Master of Arts, Miami University, 2005, English

My interests as a writer are generally located in social issues and the discourse that surrounds and shapes them. This work explores language and identity, gender and sexuality, and the relationship of individuals to communities. Many of these issues may be expressed in narratives which are manipulated to cross a post-structuralist understanding of the world with uncertainty, as an attempt to complicate what we think we know and what we don't. This tension is the center of these poems, attempting to blur the edges of categorization on more than one level: prose and poetry, linearity and non, the emotional, physical, and intellectual senses, visibility and invisibility, subject and object. This work relies on an embodied language, a system of expression that has texture and weight that can be felt/seen, as much in its sense as its intention and sound. Ultimately, all contributes to the experience and so, the meaning.

Committee: Keith Tuma (Advisor) Subjects:

Master of Fine Arts (MFA), Bowling Green State University, 2022, Creative Writing/Poetry

the deadbook is a journey through the underworld of the self, named “Aperstia.” At its core, deadbook depicts the psychological journey towards self-love and Truth as a trans human. What is the self vs. what is the impostor planted in us by society? The trans journey, for me, has been equal parts mystical and torturous. The former is natural; the latter is human-made. I have treated the deadbook as a text to be discovered, rather than created. It comes from a primordial pool. I describe the process of writing it as putting my hands into a pond and grasping at wild fish. It's in the structure of a play because the events in this book did occur in a psychic reality. the deadbook dips into the idea of self-deaths, and offers an alternative perspective, the syntheses of selves. the deadbook outstretches a hand to any reader with places to go.

Committee: Larissa Szporluk-Celli MFA (Advisor); Daniel Rzicznek MFA (Committee Member); Abigail Cloud MFA (Committee Member) Subjects: Language Arts; Philosophy; Theater; Womens Studies; Wood

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2019, English

Drawing examples from over 100 English- and Spanish-language popular dailies and weeklies between January 1855 and December 1866, my dissertation, “Poems in the U.S. Popular Press, 1855-1866,” argues that mid-nineteenth-century newspaper poems constitute a vital but still understudied form of public discourse. I define public discourse as political conversations, debates, and representations for reasoning that take place in the public sphere. I make this case in archival detail in four chapters. Chapter 1 focuses on celebrity poets as part of the media culture created by editor Robert Bonner in his blockbuster story paper the New York Ledger. Chapter 2 shifts from the East to the West coast, recovering the hemispheric Spanish-language poems in the first Spanish-language newspaper in California after the Mexican-American War, El Clamor Publico (the Public Outcry). Chapters 3 and 4 excavate the robust but largely unknown archives of newspaper poems circulating across the U.S. concerning the Panic of 1857 and the New York City cholera epidemic of 1866. This project is significant to the field of U.S. literary history, including the growing scholarship on the Latinx nineteenth century, for two primary reasons. First, the archive of periodical poems has not been completely recovered, categorized, or situated with respect to the larger currents of nineteenth-century public and print cultures. Second, scholars of the Latinx nineteenth century, including Rodrigo Lazo, Jesse Aleman, and Kirsten Silva Gruesz, have begun piecing together histories of the cultural productions of Latinx people using valuable but still incomplete archives. My dissertation contributes to the necessary work of reading Spanish- and English-language newspaper poems as related acts of public discourse reflecting a diverse U.S. media culture.

Committee: Elizabeth Renker (Advisor); Elizabeth Hewitt (Committee Member); Jared Gardner (Committee Member) Subjects: American Literature; American Studies; Hispanic American Studies; Latin American Literature; Latin American Studies; Literature

Master of Fine Arts (MFA), Bowling Green State University, 2017, Creative Writing/Poetry

ABSTRACT Committee: Sharona Muir, Advisor; Larissa Szporluk Serpent Something is a collection of poems that fuses experimental forms with traditional lyric in a hybrid attempt to problematize the uneasy relationship between ontology and language, representation, and photographic absence.

