My research is broadly concerned with contemporary poetry and the creative industries. I’m especially interested in the ways that new writing is published and promoted, literature’s economic and social structures, and wider notions of creative labour and/or ethics.
Recent Books
- The Selling and Self-Regulation of Contemporary Poetry (Anthem, 2020). This monograph examines publishing practices, prize culture, new technologies, and the changing language around professionalisation and poetic labour since 2008.
- 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/Ongoing 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 print broadsides, cards, and other ephemera, and are currently putting together our first books. This will include Flora & Fauna, a limited edition poetry collection, with linocuts by Joanna Lisowiec, which I’ve been designing and slowly typesetting.
- 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 also edit The Stray, an online, student-produced magazine based in York’s department of English and Related Literature.
In various contexts, I write on various 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 been modes for exploring the influence of the creative industries and the relationship between creative and critical practices.
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).
Some Publications
- ‘”The Moose” as Movie: Elizabeth Bishop as Screenwriter’, Reading Elizabeth Bishop: An Edinburgh Companion, ed. Jonathan Ellis (Edinburgh UP, 2019).
- ‘”…for frankness’ sake”: Confessional Structures in Giacomo Joyce’, Outside His Jurisfiction: Joyce’s Non-Fiction Writings, eds. Katherine Ebury and James G. Fraser (Palgrave, 2018).
- ‘Poetry & Work: Some Thoughts on Paterson’, The Honest Ulsterman, 2017.
- ‘Effective Altruism (A Verse Essay)’, The Honest Ulsterman, 2017.
- ‘Berryman & Schwartz: The Genesis of Love & Fame‘, John Berryman: Centenary Essays, eds. Philip Coleman and Peter Campion (Peter Lang, 2017).
- Chapters on ‘Prosody’ and ‘Gertrude Stein – Poetry & Grammar’, Portable Poetry Workshop, ed. Nigel McLoughlin (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).
- ‘On Susan Howe’s Spontaneous Particulars’, The Wolf (2015).
- ‘Seeing the New Ghost: Berryman, Schwartz, and the Genesis of Love & Fame’, The Battersea Review (2015).
- ‘Critical Approaches to Creative Writing: A Case Study’, Writing in Practice (National Association of Writers in Education), (2015).
- Metamodernism’s Meta-History (Or How to Make ‘Not Really a Movement) (British Association of Modernist Studies, London, June 2014).
- ‘Generationalism in British Poetry’, B O D Y (January 2014).
- “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.]
