Florian Gargaillo

"I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Languages and Literature at Austin Peay State University, where I teach and write about twentieth-century poetry and LGBTQ studies. I also serve as Secretary of the Wallace Stevens Society. 

My first book, Echo & Critique: Poetry and the Clichés of Public Speech (Louisiana State University Press, 2023), analyzes how postwar poets responded to the political doublespeak of their era by taking specific phrases (like “transfer of population,” “service the target” or “revenue enhancement”), and then putting pressure on them, examining their implications, and complicating them within a poem. At the same time, Echo & Critique argues that poets used this technique to weigh their own susceptibility to the clichés of public discourse.

I have published articles in such venues as MLQ, Essays in Criticism, Philological Quarterly, Modernism / modernity, Journal of Modern Literature, Twentieth-Century Literature, The Yale Review, and The Journal of Commonwealth Literature. I have also reviewed contemporary poetry for Colorado Review Online, Chicago Review, PN Review, Harvard Review Online, and Rain Taxi."

• Modern and contemporary poetry (American, British, Irish).
• Queer literature and theory

BOOK

1. Echo & Critique: Poetry and the Clichés of Public Speech. Louisiana State University Press, 2023.

ARTICLES IN PRINT AND FORTHCOMING

1. “Dorothy Parker Among the Poets.” Literary Imagination 25.1 (2023): 53-67.
2. “Graffiti and the British Postwar Poem.” Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture 55.2 (2022): 141-159.
3. “Adrienne Rich’s Cartographies: Maps and Mapping in the Poetry and Prose.” Arizona Quarterly 78.2 (2022): 121-143.
4. “Queer Allusion: Wilde, Housman, Cullen.” Modern Language Quarterly 83.1 (2022): 57-80.
5. “Langston Hughes, the Blues, and the Distance between Poetry and Song.” Modernism/modernity 28.3 (2021): 497-509.
6. “‘Unknown and Unknowable’: Animal Selves in the Bird Poems of E.E. Cummings.” Philological Quarterly 100.2 (2021): 209-230.
7. “Louise Glück and Dialogue.” Paideuma: Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics 45 (2021): 223-240.
8. “The Divided Selves of Edna St. Vincent Millay.” Literary Imagination 23.1 (2021): 69-79.
9. “Wistful Lies and Civil Virtues: Randall Jarrell on World War II Propaganda.” Journal of Modern Literature 43.3 (2020): 45-63.
10. “Philip Larkin and Envy.” Essays in Criticism 70.2 (2020): 199-220.
11. “Knowing Limits: Adrienne Rich in Rhyme.” Twentieth-Century Literature 65.4 (2019): 393-410.
12. “Relations to Knowledge: The Trope of the Book in Stevens’s Poetry.” The Wallace Stevens Journal 42.2 (2018): 176-190.
13. “Seamus Heaney and the Clichés of Public Talk.” Philological Quarterly 97.1 (2018): 97-119.
14. “Kamau Brathwaite’s Rhythms of Migration.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 53.1 (2018): 155-168.
15. “‘Echoes of Cruelty and Nonsense’ in Stevie Smith.” Modern Language Quarterly 79.1 (2018): 81-104.
16. “John Clare and the Early Poems of Seamus Heaney.” Essays in Criticism 67.2 (2017): 175-194.
17. “Anthony Hecht’s Controlled Disorder.” The Yale Review 104.3 (2016): 62-69.
18. “What Tone Allows: Robert Lowell on François Villon.” Literary Imagination 16.2 (2014): 191-209.
19. “Tough Love: W.H. Auden and A.E. Housman.” The Cambridge Quarterly 43.2 (2014): 139-156.

BOOK CHAPTERS

1. “Poetry and Propaganda.” The Cambridge Companion to American Poetry and Politics since 1900, ed. Daniel C. Morris (Cambridge University Press, 2023), 36-51.

ESSAYS.

1. “‘Siren voices lost at dawn’: Nancy Cunard, T.S. Eliot, and the Place of the Artist.” Literary Matters 12.1 (Winter 2020).
2. “Sounding Lowell: Derek Walcott and Louise Glück.” Literary Matters 9.4 (October 2017).
3. “Mary McCarthy and Public Language.” Literary Matters 9.3 (June 2017).
4. “Delmore Schwartz, Again.” PN Review 230 (July-August 2016): 71-3.

REVIEWS.

1. On Jesus Comes to Me as Judy Garland, by David J.S. Pickering. Colorado Review of Books (December 15, 2021).
2. On Dunce, by Mary Ruefle. Colorado Review of Books (June 29, 2021).
3. On French translations of Wallace Stevens by Gilles Mourier. The Wallace Stevens Journal 44.2 (2020): 295-297.
4. On Sight Lines, by Arthur Sze. Colorado Review of Books (August 9, 2019).
5. On Peaches Goes It Alone, by Frederick Seidel. Colorado Review of Books (January 30, 2019).
6. On Wild Is the Wind, by Carl Phillips. PN Review 244 (2018): 75-76.
7. On Losers Dream On, by Mark Halliday. Colorado Review of Books (May 14, 2018).
8. On The If Borderlands: Collected Poems, by Elise Partridge. Dublin Review of Books 93 (2017).
9. On Morning, Paramin, by Derek Walcott and Peter Doig. Rain Taxi 22.2 (2017): 46.
10. On Magdalene, by Marie Howe. Harvard Review Online (April 11, 2017).
11. On All the Poems, by Stevie Smith, edited by Will May. Chicago Review 60.2 (2016): 163-169.
12. On Aeneid Book VI, translated by Seamus Heaney. Kenyon Review Online (November 2016).
13. On Dickens’s Style, edited by Daniel Tyler. Essays in Criticism 65.1 (2015): 109-115.