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This is a novel about the way individuals can and do operate in a world controlled by larger power structures. It is interested in how people can effect change in this world, often in ways they do not plan. It explores the inability of the individual to control the world around them. The novel features a large cast of characters moving through a world that is dying. Earth’s climate is warming at a rate that will make it uninhabitable for humans. The specifics of this catastrophe are never explored. Rather, the novel concerns itself with people who are reacting to it, and how their reactions ultimately do more harm than good.

John Keats is a mythopoeic poet who created his own mythical substructure, often adapting traditional figures from mythology to give a special meaning to the entire canon of his major work. The early poems are hesitant, imitative, and groping, but the mature poems receive a large part of heir symbolic meaning from the substructure of Keats's myth of the poet on which they rest. In the works of John Keats, then, the reader finds a touchstone of experiences common to all humanity, shaped into Keats's central myth of the poet. He left the testament of a poet who could "see as a god sees, and take the depth/ Of things" recorded in his major poems and in some of the most sensitive letters ever written by a poet.

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2006. / Full text release at OhioLINK's ETD Center delayed at author's request

Five Kingdoms. (Under the direction of Don Stap.) Five Kingdoms is a collection of 55 poems in three sections. The title refers to the five kingdoms of life, encompassing every living thing. Section I explores political themes and addresses subjects that reach across a broad expanse of time--from the oldest bones of a child and the oldest map of the world to the bombing of Fallujah in the current Iraq war. Connections between physical and metaphysical worlds are examined. The focus narrows from the world to the city in section II. The theme of shelter is important to these poems, as is the act of being a flâneur. The search for shelter, physical and spiritual, is explored. The third section of Five Kingdoms narrows further to the individual. Political themes recur, as do ekphrastic elements, in the examination of individual lives and the search for physical and metaphysical shelter. The title poem "Five Kingdoms," was written on the 60th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. This non-narrative poem is composed of a series of questions for the reader regarding personal and national security. It is a political poem that uses a language of fear and superstition to question what we are willing to sacrifice to be safe and what "safety" means. The poem ends with a call to action: "Before you break in two, categorize/the five kingdoms, count all the living things." The poems in this manuscript are a kind of counting that pays attention to the things of the world through praise and elegy. The poems in Five Kingdoms are indebted to my reading of many poets, in particular Michael Burkard, Carolyn Forché, Brenda Hillman, Tony Hoagland, Kenneth Koch, Philip Levine, Denise Levertov, Jane Mead, W.S. Merwin, Pablo Neruda, Frank O'Hara, Mary Oliver, Adrienne Rich, and Mark Strand.

As a teacher of American literature in high school, I have become conscious of the importance of teaching students of that age level the lore and poetry of their native state. Poems of nature or local color in their own country will hold their interest when material from more distant points seems dull and uninteresting. Through my teaching I have become interested in the poetry of the Southwest and have enjoyed reading the poetry and knowing the poets through personal interview or correspondence.

This paper discusses the poetry of Audre Lorde and Natasha Trethewey, and the ways in which they bring to attention the often-silenced histories of African American females. Through close readings of Lorde’s poems “Call” and “Coal,” and Trethewey’s “Three Photographs,” these histories are brought to the present with the framework of the words “call” and “re-call.” The paper explores the ways in which Lorde creates a new mythology for understanding her identity as “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet” in her innovative, intersectional feminist poetry. This is used as the framework for understanding modern poets like Trethewey, whose identity as a biracial black woman from the American South colors her lyric, more formal work. Lorde uses the vocal, oral tradition of calling as Trethewey relies on visual, gaze-focused recall. Recall is memory and re-call means bringing the hidden past into the future. The paper concludes by saying that all black female writers may participate in their own ways of calling out the truth and remembering what should be forgotten.