The Poetics of Reading: In Conversation with Maureen N. McLane and Rowan Ricardo Phillips

Maureen N. McLane is a poet, scholar, and critic whose work often arises from the conjunction of romanticism and/or now. She has published seven books of poetry: Same Life (FSG, 2008); World Enough (FSG, 2010); This Blue (FSG, 2014); Mz N: the serial (FSG, 2016); Some Say (FSG, 2017); What I’m Looking For: Selected Poems (Penguin UK, 2019); and More Anon: Selected Poems (FSG, 2021). Her poems have appeared in e.g. Bomb, Granta, London Review of Books, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and PN Review; her work has been translated into Czech, French, Greek, Italian, and Spanish. Her book My Poets (FSG, 2012), an experimental hybrid of memoir and criticism, was a New York Times Notable Book and a finalist for the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award in Autobiography. Her scholarship has focused on British romanticism and longer histories of poetries in English: she is the author of Balladeering, Minstrelsy, and the Making of British Romantic Poetry (Cambridge UP, 2008, 2011) and Romanticism and the Human Sciences (CUP, 2000, 2006). She co-edited The Cambridge Companion to British Romantic Poetry (2008).

Rowan Ricardo Phillips is a Distinguished Professor of English at Stony Brook University. A highly acclaimed, multi-award-winning poet, author, screenwriter, academic, journalist and translator, Phillips is the author of several books. His poetry collections include The Ground (FSG, 2012), Heaven (FSG, 2015), Living Weapon (2020), and the forthcoming Silver (FSG, 2024). He is also the author of When Blackness Rhymes with Blackness (a new edition of which is forthcoming from FSG) and the nonfiction book The Circuit: A Tennis Odyssey. His translations, primarily from Catalan, have appeared widely; including his translation of Salvador Espriu’s classic short-story collection Arianda and the Grotesque Labyrinth (Dalkey Archive, 2012).Phillips has written on contemporary art for Artforum as well as for David Kordansky Gallery. In 2021, an exhibition inspired by one of Phillips’ poems, “The Beatitudes of Malibu” debuted at the David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles. Phillips is a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine, the President of the Board of the New York Institute of the Humanities, and the poetry editor of The New Republic.

Sponsored by the Department of English, the Bain-Swiggett Fund; IHUM, Lewis Center for the Arts, the Department of Comparative Literature, UCHV