Browsing by Subject "poetry"

Now showing 1 - 7 of 7
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    African American Women in Appalachia: Personal Expressions of Race, Place and Gender
    (2014-06-04) Barbour-Payne, Yunina Carol
    African American women in Appalachia have lived, survived and long been overlooked by dominant narratives that support stereotypical depictions of the Appalachian region and its inhabitants. A little over twenty years ago, poet and scholar Frank X Walker coined the term ?Affrilachia? to describe people of African American decent in the Appalachian region. Though Walker?s term announces the presence of blacks in Appalachia, in a multidimensional sense of cultural identity place is a central theme, along with race, gender, and class, in the identity experiences of Appalachia?s African American women inhabitants. As a marginalized group in the region of Appalachia, Black Appalachian women discussed in this work provide a compelling case for understanding identity experiences within the region. This thesis works to acknowledge and analyze the ?intersectionality? in the personal expressions, poetry and creative works of Black Appalachian women. This thesis investigates the personal expressions of four modes of survival by African American women in/of Appalachia to understand the multiple dimensions of Affrilachian identity and memory. This research project brings together scholarship of performances studies and Kimberle Crenshaw?s notion of intersectionality to explore the unquestionable intersection of place and other dimensions (race, class, gender) of the African American women?s experience in Appalachia. This thesis explores how themes of survival and place manifest in the oral history, personal narratives and creative works of Black women in Appalachia. The investigation and analysis of Affrilachian women?s identity from the point of view of Affrilachian women, offers an opportunity to exponentially increase our understanding of the intersections of class, gender, race and place in performances of the everyday life.
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    Astigmatism: poems exploring the misshapen I
    (Texas A&M University, 2006-10-30) Hall-Zieger, Anna
    This thesis is a book of poems, containing two major sections. The first part is a critical introduction to the creative writing; the second part consists of poetry that I have composed, revised, and revisited during the time I have spent working on my Masters degree. The poems comprise the larger section and is a cohesive collection bound by a progression of theme, style, and mode. In the critical introduction, I discuss many influences on my poetry and I explore how my poetry adheres to various modes and styles as well as how it differs from them. While I remain drawn to the confessional style, my work does not adhere enough to the strictures of that mode, and I find it rather stifling. However, instead of attempting to redefine the confessional/postconfessional mode, or arguing for one specific critical perspective, I attempt to propose different guidelines for my poetry, which seems to fall into a yet unnamed category, that I call the lyric memoir. I hope to suggest a method of reading that considers the confessional poem as representative of neither a completely constructed persona, nor a strictly autobiographical retelling of the poet??????s life. The second section of the thesis consists of thirty-seven poems. Although, I do not subdivide the poetry into labeled chapters, I have organized it so that the reader can identify a movement or progression of theme. The early poems contain reflective pieces that most closely mirror the confessional and/or postconfessional modes, as I explore my psyche, my perceived reality, and my role in the world. The middle poems address relationships??????both my relationships with others and how people interact. The later poetry reflects the world as a whole, although, as suggested by the title, all of the poems respond in some way to the title??????s implication of analyzing identity and add to the cohesion of the collection as they represent a journey from the self outward
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    Elegiac Rhetorics: From Loss to Dialogue in Lyric Poetry
    (2012-10-19) Hart, Sarah Elizabeth
    By reading mournful poems rhetorically, I expand the concept of the elegy in order to reveal continuities between private and communal modes of mourning. My emphasis on readers of elegies challenges writer-centered definitions of the elegy, like that given by Peter Sacks, who describes how the elegy's formal conventions express the elegist's own motives for writing. Although Sacks's Freudian approach helpfully delineates some of the consoling effects that writing poetry has on the elegist herself, this dissertation revises such writer-centered concepts of the elegy by asking how elegies rhetorically invoke ethical relationships between writers and readers. By reading elegiac poems through Kenneth Burke's rhetorical theories and Emmanuel Levinas's ethics, I argue that these poems characterize, as Levinas suggests, subjectivity as fundamentally structured by ethical relationships with others. In keeping with this ethical focus, I analyze anthology poems, meaning short lyric poems written by acclaimed authors, easily accessible, and easily remembered - including several well-known poems by such authors as Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Robert Frost. Anthology pieces invite ethical evaluation in part because they represent what counts as valuable poetry - and also, by implication, what does not. Because anthology poems are read by broad, diverse audiences, I suggest that a rhetorical methodology focusing on writer-reader relationships is essential to evaluating these poems' ethical implications. This rhetorical approach to poetry, however, questions rhetoricians and aesthetic theorists from Aristotle and Longinus to Lloyd F. Bitzer and Derek Attridge who emphasize distinctions between rhetoric and poetics. I address the ongoing debate about the relationship between rhetoric and poetics by arguing, along the lines of Wayne C. Booth's affirmation that fiction and rhetoric are interconnected, that poetry and rhetoric are likewise integrally tied. To this debate, I add an emphasis on philosophy - from which Plato, Ramus, and others exclude rhetoric and poetry - as likewise essential to understanding both poetry and rhetoric. By recognizing the interrelatedness of these disciplines, we may better clarify poetry's broad, ethical appeals that seem so valuable to readers in situations of loss.
