Research

Check out my full list of publications.

My current research project is titled Affective Border-Crossings: Reading for Human-Nature-Culture Connections in Anglophone Literatures. In connection to this project, I have published an article entitled Clark Coolidge’s The Land of All Time: An Affectively Restless Ecopoem (Siltanen and Guimarães 2023, open access).

My earlier research project, Difficult Relations: Reading for Emotion in Recent American Experimental Poetry, examined ways of approaching recent American experimental poetry through emotion. What happens to a reader’s ability to “feel with” the text when a poem treats subjectivity, both that of the author and of the reader, as fluid and calls attention to uses of language and structure? How might we relate to emotion in conceptual poetry where the text material may have been derived from a variety of sources rather than describing a private experience? In experimental poetry, emotions like happiness and sadness are often characterized by uncertainty: Is this the writer’s “authentic” feeling? What happens to the reader in situations like these? In addition to these broader questions, the articles published in the project examined for example the connections between conceptual and confessional poetry and the concept of metamodernism as it relates to contemporary poetry. The project was funded by the Ella and Georg Ehrnrooth Foundation, the Kone Foundation and by the Emil Aaltonen Foundation. Kone Foundation logo

Voit myös katsoa projektin suomenkielisen esittelyvideon (click on the link to see an introduction video to project – in Finnish, with English subtitles).

During the Difficult Relations project, I wrote articles on, for example, confessionalism and conceptualism in Trisha Low’s writing (Siltanen 2020, read more here), New Sincerity, metamodernism and metarepresentation in Dorothea Lasky’s poetry (Siltanen 2020, read more here), poetry as a mindfulness project in Bernadette Mayer’s Studying Hunger Journals (Siltanen 2020, read more here); and on reading and teaching emotions in poetry that works with affect, borders, and ecocritical themes, using as examples books by Evelyn Reilly and Wendy Trevino (Siltanen 2024).  

My book, Experimentalism as Reciprocal Communication in Contemporary American Poetry: John Ashbery, Lyn Hejinian, Ron Silliman came out from John Benjamins in October 2016. Read more about it here, or go directly to the publisher’s website and order it there.

In 2019, I published the article “Lapse of Happily: Consuming Everyday Banality in American Experimental Poetry”, which discusses works by Claudia Rankine and Robert Fitterman. Read more here.

 

My research interests include

  • contemporary American experimental poetry:
    – Language Writing, the New York School, Conceptual & post-conceptual poetry, etc.
  • poetry and emotion
  • poetry and authenticity
  • conceptual and confessional poetry
  • border poetics
  • ecopoetics
  • metamodernism
  • postmodernism
  • new approaches to reading and teaching complex literature
  • cognitive poetics
  • literature as communication
  • everyday life in literature

Conference papers (selection):

  • Climate emergency and connection in ecocritical literature. ESSE Conference (panel: Contemporary Crises in the Anglosphere: Fragmentation and Relationality in 21st-century Narratives), Lausanne, Switzerland, August 26-30, 2024.
  • Nonhuman movement across borders in Lorna Dee Cervantes’s Emplumada. MESEA Conference: Moving Cultures, Moving Ethnicities, University of Eastern Finland, June 12-14, 2024.
  • “Mutual Touching: Metaphorical and Concrete Borders in Divya Victor’s CURB.” Border Seminar, Gdánsk, Poland, May 23-25, 2023.
  • “Clark Coolidge’s The Land of All Time: a Jazz-Fueled Urban Ecopoem?”. Together with João Paulo Guimarães. At the Dusk of Literature?––21st-century North American writing in
    extremis. University of Łódź, Poland (online), June 25–26, 2021.
  • “Difficult Relations: Reading for Emotion in Recent American Experimental Poetry: Project presentation”. Kirjallisuudentutkimuksen päivät (The Finnish Literary Research Society’s annual conference), May 6-7, 2021.
  • “New Sincerity and the Performance of Emotion in Dorothea Lasky’s Poetry”. PAMLA (Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association) conference, Bellingham, WA. November 9-11, 2018.
  • “A New Confessional Poetry: Recycled language and private provisions in Trisha Low’s The Compleat Purge”. ACLA (American Comparative Literature Association) conference, Utrecht, The Netherlands. July 6-9, 2017.
  • “Being in the Present: Poetry as a ‘mindfulness’ project in Bernadette Mayer’s Studying Hunger Journals”. FINSSE-8, University of Turku and Åbo Akademi, Turku. June 7-9, 2017.
  • “Reading A New Confessional Poetry: The case of Trisha Low’s The Compleat Purge.” NeMLA (Northeast Modern Language Association) conference, Baltimore, MD. March 23-26, 2017.
  • “Lapse of Happily”: Consuming Everyday Banality in Experimental Poetry. FINSSE-7, University of Vaasa. October 9-10, 2015.
  • ‘Hard Work: Reading, Community, and Collaboration in Ron Silliman’s Poetry’. FINSSE-6: English in the East conference, University of Eastern Finland, Joensuu. October 18-20, 2012.
  • ‘“Launched in Context”: Lyn Hejinian Performing Ordinary Language’.  Major Minors: New and Neglected Issues in Literary Studies conference, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, USA. February 16-17, 2012.
  • ‘Voices of Others: Communication and Non-Identity in Contemporary American Experimental Poetry’. NAES-FINSSE 2010: English in the North conference, University of Oulu. June 9-12, 2010.

See more on Orcid: ORCID iD iconorcid.org/0000-0002-8478-2278