English Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2766
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Item Mirror Made of Quartz(2024) Drummond, Kassiah Ania; Bertram, Lillian-Yvonne; Weiner, Joshua; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)"Mirror Made of Quartz" is a poetic exploration about community divided into four sections that reclaim the displaced emotion of rage with empathy. In the first section "Naming a Better Word for Love", the collection bargains the complexities of expressing love amidst trust and compromise. The next section "(Womb)an", explores how the gift of a name to a daughter, echoes the title of motherhood itself as both are becoming their new roles for the first time. The womb carries legacy, tradition, and trauma. The third section "I Think About Being Black a Lot", dedicates itself to exploring the aspects of the color as an identity, by delving into various culturally impactful folklores, redemption for the unsolved history, and new perspectives to the misunderstood. Finally, the title section, "Mirror Made of Quartz," serves as a supportive reflection of myself by commentating on my name, body, and the person I hope to become with tangible optimism.Item Debris(2022) Karoly, Kathryn Rose; Arnold, Elizabeth; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The poems in Debris (by Kathryn Karoly) consider the female self through the internalized hate manifested from outside social forces into the reconstruction of the mental self, and physical self as well, as seen in the poem, “Alterations”. The speaker in Debris inhabits our male-dominated modern world, where the influence of appearance on womanhood collides with her ancestral origins, as well as the external, natural world which she searches for acceptance of the natural body. Debris seeks strangely shaped keyholes in the door of questions on human inclinations toward dissolution and transcendence during times of love and loss. Its poems speak through white space just as much as through lyric and narrative, and often mirror longing for familial ties, for the self, and carnal desire. The desert, the female body, and a photograph of Wilma Rudolph, all become twisted to unlock something else. Internal rhyme, repetition, and recycled sounds function as a morphing key. Debris doesn’t answer, but asks, and echoes.Item Possession(2021) Lasky, Max; Weiner, Joshua; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Possession is a collection of poems that work to formulate a philosophy of difference; that is, these poems explore the similarities between self and Other, and from those similarities arise an understanding of difference, an understanding that is ultimately affirmative. The first love prepares for the last, and so these poems begin with the loss of love and culminate, by the end, with the regaining of love. From New Jersey to Maryland, these poems explore place and the ecological, societal, and political contexts that inform our experience of place. Recurring threads that underlie this collection include addiction, mental illness, friendship, familial relations, and the interconnectedness between these threads, how they both inform, and escape, one another.Item Quiet Country(2021) Hensley, Alannah; Arnold, Elizabeth; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Quiet Country is a collection of poetry exploring love, violence, and grief. These poems examine the way poverty, addiction, and inter-generational cycles of abuse shape the landscape of rural Arkansas, and address patterns of violence toward children, animals, and women. The collection also includes a six-poem, Queer reimagining of the myth of Cassandra of Troy.Item UNDOCUMENTARY POETICS: TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY HEMISPHERIC AMERICAN POETRY BY WOMEN AND NON-BINARY POETS(2021) Knowles, Andrea; Long, Ryan; Ontiveros, Randy J; Comparative Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Undocumentary Poetics elucidates how poets from across the Americas use poetry’s form to interrogate the bounded nature of form itself, including the forms of the poem, the canon, the nation, and of recounting and knowing history. This project challenges the writing of a hemispheric canon of American poetry that, by largely overlooking women and non-binary poets, especially and including those of color, continues to leave dominant, white hetero-patriarchal forms intact—despite the hemispheric framework’s inherent potential to uncover minor literary networks across borders and destabilize those deep-rooted systems of control. The contemporary poetry I examine confronts those systemic erasures by tackling the constraints of genre and form. The project’s focus on form and historical power brings it into conversation with recent discussions of historical and documentary poetry. The term “documentary” has been applied to a range of poems, from lyrics documenting personal experience to mixed-media experimental writing that pushes on the genre-categories of documentary and poetry. I ask how poetry itself can be “documentary.” How do poems become “documents” that substantiate official or State versions of culture and history? Do poetry’s canons, histories, and formal and generic expectations also play this documentary role? I propose that undocumentary poetry engages in and undermines poetic documentation in multiple senses. On the one hand, the poems I analyze make visible events, lived realities, or histories that are hidden within ‘official’ versions of history and culture, and they also make visible the forms that have enabled and perpetuated such erasures. On