Education
- Ph.D., University of Iowa (English and Book Studies)
- M.A., Miami University (Creative Writing)
- B.A., Valparaiso University (English, Humanities, French)
About Me
For as long as I can remember, I've loved the puns, limericks, cheesy inspirational verses, song lyrics, language games, and advertising jingles of popular culture. For almost as long, I've loved reading, studying, reciting, printing, binding, and collecting canonical or "literary" poetry as well, and my teaching and scholarly interests emerge from this double affection for so-called highbrow and lowbrow poetries. I believe that every instance of poetic language use—from Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman to Rupi Kaur and Guns N' Roses—is a complicated mixture of social, cultural, and aesthetic forces that merits our close attention and, if we're lucky, our admiration.
Teaching Interests
I teach American literature, creative writing, and cultural studies, and I have a special interest in poetry from the U.S. Civil War to the present. That said, I have also designed and taught seminars on graphic novels, Pacific Northwest literature, and Hamlet, and I find it illuminating and challenging to mix and produce texts that have various aesthetic, cultural, and discursive registers as well as different media formats or instantiations: great poems, popular poems, song lyrics, films, video and audio recordings, performances, and the like. Students in turn have designed and produced podcasts, blog postings, interviews, poetry apps, videos, web sites, museum exhibits, 'zines, and community outreach projects as well as more traditional forms of creative or expository writing. I am curious to follow writing wherever it goes.
Research Interests
I study American poetry in public life and popular culture. My most recent book, focuses on the mediation of poetry by nonprint mass media, asking questions like: What is the relationship between a poem and the medium that transmits it? How do poems become differently meaningful when they're projected via , aired on the radio, broadcast on TV, designed for social media, or made the subject matter of films like The Night Before Christmas (1905) or (2001)? And what reciprocal effect does the projection, airing, broadcasting, or digitization of poetry have on the respective medium itself?
I am also the author of , which focuses on poetry largely outside of educational contexts. Everyday Reading showcases and analyzes large and elaborate poetry scrapbooks that people kept between the Civil War and World War II, fan letters they wrote to old time poetry radio shows in the 1920s and 30s, rhyming shaving cream ads that appeared on billboards during the mid-century, the incorporation of popular reading modes by canonical writers, and Hallmark greeting card poetry written by a well-known poet. In 2011, I also published , a collection of eight essays that I co-edited with Heidi R. Bean, and between 2008 and 2016, I kept and maintained the blog "."
My next project will be to complete another book, Oh, Ooooh, and Oi: How Three Little Sounds Key the Poetry of Pop Music, which ties artists like Whitney Houston, Bon Jovi, Ke$ha, The Cure, Guns N' Roses, Kanye West, and Beyoncé to the tradition of lyric poetry stretching back to Sappho and ancient Greece.
Publications
Books
Oh, Ooooh, and Oi: How Three Little Sounds Key the Poetry of Pop Music (in progress).
Selected Articles/Essays
“Literary Sociology, Cultural Studies, and Poetry.” Poetry in the Digital Age: An Interdisciplinary Handbook. Ed. Claudia Benthien et al. (Berlin: De Gruyter, forthcoming).
“Reading, Misreading, and Rereading ‘We Real Cool.’” Unsettling Poetry Pedagogy: A Handbook for Anti-Oppressive Teaching. Ed. Caroline Gelmi and Lizzy LeRud (forthcoming).
"The Poem in the Digital Age" in The Cambridge Companion to the Poem, ed. Sean Pryor (UK: Cambridge UP, forthcoming).
Jambands.com 20 May 2023
Hatfield Library News 18 April 2023
. Poetry International February 2022.
. The Rumpus 1 December 2021.
. American Literature 92.3 (September 2020).
JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 59.1 (Fall 2019).
PMLA 133.5 (October 2018).
Journal of Modern Literature 41.3 (Spring 2018).
"Popular Verse: Poetry in Motion" in , ed. Mark W. Van Wienen (UK: Cambridge UP, 2017).
"From Vagabond to Visiting Poet: Vachel Lindsay and the Institutionalization of American Poetry" in , ed. Loren Glass (Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2016).
"," Los Angeles Review of Books 22 July 2016.
"High, Low, and Somewhere In-Between: Women's Poetry and Popular Culture in Modern America" in , ed. Linda A. Kinnahan (UK: Cambridge UP, 2016).
"," Poetry 206.2 (May 2015).
Poetry 205.4 (January 2015).
"Material Concerns: Incidental Poetry, Popular Culture, and Ordinary Readers in Modern America" in , ed. Cary Nelson (New York: Oxford UP, 2012).
"American Advertising: A Poem for Every Product" (with Cary Nelson), in , ed. Christine Bold (New York: Oxford UP, 2012).
PMLA 125.1 (January/February 2010).
American Literature 80.1 (March 2008).
Poetry (September 2005).
Courses Taught
College Colloquium (Hamlet)
College Colloquium (Music and Literature)
College Colloquium (Walt Whitman)
College Colloquium (The Graphic Novel)
Eng 101 Reading Literature and Culture: Pacific Northwest Literature
Eng 101 Reading Literature and Culture: Literature and Music
Eng 116 50 Great American Poems
Eng 116 Literature of the Great Depression
Eng 119 Forms of Literature: American Poetry
Eng 135 Introduction to Creative Writing
Eng 201 Close Reading
Eng 202 Introduction to Literary Theory
Eng 203 Fundamentals of Creative Writing
Eng 213 Research Methods in Literature and Creative Writing
Eng 101 The Poetry of Popular Music
Eng 332 Intermediate Poetry Writing
Eng 341 Shakespeare
Eng 354 The Modern Novel
Eng 361 Modern Poetry and Poetics: Texts & Contexts
Eng 361 Modern Poetry and Poetics: 20th Century African American Poetry
Eng 371 Regional Literature: Pacific Northwest Literature
Eng 399 The 2020 National Book Awards
Eng 441 Poetry of the Pacific Northwest
Eng 441 Vampires
Eng 450 Walt Whitman and Langston Hughes
Eng 456 Zines & Underground Publishing
Hum 497 Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass
Eng 498 Senior Seminar in Creative Writing
Awards
Liberal Arts Research Collaborative Grant (2017)
National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship (2016)
Kluge Fellowship, Library of Congress (2015)
Liberal Arts Research Collaborative Grant (2013)
National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend (2011)
Ohio Arts Council Individual Artists Fellowship (1999)
Interesting Links
Poetess Archive
Ron Silliman's Blog