Brian Reed

Divisional Dean of Humanities

bmreed — Mon, 26 Mar 2018 14:40:25 +0000

I am proud to announce that, as of July 1st, 2018, I will become the Divisional Dean of the Humanities at the University of Washington, Seattle.

Birds and Poets

bmreed — Wed, 07 Mar 2018 06:00:44 +0000

A video of my talk — “Sing Along: Poets and Birds” — the 2018 Katz Distinguished Lecture in the Humanities at the University of Washington — is now available for viewing over at YouTube.

New Title

bmreed — Sun, 21 Jan 2018 17:57:18 +0000

I am proud to announce that I have been appointed as the inaugural Milliman Endowed Chair in the Humanities at the University of Washington. I would like to express my profound thanks to Glenn and Alison Milliman for their extraordinary generosity and for their unflagging support of the study and teaching of literature and the arts.

Pitching Poetry

bmreed — Sun, 31 Dec 2017 17:09:17 +0000

A new essay of mine–“Setting a Poem: A. J. Carruthers’ ‘Music, After Michael Dransfield’”–has appeared in the June 2017 issue of the Chinese journal Waiguo Wenxue Yanjiu [Foreign Literature Studies]. It’s an attempt to think about the analogy between the poem on the page and a score for musical performance, by way of the work of AJ Carruthers, a first-rate contemporary Australian writer. I take a look at a section of his long poem Axis that experiments with a pitch-notation system invented by the linguist Yuen Ren Chao.

Seoul Bound

bmreed — Thu, 09 Nov 2017 14:27:01 +0000

I’ll be giving a keynote talk this weekend–“Visual Poetry and the Poetics of Data Visualization”–at Dongguk University in Seoul, South Korea. The conference is called “Comparative Literature, World Literature, and the Digital Humanities,” and it is hosted by the Korean Society of East-West Comparative Literature (KEASTWEST).

New essay on Indigenous poetics

bmreed — Sun, 22 Oct 2017 16:29:40 +0000

I have an essay–“Sherwin Bitsui’s Blank Dictionary: Navajo Poetics and Non-Indigenous Readers”–in a fantastic new book, The Fate of Difficulty in the Poetry of Our Time, edited by Charles Altieri and Nicholas Nace, that’s just out from the University of Chicago Press. I’m honored to appear alongside the likes of Langdon Hammer, Lyn Hejinian, Ben Lerner, Cary Nelson, and Marjorie Perloff.

New Review Essay

bmreed — Mon, 17 Apr 2017 20:17:34 +0000

My review essay “Postdigital Global Literary History: On the Fourth Edition of The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics” has just been published. You’ll find it in the May 2017 issue of the journal Boundary 2.

Off to Los Angeles

bmreed — Sat, 05 Nov 2016 16:23:10 +0000

I’m soon going to be in Los Angeles for three conferences in quick succession: conferences run by the Pacific Modern and Ancient Language Association, the Chinese/American Association for Poetry and Poetics, and the Modernist Studies Association. I’ll be chairing a panel on contemporary poetry on Friday, 11 November, at 10:20am; giving a talk on the Australian poets AJ Carruthers and Michael Dransfield on Saturday, 12 November, at 11:30am; giving another talk, on Anna Akhmatova and Robert Lowell, on Saturday, 19 November, at 3:30pm; and participating in a seminar on “The Poetics of Information Exchange” on Sunday, 20 November, at 10:30am, for which I’ve written an essay on Rudyard Kipling’s poem “Boots.” Should be a memorable ten days.

New Short Essay

bmreed — Fri, 05 Feb 2016 23:44:59 +0000

I have a short piece called “Stanisław Dróżdż: From Conceptual Poem to Concept-Shape” that’s now up over on Jacket2 as part of a feature on “Conceptual Writing (Plural and Global)” edited by Divya Victor.

VisPo Blooms

bmreed — Tue, 10 Nov 2015 02:36:08 +0000

I have a short piece–“On Mary Ellen Solt’s ‘Forsythia‘”–that has been posted as part of the online journal Coldfront‘s cool new series “Singular VisPo: First Encounters,” which retells different poets’ and critics’ first epiphanic experiences with “visual poetry,” however defined.