Dr. Brendan Gillott
Biography
I was born in West Yorkshire towards the end of 1990. I received the majority of my education here in Cambridge.
I teach Paper 1, Practical Criticism, across all years of the tripos; Part I Paper 7B (1870-present); and Part II papers 12 (Contemporary Writing), 13 (American Literature), 16 (History and Theory of Literary Criticism), and 17 (Lyric).
Research Interests
My major interests are in poetry and poetics, and in literary theory. More specifically: modernist poetics; intermedia; the 'long poem'; Dada; Black Mountain poetry; the British Poetry Revival; FLUXUS; writing by composers, and the relation between poetry and music. I am currently working away at a book project concerning John Cage and so-called 'anti-art'.
Connect with Brendan
Publications
‘Concrete Poetics and Non-Art in John Cage and Dom Sylvester Houédard’ in Modernist Cultures 18.1 (2023), 68-93
Reading the Modernist Long Poem: John Cage, Charles Olson, and the Indeterminacy of Longform Poetics (New York: Bloomsbury, 2021)
‘Random Poetry?: Reading Chance, Randomness and the Non-Compressible in Gertrude Stein and John Cage’ in Textual Practice 34.11 (November 2020), 1865-1883
‘Charles Olson’s ‘Projective Verse’ and the inscription of the breath’ in Humanities 7.4: 108 (November 2018),1-20
‘The Depth of Charles Olson’s Maximus Poems’ in English 66.255 (December 2017), 351-371