Lochie Springett

Thesis title: Life Work: Serial Form, Lateness, and the Long Poem

Supervisor: Hannah Sullivan

DPhil Research: Central to all my work is an animating question: what is at stake when someone spends their entire life continuously writing the same text? More specifically, I am interested in the contemporary afterlife of twentieth-century debates about the relation between serial form and practices of textual revision. In this vein, my DPhil considers a network of experimental writers whose output is typically grouped within the overdetermined, but poorly defined, category of ‘the long poem’. By focussing on those poems that foreground multi-decade composition and compilation—a form Ezra Pound dubbed ‘life work’—this project elucidates the under-examined connections between the fields of genetic criticism, life writing, and serial poetics. Caught between an impulse to encompass more and more, until the text is saturated with all that is the case, and the intensely personal activity of autobiography, ‘life work’ offers an unusually generative way to think about literature’s ability to negotiate discrepancies in scale between world and self.  Some authors of particular interest, alongside Pound, include Louis Zukofksy, William Carlos Williams, Charles Olson, and Nathaniel Mackey. 

Relatedly, I also research the writing of Nathaniel Mackey’s friend and sometime interlocutor, Edward Kamau Brathwaite. To this end, I am currently working on an article that investigates Brathwaite’s lifelong tendency to revisit the poems that he wrote as an undergraduate at Cambridge in the early 1950s. 

Alongside my work on poetry and poetics, I maintain a broader interest in all things longform, from Dorothy Richardson’s novel sequence Pilgrimage (1915–1967) to the peculiarly distended nature of epistolary relationships.  

Research interests: Book history, genetic criticism, 'late style', life writing, modernism, poetics, senescence and ageing, serial forms.