Aaron Fogel

Aaron Fogel currently teaches courses on modern British and American poetry, modern and nineteenth century British fiction, and occasionally topics like Population and Literature, Poets’ Prose, or Theories of Laughter.  His work–only on retrospect–has been concerned with some of the plainest, most neutral formats we have and their possible implications.  These formats include Interrogation or forced dialogue, which we see all the time, for example in television dramas; “demographics” and Census, often used as a plain court of last resort in public and journalistic discussions of the real; and the Prose Page’s layout, typography and design.  Each given—question-and-answer, counting people, prose rectangles and blocs—should be approached not just sociologically or neutrally but as (roughly) a poetry.  A poetics of forced speech, of census, and of the prose page, then–each has a history.  He has been publishing a row of eccentric comic essays on various kinds of visionary word play in literature, defending a comic criticism, teaching less often taught poems and novels, and publishing poems in different modes in various anthologies and journals.