简介

My field is modern and contemporary poetry, and I have taken a variety of approaches to this work, but have been especially interested in visual thinking and intersections between literature and visual arts. My books on Marianne Moore (1981) and Elizabeth Bishop (1991) were among the first full critical studies of these poets and my edition of The Selected Letters of Marianne Moore opened up a new window into the history of modernism. Other poets I have often written about include: Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, W.H. Auden, John Ashbery, Charles Wright, A. R. Ammons, Amy Clampitt and Jorie Graham. In my recent books I have explored landscape and environmental poetry (Shifting Ground [2003]), and the interplay of private and public spheres in still life motifs (Planets on Tables [2008]). Having explored places and things, I am now completing a kind of trilogy with The Plural of Us: Poetry and Community in Auden and Others. In addition to my academic books and articles, I have occasionally published literary essays on art, travel and memory, and I dabble in translation of Italian poetry. Besides teaching introductory courses and surveys in modern and contemporary poetry, I have offered seminars on a variety of subjects–theories of modern lyric, poetry and the environment, modern poetry and the visual arts, poets and their letters, modernist poetics and the social pressures of the 30s. Below is a sampling of my publications. For the full record please see my attached c.v.