MA, Windsor
BA, Cornell
Extension: 42419
Email: kmcguirk@uwaterloo.ca
Biography
I grew up in the Toronto suburbs playing a lot of soccer and reading a lot of fiction.
Selected publications
"'He could not find his voice': Sound, Ethos, and The Age of Innocence." American Literary Realism 54.2 (Winter 2022): 135-149.
“’Near enough/ to be knowingly away’: Cornell ’69 and the Ammons Poetic.” Arizona Quarterly 76.3 (Fall 2020).
“’The apple an apple’: Ammons, Bloom, and ‘The Ten Thousand Things’ – with Emerson and Lao Tzu.” Journal of Modern Literature 44.1 (Fall 2020).
“Philoctetes Radicalized: ‘Twenty-One Love Poems’ and the Lyric Career of Adrienne Rich.” In Adrienne Rich: Poetry and Prose: A Norton Critical Edition. 2nd Edition. Eds. Albert Gelpi et al. W.W. Norton: NY, 2018. First Published in Contemporary Literature 34.1 (Spring 1993).
Editor, with Victoria Lamont. “Culture and the Economization of Everything.” Canadian Review of American Studies. Special issue, 2017.
An Image for Longing: Selected Letters and Journals of A.R. Ammons, 1951-1974, edited by Kevin McGuirk, ELS Editions, 2013.
“Ammons in Correspondence.” Chicago Review 57: 1/2 (Autumn 2012): 167-72.
"'no arranged terror': Ammons After the New Americanists.” Special Issue: Transnational American Studies—For What? Comparative American Studies 6.1 (2008): 71-84.
"'Disremembering, Dismembered': Poetics, and the Oral Histories of the Vietnam War." Soldier Talk: The Vietnam War in Oral Narrative. Eds. Paul Budra and Michael Zeitlin. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2004. 62-88.
"'All wi doin’”: Linton Kwesi Johnson, Tony Harrison, and the Cultural Work of Lyric in Postwar Britain.” New Definitions of Lyric: Theory, Technology, Culture. Ed. Mark Jeffreys. New York: Garland, 1998. 49-75.
Fellowships & Awards
- Fulbright Award, 2002-2003
- SSHRC (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council) Post-Doctoral Fellowship, 1994-1996
Current research
I’ve given most of my attention to the adventurous tradition in American poetry, spending much more time than I ever intended on the major-minor poet, A.R Ammons. But Ammons’s work has allowed me to think about a lot of different things, including postmodern poetics, “the Sixties,” cultural studies of space, literary Daoism, literary friendship, the poet’s career, and the photograph of the planet taken in 1967 by NASA scientists. Along the way I’ve taught courses in Fiction and Film, American Fiction, the American Renaissance, and, recently, at the graduate level, Thing Theory and Sound Studies. Teaching has brought me back to narrative. I’m currently developing a series of essays linking sound, ethos, and the novel.
Areas of graduate supervision
I can supervise theses in American literature and culture, especially postwar poetry and fiction My recent and upcoming graduate courses give some idea of the range of my interests: Outside Poetry (on non-literary poetics); Modernism and the Short Poem; Thing Theory and American Literature; Art and Persuasion; Sound and Ethos in American Fiction.