Professor (Martha Meier Renk-Bascom Professor of Poetry)
608-263-3794
rlkeller@wisc.edu
PhD, University of Chicago, 1981
BA, Stanford University, 1973
American poetry since 1950, especially women's poetry and experimental poetries of recent decades; American long poems; visual poetics; poetry and environmental criticism.
Re-making It New: Contemporary American Poetry and the Modernist Tradition (Cambridge, 1987); Forms of Expansion: Recent Long Poems by Women (Chicago, 1997); edited with Cristanne Miller, Feminist Measures: Soundings in Poetry and Theory (Michigan, 1994); articles in such journals as American Literature, Contemporary Literature, Arizona Quarterly, and Journal of Modern Literature on poetry by Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Creeley, John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, Rosmarie Waldrop, Joan Retallack, Alice Fulton, C.D. Wright, Cole Swensen, Susan Wheeler, Myung Mi Kim and others.
I am currently completing a book on recent experimental poetry by American women, while planning a new project on experimental ecopoetics.
While I was trained as an Americanist and teach a range of American and twentieth-century courses on the undergraduate level, my research interests are generically focused: I study poetry almost exclusively. My early scholarship dealt with the relationship between modernist and contemporary or postmodernist poetry, but since the publication of my first book I have focused on poetry written since the 1970s, especially on women's writing and feminist poetries in the U.S. While linguistically innovative work is at the center of my current research, I am committed to reading broadly in the field of contemporary poetry and to cultivating in my students the varied reading skills necessary to appreciate varied poetics. Thus, my book on women’s long poems treated work by poets as different from one another as Susan Howe, Sharon Doubiago, Judy Grahn, and Rita Dove.
I regularly teach graduate surveys of poetry movements in the U.S. since the middle of the 20th century, as well as more specialized courses devoted to such topics as the long poem or experimental poetries and poetics.