Keegan Cook Finberg
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keegancf.bsky.social
Keegan Cook Finberg
@keegancf.bsky.social
1.3K followers 490 following 210 posts
because my little dog knows me. writer. scholar. professor. recently finished a book about poetic form and the US welfare state: https://cup.columbia.edu/book/poetry-in-general/9780231219228/
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keegancf.bsky.social
I am full of gratitude for this conversation @redemmas.org on Saturday with @kristingrogan.bsky.social and Chris Nealon. It was such a wonderful way to launch Poetry in General. Thanks to all who came!!
Three people having fun discussing work and poetry.
November 17, 2025 at 5:12 PM
keegancf.bsky.social
Today is the official publication day for POETRY IN GENERAL: How a Literary From Became Public.

✨ Now available wherever books are sold ✨

Use CUP20 for a discount from the press

cup.columbia.edu/book/poetry-...
A toddler, adult, and child holding copies of POETRY IN GENERAL: How a Literary Form Became Public
November 4, 2025 at 1:56 PM
keegancf.bsky.social
My ASAP16 seminar is Friday (with thanks to @sarahmdowling1.bsky.social and Claire Grandy). Come on by!
A picture of a schedule with the following abstract: This seminar celebrates the publication of our special issue of the journal differences, "Lyric Beyond Containment," forthcoming in Fall 2025. In alignment with ASAP/16's Worldmaking/Worldbreaking theme, we gather to discuss how lyric tropes-the speaking "I," the address to an absent other, or the brief glimpse of finely-wrought feeling-prove fruitful in theorizing material, historical, political, and literary forms of subjectivity, personhood, relationality, and reciprocity. Whereas these tropes are often yoked to the decontextualized figure of the poetic speaker, we suggest that they are vital tools for moving beyond notions of the poem as a closed aesthetic object, held apart from its world. Moreover, we suggest that these tropes occur across a broad range of genres and media, which are themselves illuminated through engagement with lyric theory. The seminar features authors included in the special issue as well as scholars and practicing poets who share our interests in lyric theory.
October 22, 2025 at 4:04 PM
keegancf.bsky.social
My author copies have not arrived but folks are sending me pictures of my book arriving in their homes. I am so grateful for these readers!
The book “Poetry in General: How a Literary Form Became Public” by Keegan Cook Finberg next to a vase of matching orange, white, and yellow dahlias and daisies.
October 5, 2025 at 5:52 PM
keegancf.bsky.social
I’m posting one more shot of this beautiful index. From prepositions to purity
prepositions, enigmatic, 62-64, 191n91 preservationism, 88-92 privatization, 3-4, 6-7, 12-14; of American life, 43; of architectural spaces, 12-14, 70, 81-83, 195nn43-44; of education, 13; and gender, 14; of interpretation, 126-50; and poetry, 3, 18, 128 procedural poetry, 14, 95-125 procedural reading, 28, 33 prosopopoeia, 61 protest: and Mechanical Turk, 141; Occupy Movement, 2-3, 83; Standing Rock, 1; student, 2. See also Carving: A Traditional Sculpture (Antin); Davis, Wendy, Let Her Speak (Counterpath); Mechanical Turk public good: abortion and the, 13; neoliberalism vs. the, 34; poetry and the, 18 purity: and the body, 125; Critique of Pure Reason, 101, 107-8, 10; pure media, 15, 22, 27, 36, 38; and use value, 155, 167
July 11, 2025 at 2:00 PM
keegancf.bsky.social
I am reviewing my book proofs and my indexer is a genius. I realize I have taken this form for granted my whole life.
racial capitalism, 11-13, 15-16, 35, 37-38, 40, 43, 71, 129, 179n34, 181n11 racial liberalism, 79 Rankine, Claudia, 212n9; Citizen: An American Lyric, 159, 211n4, 214n29; Just Us: An American Conversation, 159 reading: and action/participation, 33, 52-55, 62, 65, 70; affective, 214n26; close, 199n20; ethical, 157; as "event," 5; and event scores, 39, 45, 69; as expansive process, 28; good, 26, 182n22; imperative, 41; modernist, 26, 28; and Ono's work, 22-23, 26-29; vs. performance, 16; procedural, 28, 33; and public/private, 26; and resistance, 15; surface, 157; and teleiopoesis, 142 Red Purge, 184n32 reflection: and the city, 81; of the eyes, 87; and sense of self, 107, 124 repair, 19, 149, 157. See also Zong! (Philip and Boateng) repetition: of architectural style, 87; and labor, 55; in Tender Buttons (Stein), 55 resistance: to assimilation, 31; to colonialism, 56; to commodification, 33; constraint/hunger as, 17; to efficiency, 34; to ordinality, 31, 52; reading and, 15; to self-promotion, 48, 188n37
July 9, 2025 at 3:57 PM
keegancf.bsky.social
Yoko Ono’s “Blood Piece”
BLOOD PIECE Use your blood to paint. Keep painting until you faint. (a) Keep painting until you die. (b) 1960 spring
June 30, 2025 at 2:48 PM
keegancf.bsky.social
I am excited to share that four scholars that I deeply admire have written beautiful endorsements for my forthcoming book, Poetry In General. cup.columbia.edu/book/poetry-...
With Poetry in General, Keegan Cook Finberg advances a notion of the public as a practical fiction enacted in and through social forms that exist not despite the atomized and bureaucratized forms of daily life, but through the extensive paper trails those forms generate. Poetry becomes a way of bearing witness to and living with changing social forms. With wit and verve, Finberg conceptually remaps postwar US poetry. Anthony Reed, author of Soundworks: Race, Sound, and Poetry in Production What a generous and generative study of contemporary American poetry. This is a serious work of materialist criticism in which "poetry in general" is imagined through and with our most important economic and discursive formations, from infrastructure to accumulation to the public sphere itself. Finberg demonstrates throughout an ability to locate in poetry a social archive of our present, and this book will be of interest to all scholars concerned with twenty-first century literary form and philosophical aesthetics. Leigh Claire La Berge, author ofWages Against Artwork: Socially Engaged Art and the Claims of Decommodified Labor Poetry rarely gets to be general, but Keegan Cook Finberg blasts past misconceptions of marginality, framing it as a vibrant, interdisciplinary, public practice. What a relief to see this truth so clearly stated: poetry -when at its weirdest! — is uniquely positioned to contest the state's facilitation of capital. Sarah Dowling, author of Here Is a Figure: Grounding Literary Form Keegan Cook Finberg takes poems seriously enough to see their claims on expanding the very genre of Poetry itself. Recognizing ambitions beyond individual expression, Poetry in General reads poems not as private refuges from social politics but as urgent interlocutors in a world of increasing privatization and politically managed bodies. Craig Dworkin, author of Dictionary Poetics: Toward a Radical Lexicography
June 20, 2025 at 3:22 PM
keegancf.bsky.social
From Joshua Clover's "'A Form Adequate to History': Toward a Renewed Marxist Poetics" (2010).
"Poetry is forms of language adequate to history; poetics is the study of this material." Picture of the opening of Joshua Clover's "'A Form Adequate to History': Toward a Renewed Marxist Poetics" (2010)
April 28, 2025 at 12:23 PM
keegancf.bsky.social
My book has a cover! I am excited to share it with you.
Black book cover with orange circle on the side. Text in white and yellow reads: Poetry in General: How a Literary Form Became Public; Keegan Cook Finberg
April 25, 2025 at 2:06 PM
keegancf.bsky.social
I’m teaching a gen ed class called “poetry and politics of Baltimore” and students are loving the work of my brilliant colleagues alongside mostly post-60s Baltimore literature.
A picture of a book called Baltimore Revisited: Stories of Inequality and Resistance in a US City.
February 22, 2025 at 7:16 PM
keegancf.bsky.social
Let's see you at 21.

