Lynn Keller

Title

Professor (Martha Meier Renk-Bascom Professor of Poetry)

Office

7195F Helen C. White Hall

Phone

(608) 265-3393

E-mail

E-mail Lynn Keller

Interests

American poetry since 1950, recent experimental poetries and poetics, poetry and ecocriticism

Degrees and Institutions

PhD, University of Chicago
BA, Stanford University

Selected Publications

• Re-making It New: Contemporary American Poetry and the Modernist Tradition (Cambridge, 1987) 
• Forms of Expansion: Recent Long Poems by Women (Chicago, 1997) 
• edited with Cristanne Miller, Feminist Measures: Soundings in Poetry and Theory (Michigan, 1994) 
• articles in such journals as American Literature, Contemporary Literature, Arizona Quarterly, and Journal of Modern Literature on poetry by Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Creeley, John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, Rosmarie Waldrop, Joan Retallack, Alice Fulton, C.D. Wright, Cole Swensen, Susan Wheeler, Myung Mi Kim and others.

Research Interests

American poetry since 1950, especially women's poetry and experimental poetries of recent decades; American long poems; visual poetics; poetry and environmental criticism.

Current Projects

Having recently completed a book manuscript on current experimental poetry by American women, I am now immersing myself in the field of ecocriticism and planning a new project on contemporary experimental ecopoetics.

Co-editor of University of Iowa Press Series on Contemporary North American Poetry. One of three editors for Contemporary Literature.

Personal Statement

While I was trained as an Americanist and teach a range of American and twentieth-century courses on the undergraduate level, my research interests are generically focused: I study poetry almost exclusively. My early scholarship dealt with the relationship between modernist and contemporary or postmodernist poetry, but since the publication of my first book I have focused on poetry written since the 1970s, especially on women's writing and feminist poetries in the U.S. While linguistically innovative work is at the center of my current research, I am committed to reading broadly in the field of contemporary poetry and to cultivating in my students the varied reading skills necessary to appreciate varied poetics. Interested now in integrating my knowledge of contemporary poetry with my interests in environmentalism, I am beginning to move my research into the field of ecocriticism.

Graduate Teaching

I regularly teach graduate surveys of poetry movements in the U.S. since the middle of the 20th century, as well as more specialized courses devoted to such topics as the long poem; experimental poetries and poetics; or recent poetry and ecocriticism.