Logan Esdale


›››  Two chapters from my book manuscript – “Interpersonal Space: Epistolarity and American Writing, 1852-1937” – have been published: “Dickinson’s Epistolary ‘Naturalness’” and “Stein, Riding and The Space of Letters.” Both are available at Project Muse, the former in The Emily Dickinson Journal (14.1) and the latter in the Journal of Modern Literature (29.4). Out of the early 20th-century commentary on letter writing, I generate in “Interpersonal Space” a theoretical perspective on the period’s aesthetics, examining the role of privacy in the creative process, the interplay of sociality and authorship, and the poetics of difference. Working in archives – the American literature collection at the Beinecke Library and the Marianne Moore collection at the Rosenbach Museum in particular – is both a cause and an effect of my interest in the line between what is written to be published and what is not.

›››  Some other writing . . . a National Poetry Foundation collection on Ronald Johnson includes an essay of mine. Then there are some shorter pieces, on Gertrude Stein, Laura Riding, Charles Bernstein, Susan Howe, Jen Bervin, Women Poets, Australian poets, Juliana Spahr’s Everybody’s Autonomy, Thomas Gardner’s A Door Ajar, Graham Foust’s As In Every Deafness and Closure. I have also published a couple of poetry chapbooks, one out from Phylum Press and the other available here. Both were written in collaboration with the artwork of Lara Odell; for an exhibition of her work I wrote the catalogue introduction. (The drawing here is hers.) As well, I co-edit an advice column with Lara, make t-shirts, and appreciate (?) censorship.

Department of English
Chapman University (Orange CA)

PhD, SUNY Buffalo (2003)
MA, U of Western Ontario
BA, U of British Columbia