Over the past two decades, American poet Jorie Graham has composed six books of poems. Graham struggles to understand how we make sense of the world through thinking grounded in the logical operations of reason and through thinking that operates as more of a detached wandering that enables direct experiential participation in the present moment-modes of thought occasionally differentiated as "intellect" and "intuition." Throughout her work, Graham repeatedly experiments with ways to "frustrate" the intellect in order for intuition to wander over an idea while at the same time she relies on the intellect to rescue the mind from directionless wandering. In her early poetry Graham explores ways of defining and describing what it feels like to think. Later, she enacts thinking within the lines of her poems, sometimes allegorizing the operation of the intellect and intuition and sometimes provoking readers into an experience of one particular way of thinking through the act of reading. This study examines Graham's various successes and failures as she struggles to discover "blossoming" moments of balance between the controlling intellect and the wandering intuition. Beginning with the origins of this line of thinking in Graham's early work, this study traces the poet's path of development through each book of poems in order to demonstrate the back and forth momentum shifts of intellect giving way to intuition and intuition being organized by rational thought. Through her epistemological errancies, her wanderings within and without ways of knowing, Graham discovers "blossoming" moments of wholeness where both modes of thought meet "in solution, unsolved." / Master of Arts

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This dissertation reveals a twentieth-century tradition of poetic formalism that positions race, gender, and sexuality as formal concerns, and further, as key factors in the development of contemporary formal poetics. My readings of three contemporary poets, Akilah Oliver, Sharon Bridgforth, and Alice Notley, combine formalist analysis with cultural approaches, including critical race theory and queer theory, to show how contemporary poets use form to confront racist, sexist, and homophobic representational traditions and to reshape identity discourse. This project intervenes in a critical tradition that divorces poetic form from political context and neglects formal aspects of poetries that engage with social identities, especially African American poetry. As Notley, Oliver, and Bridgforth portray racial, gender, and sexual diversity—including gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered bodies—they invent and remake forms, genres, and textual strategies, from the feminist epic to the performance novel. These new forms exceed the strategies of rupture, fracture, and fragmentation that marked many modern and postmodern experiments and, in fact, reveal the limitations of rupture as a means of political critique. Instead, they widen the field of formalism, incorporating performance genres (epic, storytelling, blues) and new textual strategies to call attention to the histories of bodies and their representations, assert interdependent identities, promote pluralism, and insist on the interrelationship of literature, orality, and bodily experience. / text

Behind Enemy Lines: The New American Poetry and the Cold War Anthology Wars The New American Poetry, a poetry anthology edited by Donald Allen and published by Grove Press in 1960, is perhaps the single most influential American poetry anthology in history. It not only brought some of the most important poets of the 20th century to international prominence, but it also created an editorial model that numerous prominent future anthologists would follow, and helped establish the image of American poetry as divided between competing camps of free verse and formal poets, or rebellious and academic poets, battle lines that were drawn when the anthology was published. At the same time, Allen's anthology established the United States as the center and the source of innovative anglophone poetry, despite the fact that such poetry was being written in numerous English-speaking countries during the post-war period. The origins and the legacy of this important anthology are complex, and have deep resonances in the way we think about poetry even today. Considering these facts, the time is right for a critical reexamination of The New American Poetry, utilizing information about the Cold War that has only recently come to light, as well as new ways of thinking about national and transnational literature which...

Mas allá de la realidad objetiva y de los hechos históricos verificables que su nombre denota, la nueva poesía socio-política se estudia aquí como un extenso sistema literario que genera su propia coherencia y su inagotable red de posibilidades significativas. Nuestro enfoque es asimismo una manera de concebir histórica y analíticamente la trayectoria del discurso hispanoamericano. El hecho de que la nueva poesía socio-política sea comprensible en su totalidad al considerar el sustrato ideológico del cual surge, nos conduce a la formulación de un modelo analítico ideológico-semiótico que se adecúe a la realidad de esta poesía. Tal modelo manifiesta la interrelación dinámica que existe entre la estructura de coherencia y la estructura de significación verificando así la funcion normativa que ejerce la ideología sobre el texto. Más que nada, este proyecto se ha fundado en la necesidad de esclarecer el proceso de construcción de un nuevo sistema poetico. El juego de relaciones intertextuales y contextuales apuntan a una revisión de valores estético-ideológicos que fundamentan literariamente un nuevo sistema de prioridades. De aquí el repaso de la historia de la poesía; una historia en construcción que ha empezado a negar el criterio positivista, evolucionista y oficialista utilizado hasta ahora. El nuestro es un enfoque que surge desde una perspectiva crítica distinta, la cual considera los factores socio-económicos y además intenta responder tanto al rigor analítico como a las exigencias culturales del presente. La creciente conciencia de las relaciones de dependencia generan una politización de la conciencia, que en el plano cultural, configura una nueva estetica cuya caracterización se establece en el tercer capítulo. Las nuevas técnicas representacionales se esclarecen al analizar la obra de tres poetas. En la poesía de Roberto Fernández Retamar y Pedro Shimose es posible estudiar la cualidad "conversacional" del código utilizando el concepto de intertextualidad como principio constructor y como principio de intercalación y además la relación de contigüidad entre el lenguaje literario y el natural. Finalmente, se estudia el concepto de la patria, utilizando la categoría espacial, para ejemplificar el impulso ideológico revolucionario y su plasmación en la interioridad textual.

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2007. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2006. / Title from title screen (site viewed on Mar. 30, 2007). PDF text: 228 p. ; 7.06Mb. UMI publication number: AAT 3221293. Includes bibliographical references. Also available in microfilm and microfiche formats.

The purpose of my thesis is to explore lesbianism in Adrienne Rich¡¦s essays and poetry. Rich has earned her reputation as a major American poet and essayist since the 1950s. Most attention has been paid to her extraordinary poems and revolutionary prose. However, the issue of lesbianism has seldom been focused on or fully discussed. Therefore, I would try to present a panoramic view on how lesbianism has been developed in Rich¡¦s works. In the first chapter, I have tried to delineate various definitions of ¡§lesbian¡¨, and formulate my own definition. Besides that, I have also introduced some theoretical perspectives of lesbianism. In the second chapter, the discussion is mainly on Rich¡¦s concepts¡X ¡§institutionalization of heterosexuality¡¨, ¡§lesbian existence¡¨ and ¡§lesbian continuum¡¨¡Xwhich were brought up in the essay ¡§Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.¡¨ In the third chapter, my aim is to delineate the development of Rich¡¦s lesbian perspective in her poetry. The discussion consists of three parts: the first part covers the revelation of women¡¦s oppression; the second is stressed on the concept of androgyny; the last part will present Rich¡¦s idea that women¡¦s power should be based on close relations among women.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Texas at Arlington, 2009.