I was teaching English as assistant d'anglais in La Seyne-sur-Mer, France. I hated this picture of myself at the time. I was very lonely that year.

"Was anyone ever so young? I am here to tell you that someone was." (Joan Didion in "Slouching Toward Bethlehem")
21 year old Keegan in front of le pont levant de La Seyne-sur-Mer, a part of an old bridge left in the harbor, wispy clouds in the sky and sun sparkling on the water.
December 17, 2024 at 3:33 PM
keegancf.bsky.social
This is my 5-year-old’s portrait of himself walking to the library while I am at a conference and he is 8-years-old.
Child’s drawing of sad person on grass with one flower, blue sky, and a building with books nearby.
November 15, 2024 at 6:51 PM
keegancf.bsky.social
Hello!! I’m looking forward to seeing some of you at #2024ASA in Baltimore this week! On Saturday @maryrizzo.bsky.social Rejjia Camphor and Patrick Oray and I will chat about a public archive of Black Arts poetry from Baltimore’s Chicory Magazine.
November 13, 2024 at 3:25 PM
keegancf.bsky.social
Picture of John Ashbery’s poem “Terminal”
October 27, 2024 at 7:56 PM
keegancf.bsky.social
Are you going to ACLA? We would love to see you here on Friday and Saturday afternoon.
March 14, 2024 at 11:22 AM