Research Interests
- Poetry and poetics
- Nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature
- Multi-ethnic literature of the US
- Women, gender, and sexuality studies
- Lyric theory and genre studies
- Literary formalism
Publications and Works in Progress
Books
Antagonistic Cooperation: Poetry, Prose, and American Poetics, 1825-2016
My book manuscript uncovers the forgotten history of how and why the categories “poetry” and “prose” created a forceful false dichotomy in US literature. Contemporary critics, writers, and readers embrace the spurious notion that prose is the most natural written mode because it is patterned on everyday speech, while verse, with all its apparent contrivances, is prose’s opposite. But it was not always so: the emergence of this sharp opposition between prose and poetry marks an unprecedented shift away from the prevailing practice during previous centuries of including prose within the broad category of poetry. English literature’s most famous defenses of poetry— Philip Sidney’s and Percy Shelley’s—define the poetic impulse as one that encompasses any creation with language, including prose. Indeed, literary historians demonstrate that what we know as “prose” is in fact a set of conventions derived and adapted from those of verse. In the modern era, literary developments (like free verse and prose poems) reveal more clearly than ever that dividing lines between poetry and prose can be inexact, extraneous, and misleading—indeed, conventions themselves. And yet, just when these hybrid forms emerge, some poets and critics increasingly and obsessively invoke the poetry-prose dichotomy. In chapters on Henry David Thoreau, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, William Carlos Williams, Elizabeth Bishop, and Claudia Rankine, I analyze the fixation on this binary to demonstrate how it helped establish and foster traditions of poetry and verse techniques. Ultimately, I argue that this binary remains central to contemporary poetry and literary study, resulting in impoverished readings of canonical volumes written to subvert this divide but also sparking key innovations and discussions about divisions in poetry, literature, and life.
My book manuscript uncovers the forgotten history of how and why the categories “poetry” and “prose” created a forceful false dichotomy in US literature. Contemporary critics, writers, and readers embrace the spurious notion that prose is the most natural written mode because it is patterned on everyday speech, while verse, with all its apparent contrivances, is prose’s opposite. But it was not always so: the emergence of this sharp opposition between prose and poetry marks an unprecedented shift away from the prevailing practice during previous centuries of including prose within the broad category of poetry. English literature’s most famous defenses of poetry— Philip Sidney’s and Percy Shelley’s—define the poetic impulse as one that encompasses any creation with language, including prose. Indeed, literary historians demonstrate that what we know as “prose” is in fact a set of conventions derived and adapted from those of verse. In the modern era, literary developments (like free verse and prose poems) reveal more clearly than ever that dividing lines between poetry and prose can be inexact, extraneous, and misleading—indeed, conventions themselves. And yet, just when these hybrid forms emerge, some poets and critics increasingly and obsessively invoke the poetry-prose dichotomy. In chapters on Henry David Thoreau, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, William Carlos Williams, Elizabeth Bishop, and Claudia Rankine, I analyze the fixation on this binary to demonstrate how it helped establish and foster traditions of poetry and verse techniques. Ultimately, I argue that this binary remains central to contemporary poetry and literary study, resulting in impoverished readings of canonical volumes written to subvert this divide but also sparking key innovations and discussions about divisions in poetry, literature, and life.
Articles and Book Chapters
"Living Poems in Thoreau's Prose," Nineteenth-Century Prose, vol. 44, Fall 2017, pp. 155-176.
Despite evidence that poetry is central to A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, critics have largely viewed the volume’s numerous lyric poems as digressions, explications, or mere ornaments to the prose. But these lyrics are, in fact, integral to Thoreau’s book. I explore how Thoreau's narration depicts poems "living" beyond their own forms, an integral component to how Thoreau conceives of death, life, and literary representation in this his first book, an elegy for his brother, John.
Despite evidence that poetry is central to A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, critics have largely viewed the volume’s numerous lyric poems as digressions, explications, or mere ornaments to the prose. But these lyrics are, in fact, integral to Thoreau’s book. I explore how Thoreau's narration depicts poems "living" beyond their own forms, an integral component to how Thoreau conceives of death, life, and literary representation in this his first book, an elegy for his brother, John.
"'Evolve or die': Revision as Activism in This Bridge Called My Back and Kate Rushin's 'The Bridge Poem,'" 33 pp.
This essay argues that revising, adapting, and republishing are political as well as aesthetic strategies for women of color feminists writing after the Black Arts Movement. To trace this strategy and uncover its effects, this essay maps the publishing history of two key texts--This Bridge Called My Backand its title poem by Kate Rushin, "The Bridge Poem"—alongside the poetics and political theories of This Bridge editors, Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, and others including Audre Lorde, Rita Dove, and Melissa Harris-Perry. Ultimately, these women's writings become creative spaces where authors and others demand and act out political transformations by first transforming texts.
To analyze "Bridge Poem," I'm using Juxta Commons to track changes between different versions of the poem. Click here to see a sample of my work.
This essay argues that revising, adapting, and republishing are political as well as aesthetic strategies for women of color feminists writing after the Black Arts Movement. To trace this strategy and uncover its effects, this essay maps the publishing history of two key texts--This Bridge Called My Backand its title poem by Kate Rushin, "The Bridge Poem"—alongside the poetics and political theories of This Bridge editors, Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, and others including Audre Lorde, Rita Dove, and Melissa Harris-Perry. Ultimately, these women's writings become creative spaces where authors and others demand and act out political transformations by first transforming texts.
To analyze "Bridge Poem," I'm using Juxta Commons to track changes between different versions of the poem. Click here to see a sample of my work.
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“Not a story writer, really”: Bishop, Lowell, and the Confessional Prose Poem," 18 pp.
Robert Lowell was talking about form as much as subject matter when he dubbed modernism “cooked” and Confessionalism “raw”: to him, moving away from the impersonal material and highly-wrought structures of modernist verse cleared the way for technical innovations that would give the impression of immediacy in part through a relaxed rhetorical style. Still, we tend to focus on the autobiographical topics of Confessional poetry rather than its technical innovations. I argue that Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop attained the "raw" quality of their autobiographical verse through an infusion of prose techniques. This essay reads Lowell's “91 Revere Street” and Bishop's “In the Village” as poetic-prose forms for autobiography that blend lyricism and realism, those genres traditionally associated with poems and prose, respectively. |
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