English Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2766
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Item A Heart in the River(2011) Dempsey, Jennifer Lynn; Collier, Michael; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Exploring the boundaries of relationships, A Heart in the River questions the personal connections through which we identify the self. Through poems about war, poker, and family history, the speaker delves into memory and the devolution --then renewal-- of trust. The Midwest, particularly northern Michigan, grounds the manuscript in nature; landscapes with rivers, birds, and a black walnut tree juxtapose with the artificial scenery and actions of civilization. The thesis is organized in three sections, each creating emotional and physical borders the speaker wishes to break, and it is only through sound and movement --both thematically and formally-- that any reconciliation may be reached.Item Hoodoos at Montauk(2014) Carstens, Rachel Doris; Arnold, Elizabeth; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This collection of poetry depicts landscapes and experiences of loss. The poems occur in various locations: Baltimore, MD; Shenandoah, VA; Rochester and New York City, NY; Uppsala and Göteborg, Sweden; Vienna, Austria; Budapest, Hungary; Kusadasi and Ephesus, Turkey; Vilnius, Lithuania; Panama City, Panama; Washington, DC. There are some named characters, and many unnamed characters; these individuals appear across poems as their relationship to the speaker and the speaker's location change.Item The Empire of Mere Survival(2011) Hollar, Glenn Pierre; Weiner, Joshua; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The poems in this collection revolve primarily around two subjects: the twenty-something speaker and his unlikely muse: a crippled Vietnam War veteran named Freddy, who struggles with deep-seated psychological problems. Though traces of formal elements exist as a sort of structural cohesion, the connection between these poems is largely a thematic and narrative one, weaving several threads together to reveal the relationship between these two figures, as well as their relationships with the people and places they choose to surround themselves with. Place is especially important in these poems, not only as a source of pride, but also as a sort of kinship--after all, at the core of this collection is an intersection of two lives in the same place at the same time, both of which seem to have stalled in some way. The tension born out of this aimlessness is what both drives and connects these poems.Item Waking Up in Beirut(2010) El-Amine, Zein; Collier, Michael; Weiner, Joshua; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)ABSTRACT Title of Document: WAKING UP IN BEIRUT Zein El-Amine, MFA, 2010 Directed By: Professor Michael Collier, Department of English The poems in Waking Up in Beirut are mainly obsessed with an exile‟s search for home. The first section is a sequence of poems that starts as an elegy for a friend and expands into an elegy for Washington DC. The second section charts a return to the poet‟s geographical home, and deals more directly with the poet‟s ethnic identity. This section delivers more elegies in the form of narrative, mostly dealing with three women who were central to the poet‟s life. In the third section the poet attempts to break out of the narrative into the lyrical. This last section defines the poet‟s evolution through his apprenticeship and represents an embarkation point for future works.Item Directions to my House: Poems(2008-05-02) Barnoy, Ishai; Weiner, Joshua; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This is a self-portrait collection. But it begins in response to texts that I read. Before, I write automatically, nonsensically, intentionally unintentionally; and the engagement with literature directs my writing toward the 'determined' strain that defines this collection. Starting, for instance, with Pound's Chinese translations, used in the earliest poem here, I build my own 'translations.' And I follow the work of poets that interest me: Miroslav Holub, from whom I borrow lines; John Ashbery, Cesar Vallejo, Kenneth Koch, James Tate, Samuel Beckett, on all whose themes I vary; and more. Certainly, my fascination with nonsense and the absurd continues, but throughout the collection I respond more and more to what I read, twisting what I can into my own language--and I reflect more and more on my own personal and interpersonal conditions, less and less reveling in pure senselessness, although even nonsense is a self-reflection.Item Summon Up the Blood(2007-04-27) Stephens, Evan Matthew; Collier, Michael; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Summon Up the Blood is a collection of poems divided into two sections. The first, entitled "Country" deals with the relationship between the individual and the natural world, and with the tendency for one to reflect the other; the second, entitled "City" is primarily concerned with the inner life of the individual amid the stresses of society and culture, and with the difficulties of preserving a sense of self in the modern world. Both sections share the overarching goal of extensively inspecting the necessity of being an honest observer of both the interior and exterior worlds. Influences include Robinson Jeffers, Ezra Pound, Tomas Transtromer and Robert Frost.