets’), and spiritual (‘landscape with horns’).

Already An Archaeobotany, Sydney Britsch

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Steven Universe once sang, “I learned to stay true to myself/ by watching myself die.” This is precisely the natural journey we must all embark upon in this life; our self continually returning, remembering that which we can trust our bodies have known all along: we are not actually separate from this thing we’ve called nature. This ever-opening landscape necessitates fluidity and the recognition of other modes of knowledge and connection, sometimes only sound or space as our guide. A place where self-healing and self-sacrifice is simultaneously enacted. Each of these moments reverberates and affects the universal voice. The earth …

Three Quarters, Michael Mckee Green

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Three Quarters makes retrospection into prospection. Following its speaker from the near-present to the near-past, the text imposes a spiritual and affective pilgrimage onto nine months (three quarters of a year) of his life. Codas, pieces of parataxis, and grammatical slippages color and heighten the experiences of a young man coming to terms with himself by reliving what’s come.

Merciless: A Crude Hagiography, Lindsey Ann Klessens Appell

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is the culmination of a project that began as an attempt to explore my relationship, as a teenager, with the Main Street of my hometown, Roundup, MT. In the process of looking through the Roundup Record-Tribune archives and revisiting adolescent memories, I began to see connective tissue between the autobiographical aspects of this documentary project and the work I had been doing in reclaiming, repurposing, and “translating” folklore and mythology in my poetry. Coming out of classes in Old English and translation theory, I had also developed an interest in experimental and creative translation of early medieval texts, …

Circle Drive, Matthew Naples

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

The massively multiplayer online role playing game, World of Warcraft follows many leveling systems that spoon-feeds its players a steady and carefully calculated sense of progression, control, and power. This is part of what makes the game so appealing, as well as the intricate character creation and vast community-based elements. Millions of players share this world of Warcraft, as if it were its own real world (and in a way it is), and they do so with characters they’ve created and customized. What furthers this connection between player and character, and player and player, is how their characters move and …

Auto/Aura, Michael Wanzenried

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

I will make the poems of materials, for I think they are to be the most spiritual poems, And I will make the poems of my body and of mortality

—Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, section 6

Auto/Aura attempts to follow through on Whitman’s project by literally using materials from the world to create a situation that challenges the traditional reader-poet relationship. The poems here diverge from the page into a three-dimensional setting to continue in a largely personal and arbitrary lineage (as all poet-historical lineages tend to be according to Jerome Rothenberg) of 19th and 20th century poetic …

Kania, Indrani Sengupta

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Kania begins as a poetic revision of fairy tales, an attempt to extract the potential female narratives buried within the source texts, in their stifling archetypes. In the spirit of Angela Carter, it attempts to manipulate the most recognizable fairy tale motifs in order to explore issues of violence, deviant desire, sexuality, and monstrosity. As the text evolves, the archetypal “monster” shifts in location, becoming increasingly internal to the woman/speaker. First “he” is the abuser, then “she” is the errant woman, then finally, “it” is the interior anxiety, the self”s nightmare, ungendered and constantly in flux. The manuscript strives, through …

All The King's Horses, Christopher Caruso

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

All The King’s Horses juxtaposes the struggle of artistic creation alongside the trauma of 9/11. This collection of poetry presents the failure of language and art to define the boundaries of anxiety’s origins. Aware of these limitations the “I” in this poem struggles to find a reprieve in defining something that cannot be defined.