CDW

I write poetry criticism: since 2011 I’ve been published online in Dr Fulminare’s Irregular Features, Hotel, The Literateur, The Missing Slate, Notes on Metamodernism, Poetry International Web, Queens Mob’s Tea House, The Quietus, Review 31, Sabotage, Sphinx, Stride Magazine, and the Times Literary Supplement, and in print in Poetry Review and Under the Radar.

I was nominated for Best Reviewer in the 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2017 Saboteur Awards.

My pamphlet RETURNS was published by If A Leaf Falls Press in 2016.

For a full listing of my published writing, see: charleswhalley.co.uk/work.

The thesis behind my work is that our understanding of poetry is suggested by the structures within which it is produced and received, which is mostly how poetry is paid for or sold and by/for whom. As such, my interest in the effects of the internet on poetry, for instance, is in examining it as a structure and medium for composition and dissemination, and how this manifests itself formally.

My interests include:

  • experimental poetry and the avant garde, and its relation to current and future anti-capitalist poetics
  • poetry publishing economies and the ‘poetry industry’
  • the technology and experience of social media vs. lyrical subjectivity
  • consumerism and identity
  • the role and status of poetry criticism.

Since 2013, a current project is on what I’ve called ‘post-internet poetry,’ in which I am exploring the influence of the internet on poetry in the context of technological and attitudinal shifts since 2008: http://postinternetpoetry.tumblr.com/ As such, it is also a vehicle for exploring the work of some new innovative poets, and the influence/reception of conceptualism and flarf.

I am an Advisory Board member of the Ledbury Emerging Critics Programme 2017.

From 2012 to 2016 I ran the Twitter account @williamempson, tweeting quotations from William Empson’s poetry and prose writings. The account is now closed.

You can follow me on Twitter. You can also email me using this form, or at my first name @charleswhalley.co.uk. Send me your poems!