I am currently reading for a DPhil in English, under the supervision of Hannah Sullivan. Central to all my work is an animating question: what is at stake when someone spends their entire life continuously writing the same text? More specifically, I am interested in the contemporary afterlife of twentieth-century debates about the relation between serial form and practices of textual revision. In this vein, my research considers a network of experimental writers whose output is typically grouped within the overdetermined, but poorly defined, category of ‘the long poem’. By exploring those poems that foreground multi-decade composition and compilation—a form Ezra Pound dubbed ‘life work’—this project elucidates the under-examined connections between the fields of genetic criticism, life writing, and serial poetics. Caught between an impulse to encompass more and more, until the text is saturated with all that is the case, and the intensely personal activity of autobiography, ‘life work’ offers an unusually generative way to think about literature’s ability to negotiate discrepancies in scale between world and self.  Some authors of particular interest, alongside Pound, include Louis Zukofksy, William Carlos Williams, Charles Olson, and Nathaniel Mackey.
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