Academic Research: The Poets' Hyem


The Poets’ Hyem

I am currently completing a practice-led PhD in Creative Writing at Newcastle University. Funded by an AHRC Northern Bridge studentship (2015-18), my research project comprises a minority critical section and a majority creative component. A major new study into modern and contemporary North-East poetry and regionalism, The Poets’ Hyem will be submitted in early spring 2019.

The critical exegesis uses John Kinsella’s theory of International Regionalism as a prism through which to reassess four North-Eastern postwar poets: Basil Bunting, William Martin, James Kirkup and Anne Stevenson. Arguing that their portrayal of the area situates ‘provincial’ poetry in an international milieu, I trace a literary genealogy from mid-twentieth century North-East England to the present in order to lay the groundwork for my own collection: a chorographic exploration of ambivalent belonging which finds geographic, semantic and historic convergence in South Tyneside.

Challenging one-dimensional and regressive accounts of regional identity, my collection asks how, in an age of disruption, we can claim regional affiliation while retaining transnational discourse. The creative work, which will form the manuscript for my first full-length collection of poetry, is titled Errata Slip for a Northern Town.

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