teaching & research

my teaching experience

I’ve studied and taught creative writing, literary and cultural interpretation and theory, and foreign languages for over 15 years in over a dozen cities around the world. I’ve brought creative writing to thousands of students in universities, high schools, elementary schools, senior centers, meditation and yoga studios, in hybrid, online, and in-person formats.

my dissertation research

The PhD dissertation spans two fields—an emergent, Contemplative Studies, and an established, lyric theory—by means of a category of religious life called “mysticism.” In it, techniques of reading and teaching from the field of Contemplative Studies resituate lyric theory’s standard methods of (and goals for) relating to poetic texts. Applying a medieval mystical body of ideas onto modern literary texts opens up those texts’ meanings for contemporary audiences both within and beyond the university literature classroom.

A postsecular lyric theory considers the modern emergence of mysticism studies to be correlated to renewed popular interest in the New Age spiritual movement, and takes seriously that these cultural phenomena may be meaningful to the study of the lyric. Understanding lyric on a metasocial level, through the relationship of the state of the art to popular culture, such a theory considers the effects of a ‘New Age subjectivity’ on issues of learning, attention, and ‘altered’ states of consciousness in the postmodern reader.

This dissertation’s argument is grounded in a historicized claim: such questions of ‘postsecular subjectivity’, consciousness, and attention can and should be understood, as illustrated in the case studies of two modern lyric poets, as modernized uploads of the central concerns of medieval mystical Catholicism. For the purposes of this project, these concerns can be summarized as detachment, the master term of Eckhart’s. Instead of arguing for a revivification of poetry per se, or advocating for adherence to particular religious subcategories, the dissertation observes continuities among the roles of one vein of mysticism and two veins of poetry with an interest in experiences of personal transformation.

This project assembles translations, close readings, and comparative analyses, together with subjective experiential interpretations (following the lead of Contemplative Studies), of poems from six books of 20th-century poetry; three by Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), and three by John Ashbery (1927-2017). Its theoretical claims do not presuppose empirically-derived historical connections between the modern poets and their medieval mystical predecessor. Rather, they investigate the efficacy of a hybrid ‘contemplative’ model of literary studies by means of a sustained comparative study of two relatively dissimilar poets refracted through the lens of a third, tangentially-related thinker (Meister Eckhart).

The dissertation intervenes in lyric theory in this way in order to suggest the pedagogical implications of foregrounding a more interdisciplinary praxis grounded in the relatively new field called Contemplative Studies. It is an extended experiment in these practices, blending more ‘secular’ critical-analytical practices of translation and close reading of Modernist lyric with more ‘postsecular’ practices of contemplation and creative reflection on the ideas of Meister Eckhart with the intention of discovering affinities—aesthetic, philosophical, embodied, and meta-socially transformative—between the ideas and images of these disparate places and times.