Browsing by Subject "Narrative poetry"
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Item But you are rich: A collection of original poems(2012-05) Newsom, Brent; Wenthe, William; Poch, John; Kolosov-Wenthe, JacquelineBut You Are Rich is a collection of original poems that balance the lyric and narrative modes, alternately uncovering the narrative context a lyric poem so often masks or searching the lyric moment within a narrative frame. Two poetic sequences in the manuscript illustrate this balance. One meditates on the father-mother-son triad and its psychic, social, and theological significance; the other dramatizes the travails of residents in a fictional town called Smyrna. These sequences are augmented by additional poems on themes such as coming of age, marriage, war, and spiritual experience. In general, all the poems in the collection explore the paradoxical fragility and strength of human connections—to each other, to the natural world, and to the divine—and the ways larger cultural forces may impinge on those connections. Just as the collection unites lyric and narrative approaches to poetry, so does it balance formalist and free-verse techniques. Poems in received forms like the sonnet, sestina, and pantoum are interspersed with poems written in open forms. An introduction preceding the poems addresses the structure and themes of the collection, influences on the poems’ composition, the author’s approach to form and rhythm, and the significance of place, both to this collection and to American poetry more broadly.Item Ligatures of time and space: 1920s New York as a construction site for modernist "American" narrative poetry(2005) Sulak, Marcela Malek; Newton, Adam Zachary; Cullingford, ElizabethThis dissertation examines spatial-temporal aspects of modernist, self-consciously “American” narrative poetry set in 1920s New York. Because many cultural considerations and languages get left out of popular theories of modernism, I fashion an alternative characterization using Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the chronotope to account for modernist poetry written in minor languages, such as Yiddish, Black dialect, and Spanish. Five poems—Hart Crane’s The Bridge (1929), Moyshe-Leyb Halpern’s In NyuYork (1919), Langston Hughes’ The Weary Blues (1926) and Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927) and Federico Garcia Lorca’s Poeta en Nueva York (completed in 1929, published in 1936)—exploit the lack of a normative sense of time and a wholeness of place that characterizes modernist literary depictions of the city to establish a position in which to write with authority. Distinguishing between poetry as a “form” and poetry as a “social force” allows me to apply a theory that had been developed for prose narrative in order to discuss the chronotopic significance of such purely poetic features as rhyme, meter, and rhythm.Item The art of contemporary narrative poetry as illustrated by Masefield's Dauber, Noyes's Drake, and Robinson's Tristam(Texas Tech University, 1935-08) Stine, LuluNot availableItem The Book of Manke: An original collection of poems(2012-05) Pierce, Rick; Wenthe, William; Poch, John; Kolosov-Wenthe, JacquelineThe Book of Manke is a collection of original poetry that consists of narratively interlocking poems about a middle-aged man, a dentist named Les Manke. When a series of losses brings up the pain of an unhealed trauma—the death of his wife and infant daughter a decade earlier—Manke tries to run away from his life. Once in the “wilderness” of a state park, Manke unwittingly begins a spiritual quest on which he faces the question of evil and the nature of suffering. Why do bad things always seem to happen to him? Is there an underlying force guiding his life, or is it only chance and choice that have brought him to this point? The poems in this collection are written in three modes—third person narrative poems, dramatic lyrics, and dream poems written in alliterative verse. This three-mode structure allows for the ironic juxtaposition of points of view. During his quest, Manke meets various characters who each have their own views on life, suffering, and God. These characters speak in dramatic lyrics and monologues, each lyric or monologue presenting a distinct temperament, point of view, diction, and poetic form. Tonally, the dissertation ranges from serious spiritual inquiry, to dark humor, to campy slapstick. Thematically, the collection employs allegory to undercut its own tradition: by exposing the genre’s limitations, it comments on the way any metaphysical understanding of God ultimately resists logical delineation.