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open access

Getting It On Home: Ways of Telling the Story

Description: In this collection of poems and essays, the author demonstrates two different methods for examining the same theme: the notion of "home"—how to get there, how to remain there and bear articulate witness to the forces which drive that author to write. The introduction sets forth an explanation for the use of the specific form chosen for expression, with an analysis of the intent behind that form. In these essays and poems, the author accounts for her years on the Texas Panhandle, in Montana, an… more
Date: May 1996
Creator: Vanek, Mary
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

A Chorus of Trees

Description: This two-part thesis includes a critical preface and a collection of my poems. Using three poems-Louise Glück's "Lullaby," Bob Hicok's "Poem for My Mother's Hysterectomy," and Nick Flynn's "Memento Mori"-the critical preface examines how, in poetry, the transformation of a body negotiates trauma and triggers a conceptual shift, the creation and revision of identity, and the release of the duende's inspirational force. The collection of poetry that follows seeks to transfigure the body as a way … more
Date: August 2010
Creator: Lyons, Renée Kathleen
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Lines by Someone Else: the Pragmatics of Apprompted Poems

Description: Over the last sixty years, overtly intertextual poems with titles such as “Poem Beginning with a Line by John Ashbery” and “Poem Ending with a Line by George W. Bush” have been appearing at an increasing rate in magazines and collections. These poems wed themselves to other texts and authors in distinct ways, inviting readers to engage with poems which are, themselves, in conversation with lines from elsewhere. These poems, which I refer to as “apprompted” poems, explicitly challenge readers to… more
Date: August 2015
Creator: Gibson, Kimberly Dawn
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Wake

Description: Preface: A consideration of the New Sincerity movement in contemporary American poetics in the work of Tao Lin, Matt Hart, and Dorothea Lasky. Creative work: A three section book of poetry exploring elegy, form, and the intersection of strangeness and domesticity.
Date: December 2016
Creator: Beard, Christopher Aaron
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Fathom's Edge

Description: Investigating elements of the creative process in the work of three poets: James Wright, Gjertrud Schnackenberg, and Pegeen Kelly. Each poet deploys a different method for access to those experiences that lie at the edge of accessible language. Each method is discussed and its deployment illustrated. Wright leads us from the sensory world to the supersensual. Schnackenberg makes use of the formal device of the fairy tale. Kelly immerses in the logic of dreams. Drawing on Elaine Scarry's theory … more
Date: May 2010
Creator: Sweeney, Mark
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Letters from Jack and Other Cadavers

Description: My dissertation, Letters from Jack and Other Cadavers, developed out of my interest in using persona, narrative forms, and historical details collected through thorough research to transform personal experience and emotions in my poems. The central series of poems, "Letters from Jack," is written in the voice of Jack the Ripper and set up as a series of poems-as-letters to the police who chased him. The Ripper's sense of self and his motivations are troubled by his search for a muse as the po… more
Date: May 2010
Creator: Leis, Aaron
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Vulgar Moon

Description: The preface to this collection, "Speculation and Silence," argues that confessional poetry remains integral to contemporary poetics, though the implications of the term have changed since its "first-generation." Confessional poetry must not be dependent on simply the transmission of sensational details and the emotional consequences, but on poets' implementation of silence and restraint in both the diffusion of ideas and in the crafting of the piece. Vulgar Moon is a collection of poems in whic… more
Date: December 2007
Creator: Miller, Kelley Reno
Partner: UNT Libraries

Storm Swimmer

Description: In poems that celebrate survival and renewal, Ernest Hilbert summons the ageless conflict between human affection and the passing of time, recognizing that all we love must eventually disappear. Tender poems of fatherhood weigh against unsettling explorations of natural dangers and intimations of bodily harm. From porn sets to seedy gun ranges and heavy metal tribute nights in crumbling theaters, Hilbert’s eye roves over the desolation and beauty of contemporary America, all the while feeling t… more
Access: Restricted to UNT Community Members. Login required if off-campus.
Date: April 2023
Creator: Hilbert, Ernest
Partner: UNT Libraries

Given That the Body Was Made

Description: A collection of poems that explores notions of disability, family, and belief, with a preface that meditates on questions related to the ethical ramifications of various approaches to the making of poetry and art that takes up the suffering of others as subject matter.
Access: Restricted to UNT Community Members. Login required if off-campus.
Date: May 2019
Creator: Burke, Conor William
Partner: UNT Libraries

Brazos

Description: Brazos is a collection of poetry that comments on and critiques life in a small town in Texas. These poems situate the speaker both in this town and in spaces removed from the town, but the work always grapples with questions of how the speaker identifies himself via the relationship to that space. The creative portion is accompanied by a critical introduction that looks at the intersections of poetry and the lyric essay.
Access: Restricted to UNT Community Members. Login required if off-campus.
Date: May 2019
Creator: Carter, Justin
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Spectral Evidence

