My research is broadly concerned with twentieth-century and contemporary poetry. I tend to focus more specifically on ‘supplementary’ writing by poets (essays, blogs, letters, manifestos), the ethics of creative labour, and various economic and institutional structures supporting the poetry industry. My current monograph project, with the working title, Collection: The Selling and Self-Regulation of Contemporary UK Poetry, examines anthologies, prize culture, and the discourse around originality and creative labour.
Within modernist studies, I’ve primarily written on US poets, including TS Eliot, John Berryman, Delmore Schwartz, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, and William Carlos Williams – the latter of whom was the subject of my PhD thesis. Moving between modernism and the emerging field of creative writing studies, my research and poetry have also both been modes for exploring the relationship between critical and creative practice.
Recent talks
- Delighted & Humbled: The Self-Made Poet and the Ethics of Poem-Making (Contemporary Poetry: Thinking and Feeling, Plymouth University, May 2016).
- Unacknowledged Obligations: Poetry Sleuthing with Thomas De Quincey and Ira Lightman (Authorship and Appropriation, University of Dundee, April 2016).
- ‘Curious Creatures’: Beastly Encounters in Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Moose” (1976) and Krzysztof Zanussi’s Kontrakt (1980) (Elizabeth Bishop’s Questions of Travel: 50 Years Later, University of Sheffield, June 2015)
- What’s so funny about beefs, bad blood, and misunderstandings?: Fear of Factions in Contemporary British Poetry (New Generation to Next Generation: Three Decades of British and Irish Poetry, London, March 2015)
- Seeing the New Ghost: Berryman, Schwartz, and the Genesis of Love & Fame (Berryman Centenary Conference, Dublin, October 2014).
- ‘Dark days of spring’: The Visionary Violence of Dr Williams and Dr Benn (European Network for Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies, Helsinki, August 2014).
- ‘Once more in the city I cannot name’: John Beer’s The Waste Land and the Possibility of Metamodernism (British Association of Modernist Studies, London, June 2014).
- The Anthology as Poem: Radical Curation in Nineteeth-Century Commonplace Books (Poetry Anthology Symposium, Sheffield, June 2014).
- Not that kind of doctor: William Carlos Williams as Bad Thinker (Modernism and the Moral Life, University of Manchester, May 2014).
Forthcoming
- chapters on ‘Prosody’ and ‘Gertrude Stein – Poetry & Grammar’ in Portable Poetry Workshop, ed. Nigel McLoughlin (Palgrave Macmillan, October 2016)
- “…for frankness’ sake”: Confessional Structures in Giacomo Joyce – Outside His Jurisfiction: James Joyce’s Non-Fiction, eds. Katherine Ebury and James G. Fraser (Palgrave, 2017).
- ‘”The Moose” as Movie: Elizabeth Bishop as Screenwriter’, Elizabeth Bishop and Contemporary Poetry, ed. Jonathan Ellis (Edinburgh UP, 2017).
- ‘Berryman & Schwartz: The Genesis of Love & Fame’, John Berryman: Centenary Essays, eds. Philip Coleman and Peter Campion (Brill, 2016).
Criticism online
- “The Skeleton of the Times”: Evolutionary Theory and the Orthogenetic Poetics of William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens (Modernist Studies Association conference, Buffalo, NY, October 2011).
- “By Hypothesis Unknowable”: Prufrock – Eliot – Hamlet – Freud – Joyce (T.S. Eliot Society Annual Conference, Paris, July 2011). Awarded the 2011 Fathman Young Scholars Award in Eliot Studies.
- “Pissing Your Life Away”: An Early Martyr and Poems of Otherness (William Carlos Williams Society panel, Modern Languages Association annual convention, Los Angeles, January 2011).
- “Looking back it / will seem good”: John Ashbery and the Problem of Late Style (Contemporary Literature and Its Contexts, University of Manchester, July 2010).
- “Do we think we stand outside the universe?”: The Formalistic Grounds for William Carlos Williams’ critique of Imagism (International Imagism Conference, Brunnenburg Castle, Italy, June 2010). [Available in this collection.]