Committee: Sharona Muir (Advisor); Larissa Szporluk (Committee Member) Subjects: Literature

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 1987, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects: Education

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 1975, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects: Education

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2014, English

A Little Pozo Underfoot: Volume 1 begins a creation epic. The poem explores the origins of life on earth, adapting various scientific and mythic models for poetic investigation of the function of time in human culture. A mixed-language epic poem in English and Spanish, it experiments with cyclical narrative. Drawing from pre-Columbian myth as well as adaptations of Judeo-Christian texts in the construction of its plot, the poem is influenced by theories of language, time, identity, and spirit by poets and thinkers such as Octavio Paz, Kenneth Burke, Patricia Parker, and Lyn Hejinian. Unsettling linear narrative structure and traditional syntax by using techniques of recursion and translinguistic play to establish an ongoing present, the poem aims to demonstrate that open-ended language can operate according to a cyclical understanding of time.

Committee: Cathy Wagner (Committee Chair) Subjects: Language Arts

Master of Fine Arts, The Ohio State University, 2014, Art

We are afraid to forget and to be forgotten: we collect, catalog and archive so that we may know what came before and that we might be remembered. Our lives are built on this premise; whether for show or for sentiment, much can be said about the things we keep. We don't save unwanted things. We rid our homes of the old, the used, the unnecessary. We bury our embarrassments. Memory is slippery, unstable and fragile, while these objects of our disregard are concrete presences. My work invests attention in life's cast-offs. I am interested in the relation between these physical things, the social and personal memories they contain, the words we use to name them and the snapshots that serve as their record. My material is found in these images, descriptions, and display. And in them is the recall of our lives.

Committee: Aspen Mays (Advisor); Jessica Mallios (Committee Member); Rebecca Harvey (Committee Member) Subjects: Fine Arts

BA, Oberlin College, 1984, English

In this paper, I hope to examine Merwin's ultimately successful quest for such a language and such a myth. Beginning with a brief description of his early work, in which the problem of language becomes a seemingly insuperable barrier to an understanding of the world, I wish to demonstrate his gradual evolution of a poetic voice which is both contemporary and universal. Of course, a study of this length will inevitably be marred by a certain amount of over-generalization and simplification. Merwin's struggle with language has been a long and arduous one, and he has explored many byways on the journey which we will simply not be able to investigate. However, I trust that this summary of the major stages of Merwin's poetic development, with a special concentration on the poems which mark its fruition, will provide a cogent introduction to his response to the unique poetic problems of his time, as well as offer some insights as to the achievement of his work.

Committee: David Young (Advisor); Stuart Friebert (Advisor); John Hobbs (Advisor) Subjects: Literature

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2013, Near Eastern Languages and Cultures

This thesis focuses upon the poetry of Samuel ibn Naghrela (993-1056) and Solomon ibn Gabirol (c. 1021-1057), two of the most notable poets of the Andalusian period of Hebrew poetry. These two contemporary poets personify different characteristics of medieval Andalusia: Ibn Gabirol's poetry incorporates the Neoplatonic philosophical ideas that infused medieval Andalusian society, while that of Ibn Naghrela, written several years earlier, is unaffected by Neoplatonism. The first chapter introduces the historical and cultural context which gave birth to these two poets. The second chapter introduces the two poets. Chapters three and four present the themes of death and life in the context of eight poems. Ibn Gabirol accepts death as inevitable and reflects on life's brevity. He regards death as a new beginning and celebration of the soul's release. Ibn Naghrela regards death with trepidation. But in the poetry that is examined, he neither advises his reader to prepare for death, nor indicates that he himself is altering his life to prepare for death. Examining the two poets' views towards death in these poems also indicates how they lived their lives. As will be shown, in the poems that are discussed Ibn Naghrela exhorts his readers to enjoy life, reminding them that life is fleeting, and that life's pleasures will not outlast death. He does not advise his reader to renounce the material world in preparation for death, for he views death as a grim finality, and broods on the gruesome aspects of physical decay. Ibn Gabirol, on the other hand, influenced by the Neoplatonic theme of spiritual purification and the soul's release, advocates more pietistic practices in the poems that are examined, urging his readers to improve themselves while they are alive for the edification of their trapped soul, so that she may escape the corporeal body upon its demise.

