Dr Tymek Woodham

Profile

I studied English and Creative Writing at Warwick University before completing my PhD at University College London under the supervision of Mark Ford in 2021. I am currently finalising my first monograph, The Poetics of Agency: Action and Form in Post-War US Poetry (contracted for publication with Bloomsbury Academic). My next research project is a critical history of interdisciplinarity at the radical liberal arts college, Black Mountain College (1933-1957)

Teaching

I’m not currently teaching at Queen Mary, but I am very happy to talk to undergraduate and postgraduate students about twentieth-century American literary culture and political aesthetics. My particular areas expertise include: experimental/avant-garde poetics, Harlem Renaissance authors, the ‘New American Poetry’, the philosophy of agency and intermediality (i.e. the relationship between literary texts and other media—particularly music, film, dance and visual art/crafts).

Research

Research Interests:

• - American poetry and poetics
• - Post-WW2 experimental poetry, specifically those traditions clustered under the heading of the ‘New American Poetry’
• - African American literary culture
• - Intermediality: jazz poetics, collaborative works across media, poems that pretend not to be poems
• - Theories of the subject, agency and site-based poetics

My first monograph, The Poetics of Agency: Action and Form in Post-war American Poetry, examines how experimental approaches to poetic form in the post-war United States struggled to wrest the concept of human agency away from the chimera of the ‘sovereign individual’. In a series of studies that compare the poetry and poetics of four pivotal authors (Charles Olson, Langston Hughes, Frank O’Hara and Denise Levertov), I explore how prefigurative aesthetics committed to modelling more plural and receptive forms of agency are variously complicated by the lived realities of social, technological and planetary processes of structural entanglement.

My current research project, provisionally titled Inescapable Flux: Black Mountain College and the Legacy of the US Avant-Garde, is a critical history of interdisciplinarity at the renowned radical arts institution, Black Mountain College. Long acknowledged as a vital part of College pedagogy and communal culture, this will be the first book-length study to foreground the ‘interdisciplinary encounter’ at the centre of the institution’s organic development. Here, I am concerned with how interdisciplinarity was conceived by BMC artists as a mode of social, political and cultural enquiry: whether it be MC Richards worrying the gendered distinction between art and craft during her ‘pottery poem’ seminars; or German-speaking migrants transforming the meanings of neo-modernist American national epic poems by setting them to music; or international visual artists responding to Black performers merging opera with blues during ‘summer school’ guest concerts, I want to theorise interdisciplinary practice as an active modelling of political subjectivities that challenge the gendered and racialised disciplinary systems of the US during the post-war period and beyond.

Publications

Book

The Poetics of Agency: Action and Form in Post-war American Poetry. (Contract signed with Bloomsbury Academic, expected 2025.)

Articles

‘BOUNDARIES BIND / UNBINDING’: Langston Hughes’ ASK YOUR MAMA (1961) and the archive.’ In preparation.

‘Peripheries.’ Moveable Type. London: University College London, Vol. 10, 2018. DOI: 10.14324/111.1755-4527.093