Research

2012-06-17 15.38.05My research is broadly concerned with contemporary poetry and the creative industries. This includes a focus on the ways poetry is published and promoted, along with wider interests in creative labour and ethics.

Books

  • The Selling and Self-Regulation of Contemporary Poetry (forthcoming from Anthem Press, 2020). This monograph examines publishing practices, prize culture, new technologies, and the changing language around professionalisation and creative labour for contemporary poets.
  • Wretched Strangers: Borders Movement Homes (Boiler House Press, 2018) – an anthology exploration the poetry of migration in Brexit-era Britain, co-edited with Ágnes Lehóczky.

Current Projects

  • Thin Ice Press: with Helen Smith, I’ve been assembling a new letterpress studio at the University of York, which includes a number of historic iron and platen presses and a newly-built replica 18th-century wooden common press. We’ve been printing broadsides, cards, and other ephemera, and are currently putting together our first books.
  • I’m nearly finished with How Many Loves: Three Artists at Work, a book of creative-critical sequences examining creative labour through the lives and work of late-19th-century painters: James McNeil Whistler, John Singer Sargent, and Harriet Backer.
  • See the Music page for my ongoing ‘Poem Songs‘ project.
  • I edit The Stray, a new literary magazine based in York’s department of English and Related Literature.

In various contexts, I also write on twentieth-century 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. More generally, my criticism, poetry, and other creative work have all been modes for exploring the influence of the creative industries and the relationship between creative and critical practice.

Recent & Upcoming Talks

  • ‘Whitman and the Invention of the Modern Poetry Collection’, Whitman 200 conference, University of Bolton, May 2019.
  • ‘Poetry as Content: The Network Value of Lyrical Thought’ (Poetry and the Essay, University of Wellington, NZ, December 2017).
  • ‘Making Words Work: Employability in English and Creative Writing’ (English Shared Futures, Newcastle, July 2017).
  • ‘Miraculously Multiplied: Ball Poems & Self-Loss’ (Poetry and Psychoanalysis conference, Institute of Psychoanalysis, London, June 2017).
  • ‘Not a Morose Type: The Windsor Font in Annie Hall‘ (Remembering Annie Hall conference, University of Sheffield, May 2017).
  • ‘Delighted & Humbled: The Poet as Entrepreneur’ (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).
  • ‘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).

Selected Publications