Description: Spectral Evidence is a collection of poems that instigates a variety of omens, signs, divinations, and folktales to explore the concept of wish fulfillment. They arise in obedience to the compulsion to repeat past dramas brought on by failed love, the nostalgia of childhood, the damning legacy of language, the restriction of gender roles, death, etc. In order to quell these anxieties, the speaker looks beyond the self to both history and mythology, often invented mythologies as an attempt to co… more
Date: May 2017
Creator: Edwards, Trista
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Ode to Controlled Vocabulary

Description: This poem pays homage to controlled vocabularies. It describes the importance of using controlled vocabularies and why they should be respected and utilized.
Date: March 2009
Creator: Tarver, Hannah
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Samuel Barber’s Song Cycle, Despite and Still

Description: This paper discusses the song cycle Despite and Still by Samuel Barber, created with three poems by Robert Graves, one poem by Theodore Roethke, and part of Jame Joyce's novel Ulysses. Phyllis Bush Thomas describes the feeling created by the song cycle and the compositional style of Samuel Barber.
Date: August 1985
Creator: Thomas, Phyllis Bush
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Analysis for Performance of the Song Cycle Songs of Travel, by Ralph Vaughan Williams

Description: This paper analyzes Ralph Vaughan Williams' Songs of Travel and asserts that the songs are a song cycle rather than just a collection of songs set to to the poetry of Robert Louis Stevenson. Richard Porter Cole performs a musical and poetic analysis of the songs and makes suggestions to aid performers of the piece.
Date: May 1977
Creator: Cole, Richard Porter
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Opening Day

Description: Although I've read and written poetry for my own pleasure for about twenty years now, I've only seriously studied and written poetry on a consistent basis for the past two years. In this sense, I still consider myself a beginning poet. When attempting to pursue an art form as refined and historically informed as poetry, only after spending a number of years reading and writing intensively would I no longer consider myself a beginner, but a practitioner of the art. I've grounded my early deve… more
Date: August 2008
Creator: Van Hooser, David
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Vanishing Act

Description: This dissertation is comprised of a collection of poems preceded by a critical preface. The preface reconsiders the value of discontinuous poetic forms and advocates a return to lyric as an antidote to the toxic aspects of what Tony Hoagland terms “the skittery poem of our moment.” I consider poems by Wendy Xu, Kevin Prufer, Sharon Olds, and Stephen Dunn in depth to facilitate a discussion about the value of a more centrist position between the poles of supreme discontinuity and totalizing cont… more
Date: May 2015
Creator: Pryor, Caitlin
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Where My Own Grave Is

Description: The preface to this collection, "Against Expectation: The Lyric Narrative," highlights the ways James Wright, Stephen Dunn, and C.K. Williams use narrative to strengthen their poems. Where My Own Grave Is is a collection of poems that uses narrative to engage our historical fascination with death.
Date: December 2008
Creator: Collier, Jordan Taylor
Partner: UNT Libraries

Because You Previously Liked or Played

Description: Because You Previously Liked or Played is a poetry manuscript that attempts to respond to the Trump administration in a new way unique to the medium of poetry. Trump is the central, all-pervading subject of this text, but the rise of web 2.0 and new media which normalizes a quick and unrelenting consumption of information is another essential focal point. The manuscript works both within and against the various political channels, discourses, and entanglements, within and against the various wa… more
Date: August 2020
Creator: Redmond, James Delmar
Partner: UNT Libraries

Where We Split

Description: Nearly 30 years after its publication Gloria E. Anzaldúa's book Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza remains more relevant than ever, particularly her discussion of borderlands as more than physical boundaries. In her book, she theorizes and explores how borders can possess psychic, social, and geopolitical qualities, and in order to articulate the nuances and challenges of border-culture, she invents a new language for underrepresented poets to discuss their poetics. The goal in crafting t… more
Date: August 2020
Creator: Paramo, Sebastian Hasani
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Antigravity

Description: This dissertation contains two parts: Part I, which discusses the elegy of possessive intent, a subgenre of the contemporary American elegy; and Part II, Antigravity, a collection of poems. English elegies have been closely rooted to a specific grief, making the poems closer to occasional poems. The poet—or at least the poet’s speaker—seeks some kind of public consolation for (often) a private loss. The Americanized form does stray from the traditional elegy yet retains some of its charact… more
Date: August 2012
Creator: Bowen, Ashley Hamilton
Partner: UNT Libraries
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