Committee: Adena Tanenbaum Dr. (Advisor); Daniel Frank Dr. (Committee Member) Subjects: Near Eastern Studies

Master of Arts (MA), Wright State University, 2008, English

A collection of poems composed as an exercise with imagination and the attempt to convey the mind as medium for experience without forgetting the reader remembers something else.

Committee: Gary Pacernick PhD (Advisor); Annette Oxindine PhD (Committee Member); Carol Loranger PhD (Committee Member); Henry Limouze PhD (Other); Joseph F. Thomas, Jr. PhD (Other) Subjects: English literature

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2010, Arts and Sciences: English and Comparative Literature

Poems in this manuscript were borne out of a curiosity about—and further research into—pirates and piracy. The title, PLAN/K, is a nod to the primarily fictionalized practice of walking the plank and a play on Plan B. Plan B, of course, signifies alternative plans in general, but it is also the name for the emergency contraceptive pill. If Plan B manages accidents, then Plan K cultivates accidents through writing strategies that privilege mishearing and misreading. Furthering the spirit of piracy, and pilfering particularly, the poems incorporate anagrams and puns, figures of speech often considered base or crude, but which can also be considered as devices that disrupt and reroute language while allowing the uncanny in language to surface. The essay explores footnotes and endnotes as forms in three contemporary books of poetry written by women. Martenson's Xq28 and Boully's first book, The Body, radically foreground the footnote by making it the sole textual component on the page. Through her use of footnotes, the essay argues that Martenson highlights an erased body in order to critique lesbian erasure and uses the margins to frame a subversive anti-hegemonic speaking position. In contrast, the essay argues Boully invests in psychological reactions to a missing body by staging repression and the return of the repressed through alternately subsuming and subsiding footnotes and the covering over (more or less successfully) of the missing body of a dead lover who is figured in the blank textual body. Whereas The Body and its form are motivated by the tenets of melancholia, in her second book, [one love affair]*, the essay argues Boully stages processes of mourning. Following Jeffrey Adams, the essay considers intertextuality in terms of “aesthetic object-relating.” The essay argues that palimpsest and endnotes perform a reactivation of object-relating and help the speaker of the poems reinvest in relationships with other subjects rather than withdraw from such inves (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Donald Bogen PhD (Committee Chair); Beth Ash PhD (Committee Member); Lisa Hogeland PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Literature

Master of Fine Arts, The Ohio State University, 2011, Art

It may seem contrary to paint when there are so many possibilities to create with technology –but that's what makes painting so important. Through painting I develop a visual language and filter through it those things about the real world that nobody seems to be paying attention to. In combining perspectives, places, exaggerated colors, and objects, I am pointing out those curious moments in the world that seem normal and banal, but gain significance through a slower read. Through painting I investigate how we move through this world, on ski slopes, at the edge of one's yard where the fence creates a boundary, the way in which neon lights may (or may not) affect a body of water. The paintings begin with questions. These questions may concern a specific sensation of space, an event, a natural or unnatural phenomena (such as neon lights on the ocean at night) –the painting is a curious and playful investigation of a condition or event that I have seen in reality, which I develop from that original question into a painted reality. It is my goal for the end of the painting to inspire new questions. Painting is about looking. It is a place where one can think through imagery, gesture, and materiality. The process can reveal itself to the viewer, showing the viewer the order of the painting. Everything is exposed. Even those layers that are hardly visible are still a part of the painted object. Through articulating ways of looking and experiencing my own painting practice as well as the painting and poetry of others, I seek to find a few moments of clarity.

