James Longenbach

Joseph Henry Gilmore Professor of English

PhD  Princeton University
Modernism, poetry, creative writing

Research/Writing interests

James Longenbach is a poet and critic whose most recent book of poems, Draft of a Letter, is about the vicissitudes of belief—belief not in what is distant and strange but in what is close and familiar: our bodies, our words.  His most recent critical work, The Art of the Poetic Line, is an account of the work of lineation in free-verse, syllabic, and metered poetry (ranging from Shakespeare to Ashbery).  He has also written widely about modern and postmodern poetry, sometimes emphasizing the historicity of poetic language (Wallace Stevens: The Plain Sense of Things) but also exploring the ways in which poems resist their historical situation (The Resistance to Poetry).

Selected publications

• The Art of the Poetic Line, Graywolf 2007
• Draft of a Letter, Chicago 2007
• The Resistance to Poetry, Chicago 2004
• Fleet River, Chicago 2003
• Threshold, Chicago 1998
• Modern Poetry after Modernism, Oxford 1997
• Wallace Stevens: The Plain Sense of Things, Oxford 1991
• Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats, and Modernism, Oxford 1988
• Modernist Poetics of History, Princeton 1987
• Over a hundred essays and reviews on (for instance) Ashbery, Bidart, Bishop, Crane, Eliot, Glück, Graham, Lowell, Moore, Oppen, Pinsky, Pound, Stevens, Wright, Yeats
• Poems published in The Nation, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Slate, and The Yale Review.
  

Teaching

Courses in modern and contemporary American poetry, British and American modernism, James Joyce, Shakespeare, creative writing      

Recent undergraduate courses

• Modern Literature (spring 2007)
• Advanced Creative Writing: Poetry (spring 2007)
• Shakespeare
  

Recent graduate courses

• Modernism: Ulysses (spring 2006)
• Seminar in Creative Writing: Poetry (fall 2002)
• Modern Poetry
  

Honors and activities

• Bain-Swiggett Professor of Poetry, Princeton University
  
• Student Association Professor of the Year, University of Rochester
• Jury Chair, National Book Award in Poetry
• Faculty, Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers
• Guggenheim Fellow
• Mellon Fellow
• Nation/Discovery Award
• Student Association Teaching Award, University of Rochester
• Visiting Fellow, Worcester College, Oxford University
• National Endowment for the Humanities Senior Fellow

jlgb@mail.rochester.edu
(585) 275-4587
512 Morey Hall