David Herd

Building on his work with the Refugee Tales project (www.refugeetales.org), and taking the contemporary fact of detention as its starting point, David Herd’s talk considers the interlocking attempts of Charles Olson, Hannah Arendt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to arrive at new forms of political space.

David Herd’s collections of poetry include All Just (Carcanet 2012), Outwith (Bookthug 2012), Through (Carcanet, 2016), and Walk Song (Equipage, 2018) He has given readings and lectures in Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, Poland, the USA and the UK, and his poems, essays and reviews have been widely published in magazines, journals and newspapers. He is the author of John Ashbery and American Poetry, Enthusiast! Essays on Modern American Literature, and the editor of Contemporary Olson. His recent writings on the politics of human movement have appeared in Detention Unlocked, Los Angeles Review of Books, Parallax, PN Review and the TLS. He is a co-organiser of the project Refugee Tales and Professor of Modern Literature at the University of Kent.