English Theses and Dissertations

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2766

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    Tenors and Vehicles
    (2010) Danoff, David James; Plumly, Stanley; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Using a variety of formal strategies, the poems in this collection trace connections between art and life; between the exaltation of lyrical flight and the mundane experience of ordinary days; between (you might say) grand opera and reality. The styles employed range from the formality of sonnets, ballads, a rondeau, a pantoum, quatrains, couplets, and some other nonce forms, through various unrhymed or unmetrical hybrid forms, to the more muted lyricism of free verse and even prose poems. Along with traditional forms, narrative is used to help build suspense and sustain dramatic interest, to generate levels of irony, and to create more satisfying patterns. Again and again, these poems struggle to forge the loose details of domestic life, remembered experience, and close observation of the natural world into something like the crystallized music of an aria, where at least for a moment the world remains vivid, harmonious, and sensuously beautiful.
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    Ice Skating in the Sculpture Garden
    (2008-05-05) Boulard, Deanna Marie; Collier, Michael; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This collection includes a prologue and three ten-poem sections. In an attempt to sit quietly, to see and hear as clearly as possible, the poems include much tea-drinking, museum-going, and people-watching. Though most of these poems are in free verse, the vast majority employ traditional line and stanza lengths, as well as consonance and assonance, and the occasional echo of pentameter. At the same time, they try to remain true to the rhythms and vocabulary of American and Canadian speech. Influenced by Elizabeth Bishop, Billy Collins, and Anne Porter, the poems are concerned with the observation of light, the distance between people, the sound of the language, and with finding art in the everyday and the everyday in art.
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    Tongue
    (2008-05-05) Mills, Tyler Caroline; Plumly, Stanley; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Tongue begins with Ovid's Philomela. Instead of presenting the female as a body with a gaping, empty mouth, Tongue presents notions of speech. Tongue moves through mythological poems that perform Odysseus's wanderings as a means by which a speaker understands "home" to be the human body, and the psyche's relationship to that body. Influenced by the way in which James Joyce's chapters of Ulysses perform episodes of Homer's myth--in language that does not try to match up a single "Cyclops" or "Circe" figure--Tongue subverts gender expectations and moves through myth, music, and subconscious narrative leaps. For these poems do not seek to present a single narrative, but to use mythology as mirrors reflecting story fragments common to a speaker, a woman, and experiences of "home." What are myths but transcriptions? The tongue is a fleshy and flexible organ.
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    FLY-OVER COUNTRY
    (2005-05-13) Foster, Eva; Plumly, Stanley; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    The focus of this collection is the geography of memory, human connection, and home, an exploration of an emotional and literal landscape. Fly-over country is sealed in the middle of the country and the speakers' consciousnesses. When the external world breaks through, it is in fragments: a memorandum on torture, a tsunami from a Japanese woodblock, a brief surfacing into a dystopic present presented through the voice of another poet. This fragmentation is central to the collection, which attempts to deal with the problem of experience and memory, dispersal and loss. History is addressed as a series of shifting and even contradictory experiences; landscape intrudes and recedes, in conflict with itself and with the speaker, who is often peripheral or disappearing into another perspective. The collection takes as its central subject the difficulties of estrangement and identity.