School of English

The Centre for Modern Poetry

The Centre for Modern Poetry provides a rich research environment for staff and students working in the field of Modern and Contemporary poetry and poetics. Staff affiliated to the Centre include David Ayers, David Herd, Ariane Mildenberg, Jan Montefiore, Simon Smith and Sarah Wood. We stage a range of regular events, including reading groups, research seminars and performances.  In 2010 we hosted Charles Olson 2010, an international conference to mark Olson’s centenary, and in 2011 we helped found Sounds New Poetry, an international poetry event associated with Canterbury’s longstanding Sounds New music festival. In 2012 the Centre will contribute to the European Avant-Garde and Modernism Conference to be hosted at the University of Kent in September. Over the past few years we have been glad to welcome leading poets, scholars and critics to give talks, readings, lectures and workshops. Recent visiting speakers and performers have included: Peter Gizzi, Marilyn Hacker, Michael Heller, John Kinsella, Tony Lopez, Redell Olsen, Richard Price, Matthew Welton.


Graduate students working within the Centre follow the modern poetry strand of the MA in English and American Literature. This consists of the modules ‘EN871-Men and Women: Modernist Poetry’ and ‘EN872 - Provocations and Invitations: Poetry After the Second World War’, and can often lead to a dissertation in the field. Doctoral students working in the area join an active cohort of research students whose recent and current projects include work on John Ashbery, Wallace Stevens, Robert Lowell & the New American Poetry, the history of performance in postwar British and American poetry, and hypertext and the Modernist book.  The Centre also houses the PhD in Poetry: Text and Practice. For details of this practice-based research programme please look here.
Staff at the Centre for Modern Poetry publish widely as critics and poets. We also edit a series of monographs, the Peter Lang Modern Poetry Series.

Ongoing and upcoming activities

  • The Modern Poetry Reading Group meets once a month. In previous years we have considered Charles Olson, Susan Howe and Roy Fisher. We are currently reading Poems by JH Prynne
  • ZONE is a reading, performance and discussion series concerned with poetry, poetics and politics affiliated to the Centre for Modern Poetry.  For upcoming readings please go to: www.freerange.co/
  • Sounds New Poetry is an annual poetry festival connected to the long-established Sounds New contemporary music festival. For details of the festival please go to: www.soundsnew.org.uk .
  • In September 2012 the Centre for Modern Poetry will be pleased to welcome the European Avant-Garde and Modernism Network to the University of Kent. Staff at the Centre have been instrumental in the organization of the conference and will participate in its proceedings.

Ongoing research projects

  • Staff at the Centre for Modern Poetry are part of the Poets & Critics Research Group based at Université Paris Est. For details of this project please go to: 

www.poetscriticsparisest.blogspot.com/

  • Staff and students at the Centre for Modern Poetry are involved in an ongoing collaboration with the Poetics Research Group at Royal Holloway University of London. Regular seminars on contemporary poets and questions in poetics take place at Kent and in London.
  • David Ayers held a Leverhulme Fellowship from 2008-2010 under the title 'Internationalism and the Idea of Europe'. This project researched the cultural impact in Britain of the Russian Revolution and the formation of the League of Nations.

Archive

Staff

David Ayers is Professor of Modernism and Critical Theory, Chair of the European Network for Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies, executive member of the Modernist Studies Association and of the British Association for Modernist Studies, and co-organizer of the London Modernism Seminar. He has published extensively on Modernism.


David Herd’s current research interests lie in the area of modern poetry and the politics of movement. His recent essays on this subject have appeared in PN Review, Parallax and Almost Island. He has published extensively on modern poetry and is currently editing Contemporary Olson (to be published by Manchester University Press in 2014). His new collection, All Just, is forthcoming from Carcanet.


Ariane Mildenberg's research interests lie in Modern poetry and twentieth-century philosophy, poetry and visual art, and translation of contemporary Scandinavian poetry. Her publications on the poetry of Gertrude Stein, John Ashbery and Wallace Stevens explore the interaction of poetry with phenomenology. She is currently working on an Anglo-Danish translation project with Simon Smith.


Sarah Wood has written books on Robert Browning, who was a poet, and on Jacques Derrida, who is on record as saying he'd have liked to be one. She co-authored Blue Guitar, a creative-critical book on Wallace Stevens, with poet Jonathan Tiplady. She is an editor of Oxford Literary Review, and has just produced an issue (33.2, December 2011) on Deconstruction and Poetry.

For information about the activities of the Centre for Modern Poetry, and to discuss the Centre’s graduate programmes, please contact:

Professor David Herd
Director of the Centre for Modern Poetry
d.herd@kent.ac.uk

School of English, University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent, CT2 7NX

The University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent, CT2 7NZ, T: +44 (0)1227 823054

Last Updated: 12/03/2012