I am working on a book entitled Poetry in General, or, Literary Experimentalism After 1960 that traces how poetry became an interdisciplinary public form. I suggest that what we now call poetry expanded into the arenas of work, property, and politics in tandem with shifts in the government’s relationship to the economy. The book considers interdisciplinary poems’ changing tactics to resist, respond to, and interpret shifts in political reason alongside policies about welfare, healthcare, housing, and the place of corporations. Some of my argument about “poetry in general” is reflected in a forthcoming essay about Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit (1964) at Amodern. An earlier version of part of the book is published as an essay about Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems (1964) at Textual Practice.

I have started the preliminary work for another project about lyric form and surveillance technologies. I am interested both in how the formal constraints of lyric form are embedded in notions of privacy that change with new technologies, and how these new technologies shape lyric form. I have recently published two essays on this topic: “American Lyric, American Surveillance, and Claudia Rankine’s Citizen” in Contemporary Women’s Writing and “What activism can learn from poetry’: Lyric Opacity and Drone Warfare in Solmaz Sharif’s LOOK” in the Review of International American Studies.