the other, the poems undermine the boundaries of that documentation, ultimately making even themselves provisional. I highlight the ways that poetry’s condensation of forms and language, and its resulting paradoxes and ambiguities, specifically enables such undocumentation. Rather than creating a new category or form of poetry with Undocumentary Poetics, I observe undocumentary poetics as a current within contemporary poetics, one that is invested in imagining a world with more nuanced and fluid, and less rigid, forms. It is a poetry that “inhabits contradiction” as M. NourbeSe Philip put it, “unraveling old systems of control and domination,” without creating new ones.Item Up Ahead(2020) Head, Bryan; Collier, Michael; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Up Ahead documents the ways movement and speed inform, permit, and distort a speaker’s perception of narratives assumed both individually and collectively. The collection’s skeletal metaphor—the American interstate as vehicle for American opportunism and exceptionalism—dramatizes the tension (or lack thereof) in reckoning with the contradictions and fictions inherent in being a traveler, a husband, and an American. Many of the poems in Up Ahead pull real documents surrounding the planning, lobbying, and building of the interstate system (the largest human construction wonder in history) to parallel language found in the domestication of violence, and the absolution of individual guilt.Item A Spade, A Spade(2020) Murray-Daniels, Shonte Nicole; Collier, Michael R.; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The poems in A Spade, A Spade are mainly obsessed with the poet’s understanding and reconciliation with her family. The collection is in four parts, each of which investigates the speaker’s perspective as a daughter, sister, and granddaughter in a broken family. The poems are rooted heavily in memory, as the speaker recollects her time with her estranged father, and comes to term with her mother’s battle with lung cancer. A Spade, A Spade carries a dance motif throughout to explore the body as it grows and deteriorates.Item Don't Call It Grieving(2020) Shibli, Ayesha; Weiner, Joshua; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)“Don’t Call It Grieving” is in constant conversation with the modes of formality and performance of losing. Each formal decision and subsequent departure tells its own story of loss and obsesses over the question: Is all loss equal, and what do we owe to those we choose to leave behind? The collection of poems in this thesis explores both the kinds of loss we know and those we don’t have a word for. Form attempts to express what can’t be said—what words are subsequently found serve to continuously shape around absence. Whether a lost loved one, a friend, or a home—these poems fill in the space with stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally, acceptance.Item “DISCRETION IN THE INTERVAL”: EMILY DICKINSON’S MUSICAL PERFORMANCES(2020) Holmes, Gerard; Smith, Martha Nell; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)“Discretion in the interval”: Emily Dickinson’s Musical Performances considers Dickinson’s writing in the context of improvisational aesthetics prevalent in musical and writing cultures during her lifetime, but now largely effaced from their print reproductions. Her manuscript poems fall into two broad categories: those she preserved for herself, which I liken to musical scores, and those shared with friends, family members, and acquaintances, often by mail, which I liken to extemporaneous musical performances. These two sets of manuscripts coexist in a dynamic, cyclical, and generative process, through which Dickinson generated a growing set of performance possibilities each time she inscribed a given poem or added a variant word, phrase, or punctuation mark. Collectively, these manuscript variants comprise a set of performance instructions, akin to an improvising composer’s marked-up score or scores. This project accords with recent feminist and manuscript-based Dickinson criticism that considers the poems to be open-ended, allowing recreation by readers with each rereading. My discussion of improvisation is informed by the use of the term within ethnomusicology, which considers extemporaneous creative practice within, and constitutive of, the cultures that produce it. Dickinson's work also arose from, enabled, and constituted a community of readers and writers. Nineteenth-century musical, literary, and religious cultures prized improvisation. In the United States, distinct but interrelated strains of improvisational aesthetics existed within European-American and African-American cultures. Dickinson's engagement with these creative cultures is evident in her letters as well as poems, as a set of key terms and practices. Dickinson’s rewriting and sharing within her self-selected network refused the stabilizing, duplicative tendencies of print, allowing instead a practice of writing in multiple, audience-directed iterations. Rather than revising teleologically, Dickinson writes toward increasing multiplicity and possibility. For improvisers, no single text or performance is definitive. Each increases the set of possible performances. Dickinson's manuscripts, often written extemporaneously to accompany a letter or note, drew from preserved manuscripts, on which she recorded guiding words, phrases, and markings that signal available variations. Her engagement with improvisation has implications for representation of her work in print and online, and for nineteenth-century literary studies more generally.