Dr Nicky Melville, Teaching Fellow in Creative Writing 

Tuesday 30 April 2024

Watch this recording and listen to Teaching Fellow Dr Nicky Melville is an experimental, or avant-garde, poet of many stripes: appropriation, visual and process poetry, and lyric-experiment. Generally speaking, experimental writing is looked down on by the poetry mainstream as not 'proper poetry'. However, Nicky's writing and research has helped him to  realise that so called avant-garde writing is often not as ‘avant’ as all that.

Contemporary ‘innovations’ can actually be found in old texts, from late-antiquity to late Middle Ages. In this lecture Nicky will explore experimental poetry and its links to the past and consider how this raises the question of what work is accepted into the canon and how it allows for an expansive and engaging way to teach students innovative writing.