Committee: Laura Lisbon (Advisor); Sergio Soave (Committee Member); Michael Mercil (Committee Member) Subjects: Art Criticism; Art Education; Art History

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2003, English

The broad questions the dissertation poses are 1) What is the poet's relationship with language? and 2) How do post-structuralist theories of linguistically constituted subjectivity affect how and what the poet writes? The examination applies this issue to a range of American poets working in the late 1970s and early 1980s when the new theories of how language and literature worked were being spread through the academy and the general culture alike. The dissertation's method first reads a poet's work from this period with a keen focus on what her poems both explicitly and implicitly say about language. Then, the work of a theorist, whose work is contemporaneous with the poet, explication in terms of its consequences for language and subjectivity. Finally, the two – poet and theorist – are engaged in a dialectic that exhibits how theories of language affect how and what a poet writes. The dissertation proposes four poetic relationships with language. Using the poetry of Adrienne Rich and the theory of Harold Bloom, anxiety is determined to be the initial way a poet relates to language. Subversive irony quells such anxiety, according to the poetry of John Ashbery and the deconstructionism of Paul de Man. Maurice Blanchot conceptualizes a space of literature which allows a poet like Jorie Graham to anguish herself out of existence. Alternatively, a Language poet like Barrett Watten so obsesses over language that he comes upon a relationship with language that is like psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan's theory of subjective destitution in which one uses language but is divested of its meaningful influence of anxiety, irony, and anguish. The dissertation determines the inauguration of a new kind of poetry, one which merges poetry and theory. One of the results of the study finds that the new theoretical poetry suffers itself to understand language's effect on subjectivity and then clear away the saturation of language in order to construct a subjectivity that exists both insid (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Walter Davis (Advisor) Subjects: Literature, American

BA, Oberlin College, 2012, English

This project follows the strangely consistent fascination in modern and contemporary poetry with vessel objects. From Wallace Stevens' "jar [placed] in Tennessee," to "That vase" of Philip Larkin or James Merrill's "clear vase of dry leaves vibrating on and on," even so far back in literary history as the shapely "Grecian Urn" of John Keats' famous ode among numerous others, the genre is teeming with vessels. I argue that these kinds of objects open up distinctive possibilities for poetic exploration because of the unique way that they engage with space. Consequently, by using these objects as metaphors, poets are able to reflect upon the nuanced relationship between poetry and a non-poetic reality on the one hand, and between an interior subjective life and an external objective world on the other. My analysis reflects the spatial trajectory of this 'object-metaphor' itself, examining the three main topographical components that constitute all vessels: 1) the vessel's contained interior space, 2) the realm surrounding or exterior to the object, and 3) its creatively constructed surface which functions as the physical boundary between the other two spaces.

Committee: DeSales Harrison (Advisor) Subjects: Language; Literature; Modern Literature; Philosophy

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2010, English: Creative Writing

Of Selves & Singings presents poems exploring form, diction, lineation, musicality, linguistic patterning, rhyme, meter, mode of presentation, pagination, performative sound media and animation. Neither acting in accordance with nor setting the stage for a centralized artistic modality, these poems resist the idea of a normative practice in terms of both text and media. The relationship between poems is paradoxical. They are meant to be entirely alike in that they are meant to be entirely dissimilar. The purpose of this variance is to test whether the individual poem projects a unique set of internal architectures which require a methodology in separate acts of poetic creation.

Committee: Keith Tuma PhD (Committee Chair); Cris Cheek PhD (Committee Member); David Schloss MFA (Committee Member) Subjects: Language Arts

Master of Arts in English, Cleveland State University, 2010, College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences

Dana Gioia's controversial book Can Poetry Matter? challenges poets to write in traditional forms to expand poetry's readership beyond the “subculture” of the university. In response to Gioia's position, my thesis considers the mind-numbing trends in today's entertainment and places importance on innovation to suggest that there is potential danger in Gioia's call to conform. If the artists of a society mold their work like a commodity to be consumed by the masses, this lack of originality could stint creative progress and hinder, rather than encourage, readers' interests. Gioia's position is currently a reference point for contemporary debates about poetry and society. My position offers a new suggestion to general readers: put forth individual effort and pursue professional instruction to learn how to read poetry in order to acquire a broader appreciation for the ways poetic form enriches communication. Furthermore, what is classified as difficult poetry depends upon the canon of a culture. Writers should not be required to reach a set audience or limit their innovation.

Committee: Michael Dumanis PhD (Committee Chair); Adam Sonstegard PhD (Committee Member); John Gerlach PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: American Literature; Art Education; English literature; Fine Arts; Higher Education; Language Arts; Literacy; Literature; Secondary Education