My writing, teaching, and administrative work converge in a fascination with the constant possibility of intelligent and novel steps within an old framework. The frameworks of my most recent writing are modern and contemporary poetry and poetics, twentieth-century experimental writing, and the U.S. system of higher education. My most recent books are a collection of essays called Sound States: Innovative Poetics and Acoustical Technologies (University of North Carolina, 1998) and a study of H.D. and contemporary innovative poets entitled How to Live / What to Do: H.D.'s Cultural Poetics (University of Illinois Press, Spring 2003).

In between, I have written essays on such topics as Emily Dickinson, Adrienne Rich, storytellers in contemporary feminist fiction, the construction of the American literary canon, oppositional intellectuals and the job market, and the pleasures and perils of chairing a department, co-edited two collections of contemporary poetry, and followed the poet H.D. into and out of the frameworks of science, anthropology, and mysticism.

My most recent teaching turns to the question that centers my next booklength project, titled "What Else Can Poetry Do?" I am particularly interested in the intelligent and novel steps made by such writers as Gertrude Stein, John Cage, Lyn Hejinian, Susan Howe, and Nathaniel Mackey and in the ways in which these steps anticipate the framework of contemporary hypertext poetics.

Poetic Communities Spring 2011
Poetry in the Age of Information Spring 2011

New Media Poetics Spring 2010
Documentary Poetics Spring 2010