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    Extending the Writing Paradigm: Is Writing Haiku Poetry Healing?
    (2009-10-28) Stephenson, Kittredge
    Haiku poetry was investigated in the context of the narrative writing paradigm to evaluate its healing potential. Participants, 98 introductory psychology students at a large southwestern university, wrote for 20 minutes a day on three consecutive days and completed self-report measures of happiness, satisfaction with life, spiritual meaning, creativity, physiological symptomatology, depression, anxiety, and health/illness orientation at baseline and 3-week follow-up. A series of ANCOVA linear contrasts were used to examine differences between groups writing narrative about a neutral topic, haiku about a neutral topic, haiku about nature, or haiku about a negative life event. It was found that writing haiku demonstrated increased levels of creativity overall. In addition, the nature haiku group reported significantly lower levels of physiological symptomatology than the negative life event haiku group and had significantly lower illness orientation than the haiku control group. These results provide a partial replication of a previous study. They also suggest that writing haiku poetry is a creative activity that leads one to be more sensitive to the writing topic, whatever it may be. Narrative writing, by contrast, appears to help integrate one?s experience. The difference between the heightened sensitivity of writing haiku and the integrative capacity of narrative are compared and recommendations made for future research.
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    Haiku, Nature, and Narrative: An Empirical Study of the Writing Paradigm and Its Theories
    (2014-04-04) Stephenson, Kittredge T
    The present study continued an examination of haiku poetry within the context of the writing paradigm. Groups were compared with respect to three factors?writing type (narrative, haiku, or haibun), image content (nature or non-nature), and affective valence (positive or negative)?on short-term effects (arousal, affective valence, and flow), as well as longer-term negative (anxiety, depression, physiological symptomatology) and positive attributes (spiritual meaning, creativity, mindfulness). The study included a representative sample of 235 participants from a large southwestern university. Longer-term measures were compared using a priori contrasts and Analysis of Covariance, while short-term measures were analyzed via a priori contrasts and Repeated Measures Analysis of Variance. In comparing groups whose writing involved narrative versus those that wrote only haiku, there was some evidence that participants experienced greater salubrious change when their writing included narrative: mindfulness, change in affective valence, and flow all increased. There were no significant differences between participants who wrote haiku about nature versus a non-nature topic. Relative to those writing haiku in response to negative nature images, those writing haiku in response to positive nature images evinced decreased depressive symptomatology, increased physiological symptomatology, and greater positive change in affective valence. Finally, flow served as a significant main effect for post-writing affective valence across groups, in addition to pre-writing affective valence: the effect was consistent for the narrative group, developed over time for the haiku group, and decreased over time for the haibun group. None of the groups demonstrated significant change on the longer-term measures from baseline to follow-up, however, raising questions about the effectiveness of writing in response to images. The implications of the present study and possibilities for future research are discussed.
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    Naked Men Frying Bacon Stand Sideways
    (2013-09-13) Istvan, Michael A
    In Chapter I, I explain the chief features and underlying philosophy of the two warring poetic movements, imagism and symbolism, that have influenced my work. I also suggest reasons why coexistence among these two traditionally warring poetics is possible and important. In Chapter II, I present a collection of poems that concern, more or less, self-deceit and wishful thinking.
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    sylvae parvae: poems
    (Texas A&M University, 2005-02-17) Stumpo, Jeffrey David
    The following is a collection of original poetry, supplemented by a critical introduction tracing biographical, literary, and theoretical influences. The critical introduction takes the form of a series of loosely connected notes. The poems are divided into two major sections. I begin by discussing the difficulties involved in writing an overarching introduction to a collection which was never intended to be a cohesive whole, that is to say, a group of individual poems rather than a themed collection or sequence. I examine some of the influences on my work, including other poets and authors. These poets do not fall into strictly defined schools or chronological periods. Rather, I find that certain poets throughout history pay attention in greater or lesser detail to the spaces around words (potential meanings) and the system that is constructed in a given poem. I align myself, therefore, not with particular schools or eras, but with writing styles. I also discuss some of the theories that come into play in my work. Most often these resemble postmodernism, yet I tend to draw on metaphors from science or philosophy rather than literary theorists themselves, who are often needlessly obtuse. Lastly, I look at autobiographical influences that have shaped my writing. I complete my introduction with a detailed discussion of two poems and how these various elements are visible therein, and a few comments on the title of the thesis. The first section of poetry is titled "Lyrics & Observations." As can be gleaned from this title, the poetry is primarily lyric, though alternating between formal and informal in structure. Additionally, most of the lyric poems I write tend to make observations on life, leaving any moral unspoken or open-ended. The second section of poetry, on the other hand, is titled "Narratives & Lessons" and tends towards poetry with an overt message. These poems represent a selected output of the last year. Some of the poems may have begun their lives before I began my studies at Texas A&M University, but almost all have been revised since that point, reflecting my continuing growth and change as a writer.