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. I also serve as President of the Wallace Stevens Society.
My first book, Echo & Critique: Poetry and Political Clichés after World War II (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, drawing out 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 begun work on a second project that studies the central but little-discussed role of allusion in the development of queer poetry from the Oscar Wilde trial to the Stonewall riots.
My second book, Queer Allusion: Poetic Connections from Wilde to Ginsberg (forthcoming from Louisiana State University Press, 2025), uncovers the central but little-discussed role that allusion has played in the development of queer poetry on both sides of the Atlantic, from the trial of Oscar Wilde in 1895 to the Stonewall Riots of 1969. I demonstrate that allusion served three purposes for LGBTQ writers. First, allusion enabled queer poets to reflect on their experiences through literary antecedents, and thereby to shape their identities in writing. Second, allusion gave writers the opportunity to make connections on the page at a time when most LGBTQ communities existed underground and so were difficult to access. Finally, by establishing links across multiple works, poets sought to build an alternative queer canon running parallel to the canon of English-language verse formulated in academic scholarship.
My articles have appeared in such venues as MLQ, Essays in Criticism, MELUS, Genre, Philological Quarterly, JML: Journal of Modern Literature,Twentieth Century Literature, Modernism/modernity, Arizona Quarterly, 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.
If you'd like to contact me, I can be reached via email at gargaillof@apsu.edu.