Research

2012-06-17 15.38.05My 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

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