Jonathan Mayhew

For my first post on Arcade I thought I would introduce myself and my recent and current projects.  I graduated with a PhD in Comparative Literature from Stanford in 1988 and am Professor of Spanish at the University of Kansas in Lawrence.  I blog at Bemsha Swing, mostly about jazz and contemporary Spanish poetry.  My plan for Arcade is to continue to blog, though possibly in a more formal style, as I already do at my main blog, with frequent cross-postings.     

My recent books are Apocryphal Lorca and The Twilight of the Avant-Garde.  For this coming academic year, my main projects will be to teach a graduate seminar on Poetry and Performance, with my colleague Jill Kuhnheim, and to develop the course "Writing Jazz," an undergraduate course I will give for the honors program in the spring, while I attempt to figure out what my next book length project will be.  

I am writing several essays on "late modernism" in contemporary Spanish poetry which may develop into a book. What I've found is that the strongest poetry from contemporary Spain comes out of a self-consciously high modernist tradition rather than from a weaker postmodern one.   I plan to use arcade to develop ideas about this project as well as to continue to think about poetry, poetry and performance, and jazz music.