Faculty of Humanities School of Literature and Language Studies 8707325r sheileya@myconnection.co.za / This thesis comprises a volume of verse entitled ‘Wandering through water’ and a theoretical reflection on it. The volume contains poems written, edited and refined over the two year research period (July 2003 to May 2005). A reflexive essay accompanies it, providing a template for an account of the poems’ composition and a description of poetic devices and practices employed. It also engages with the primary concerns of the verse and its possibilities. The essay reflects on the working method employed: the process and necessity of refining a poem by tracing its multiple revisions. Reflexive tools utilized in this ‘mapping’, include the ‘Writer’s Reflexive Journal’, suggestions and comments made during supervision and workshop processes, as well as engagement with other poet’s work. The reflexive essay also explores that the thematic priorities of the poetry and its inspiration which is rooted in a historical, Jewish and South African context. In the space of the poetry it is re-narrated, negotiated and struggled with and at times experienced without the mediation of conscious thought, to produce alternative meaning and the possibility of selfhood. It explores the responsibilities of a poet to her community. Further, that the writing of poetry contains within it the possibility of extending that which is personal and contextualised into a spiritual or universal experience.

No description available.

The fact that Ben Sira seemingly has a negative attitude towards women or femininity can easily lead to the assumption that the work has a negative attitude toward sexuality. However, this thesis will seek to demonstrate that the author's view on sexuality is complex, subtle, and depends on the context of the individual sayings. First of all we have to make a distinction between the attitudes of the writer of the original Hebrew text of the book and that of the Greek translator. The two texts, produced in different social settings, circumstances, times and places, differ substantially at times in regard to sexuality. Therefore it is essential to treat them separately and to compare them. In addition, the Book of Ben Sira, the longest Jewish wisdom book, is a complex combination of carefully composed wisdom poems that structure the whole work, and of teachings on everyday issues including marriage, family life, self-control, desires and passions, and sexual promiscuity. The openness about issues of eroticism that characterizes some of the poems concerning personified female wisdom is unprecedented in the wisdom writings of Second Temple Judaism. Similarly, the sage dedicates a greater number of passages than other wisdom books, to the discussion of social relations especially in regard to family. In so doing his regular point of departure seems to be what benefits or damages these relations mean, and whether they bring disgrace to a person, especially through sexuality. These all have bearings on the author’s and translator’s views of sexuality, including the position a person or situation under discussion might have in the sage’s social value system. Therefore the thesis examines the wisdom poems, and all sayings that concern sexuality found in discussions of passions, relations with parents, daughters and sons, wives and husbands, and warnings against sexual wrongdoing, including prostitution and adultery. All this is done with a special regard to the differences between the Hebrew original text and the Greek translation.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 73-74).

The entire thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file; a non-technical public abstract appears in the public.pdf file. Title from PDF of title page (University of Missouri--Columbia, viewed on October 20, 2009). Thesis advisor: Dr. W. Thomas McKenney. Includes bibliographical references.

Please note: creative writing theses are permanently embargoed in OpenBU. No public access is forecasted for these. To request private access, please click on the lock icon and filled out the appropriate web form. / Around 50 poems, written for the completion of an MFA at Boston University in 2017. / 2031-01-01T00:00:00Z

ALL MY HEROES ARE BROKE is a poetry collection written from the perspective of a first generation American coming to terms with the implicit struggles and disillusionment of the American Dream. The first section takes place in New York, both implicitly and explicitly, and serves to introduce the speaker and reveal aspects of his family’s history. The second section takes place in Florida, and continues to further exemplify the speaker’s growing cynicism towards the circumstances of his life, and the peculiar atmosphere of solitude that it creates. ALL MY HEROES ARE BROKE primarily uses two forms: short, image driven poems inspired by the works of Robert Bly and Po Chu-I; and longer narrative poems that reveal more personal information about the speaker, in the manner of Li-Young Lee and Frank O’Hara, allowing the speaker to project his own life onto his surroundings and the people of those larger communities.

James Dickey's work as an artist grows out of the way he feels about life, and about the world of art. He believes that aesthetic experience can revitilize the reader, that it can give him a new vision. And because of the new vision the artist and the reader are united. The poem, therefore, becomes a very alive, vibrant medium. And during his poetic career James Dickey explores the possibility of poetry as a statement. He is never afraid to push a poem to the limits of experience. The result is sometimes a strange, and grotesque work of art. However, in his best moments James Dickey is capable of loading the poem with intense energy. And it is this energy which he hopes to transfer to the reader so that the reader can see the world with new eyes. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

This dissertation is a collection of poems preceded by a critical preface. The preface considers Anthony’s Hecht’s long poem, “The Venetian Vespers,” and the ways in which the temporally unsettled situation of the poem’s speaker parallels a problem facing narrative-meditative poets. The preface is divided into two main sections that explore divisions of this larger conflict. The first discusses the origins and effects of the speaker’s uprootedness in time, and the ways in which he tries to both combat and embrace this dislocation by temporarily losing himself in the immediacy of observing visual art. In this section I connect the dilemma of the speaker, who wishes to escape his memory by focusing outwards, to the dilemma of a representational poet who, despite his position towards the past, must necessarily confront or recollect memories and emotions in order to create authentic descriptions or characters. The second section focuses on the production and appreciation of artistic works (both visual and literary) and how the meaning, production and appreciation of beauty are inseparable from its existence within the physical limits of time. Here I discuss the significance of Hecht’s character who is surrounded with beauty yet describes himself as a person who only observes and does not create anything. Through this character, I argue that Hecht reveals a fundamental conflict that exists between artistic creation and chronological time, and that his poem embodies a particular and paradoxical view of beauty that resonates deeply with the motivations and struggles of writing poems.

In this collection of poems and essays, the author demonstrates two different methods for examining the same theme: the notion of "home"—how to get there, how to remain there and bear articulate witness to the forces which drive that author to write. The introduction sets forth an explanation for the use of the specific form chosen for expression, with an analysis of the intent behind that form. In these essays and poems, the author accounts for her years on the Texas Panhandle, in Montana, and a year spent teaching in Prague, Czechoslovakia. These locations furnish the moments and incidents of conflict and resolution that make up the dramatic incidents of the included material.