Areas of Research/Interest: Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century American Literature; Contemporary Poetry; Art History; Theory, Urbanism

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Poet/critic Lytle Shaw works primarily on American literature with emphasis on poetics, art and theory.  His books include Cable Factory 20, The Lobe, Frank O’Hara: The Poetics of Coterie and two forthcoming studies: Fieldworks: From Place to Site in Postwar Poetics and Specimen Box (on new modes of institution critique in art and poetry). A contributing editor for Cabinet, he has recently published catalog essays on Robert Smithson and Zoe Leonard for DIA Center; on Gerard Byrne for Koenig Books, and on The Royal Art Lodge for the Drawing Center.  His collaborative work with the artist Jimbo Blachly has been exhibited widely and is collected in The Chadwick Family Papers: A Brief Public Glimpse. Shaw is currently working on two books: one about the politics of time in depicted landscapes and another about the status of poetry in recent theoretical debates. His courses include New York Poetry and the New Left, Theorizing the Archive, Very Contemporary Poetry, The Source of the Hudson: Landscape, Theory, History and Specters of Enlightenment in Postwar Poetics and Theory.

Select Publications:

Fieldworks: From Place to Site in Postwar Poetics. Forthcoming: University of Alabama Press.

Specimen Box. Forthcoming: Periscope Books.

19 Lines: A Drawing Center Writing Anthology, ed./Introduced. The Drawing Center/Roof Books. 2007.

Frank O’Hara: The Poetics of Coterie. University of Iowa Press. 2006.

“Whitman’s Urbanism” in The Cambridge Companion to New York Writing, eds. Bryan Waterman and Cyrus Patell (forthcoming, 2010)

“Gesture in 1960: Toward Literal Situations,” in New York Cool, ed. Pepe Karmel. Grey Art Gallery. 2008.

“The Utopian Past,” in The Present Tense Through the Ages: on the Recent Work of Gerard Byrne. Koenig Books. 2007.

“Faulting Description: Clark Coolidge, Bernadette Mayer and the Site of Scientific Authority,” in Don’t Ever Get Famous: Essays on New York Writing Beyond “The New York School,” ed. Daniel Kane. Dalkey Archive. 2006.

“Smithson, Writer,” in Robert Smithson: Spiral Jetty, eds. Lynne Cooke and Karen Kelly. DIA Center for the Arts/University of California Press. 2005.

“The Moral Storm: Henry Darger’s Weather Notebooks,” Cabinet, 3. 2001.

Affiliations: Contributing Editor, Cabinet; Founder/Co-editor, Shark; Founder/Curator, Line Reading Series at The Drawing Center; MLA: Modern Language Association.

Fellowships/Honors: Holloway Poet, University of California, Berkeley, Spring 2008; Getty Post-Doctoral Grant in Art History, 2003-2004; Millay Colony, 2001; MacDowell Colony, 2001; Vice Chancellor for Research Grant (UC Berkeley), 1998; Dean's Dissertation Fellowship (UC Berkeley), 1997-1998; Mellon Dissertation Fellowship (UC Berkeley), 1996-1997; Class of 1916 Honors Thesis Prize (Cornell), 1991.