English and Humanities

James Wilkes and Holly Pester, both poets, write here about their engagement with the descriptive experience sampling (DES) method, which stemmed from an interdisciplinary encounter with the psychologist Russell Hurlburt, and their experience of being trained as subjects in this technique. This chapter considers how DES can be used in unexpected ways to think through vexed questions in poetics about the relationship between experience and language, and the material ways in which experience might be captured. James and Holly consider the deployment of DES in the context of a poetry reading, which emerges as a space of multiple, distributed and distractable attention.

This thesis produces a critical and creative space for new forms of sound poetics. Through a reflective process combining theoretical research and poetic practice – performances, text-scores and installations – the thesis tests the contemporary terms of intermedial poetics and sound poetry, establishing a conceptual terminology for speech-matter. Beginning with a study of 1960s sound poet Henri Chopin and his relation to the tape machine, I argue that this technological mediation was based on a poetics of analogue sound hinged on bodily engagement. Social and physical properties of the tape machine contribute to a mode of practice that negotiates the body, machine, and effort. Exploring Michel Serres’s concept of parasitic noise and the relation of interference to lyric appeal, via the work of Denise Riley and Hannah Weiner, I understand sound poetics as a product of lyrically active noise. Through an analysis of radio address, a conceptual link is drawn between lyric poetry and tec...

Hilary Mantel doesn’t have someone standing behind her, as she sits at her desk, saying, ‘Go on, go on, Hils – push; push! You can do it. You know you can do it.’ Nor does Don DeLillo have a physio to keep his shoulders in shape after another long day at the Olympia SM-9 typewriter. Nor does Alice Munro have a dietician planning the balance of proteins and carbs in her late evening snack in order to get her brain chemistry just right for the next morning’s sentences.

Why not?

Harry Potter is the most successful fictional character of our time. Why? Part of the reason must be that readers like him so desperately much. First they sympathize with him, then they empathize with him, and soon his adventures have become their adventures. How does this happen? How is this achieved? In this lecture we will be looking at the structures that lie behind sympathy.

This was given as my fifth annual Birkbeck summer lecture to students on the Creative Writing MA.

This was given as my  third annual Birkbeck summer lecture to students on the Creative Writing MA. It addresses the subject 'What kind of sentences should I write?' via Graham Greene (particularly The Power and the Glory), Saul Bellow, David Foster Wallace. There's an aside about the word 'and'.

Taking Keston Sutherland's poem HOT WHITE ANDY as its focus, this question examines what a contemporary definition of Literature with a capital L might be. It was given as the seventh of my annual Birkbeck lectures to the students of the Creative Writing MA.