In which I am pleased to make your acquaintance

You have perhaps noticed that my username is Doctorice -- Dr. Ice -- but that I am currently without a doctorate of any kind. Let me explain: Dr. Ice is a nickname given to me by the poet Charles Wright, one of my professors at the University of Virginia. My friends were amused by the nickname, and it stuck. I will one day, I hope, complete my dissertation, and thus grow into the name.

Until then, I will be who I have always been. I'm originally from Little Rock, Arkansas, and currently live in Chicago, Illinois. I'm a doctoral student in English language and literature at the University of Chicago. I study contemporary American poetry, modern and contemporary British fiction, poetics, aesthetics, and religion in literature. Before coming to Chicago, I lived in Charlottesville, Virginia, where I studied creative writing at U.Va. And before that, I was in Houston, Texas, as an undergraduate at Rice University. It sounds as if my entire life is defined by educational institutions, and this isn't entirely inaccurate.

Writing

I'm currently (and perenially) finishing a book of poems, entitled Tributary. I've published a few of the poems from the book in small journals, and am always on the lookout for new publishing opportunities. I'm also shopping the book around, and, of course, trying to make it better. I'm also working on a longer poem, a novella in verse whose working title is "Fey."

Studies

My focus at the moment is in contemporary American poetry. I'm currently preparing to take our version of comprehensive examinations, a two-and-a-half hour oral exam which covers three reading lists.

Contemporary American poetry

A. R. Ammons, John Ashbery, Frank Bidart, Anne Carson, Mark Doty, Louise Glück, Lyn Hejinian, John Koethe, Larry Levis, James Merrill, Thylias Moss, Robert Pinsky, Carl Phillips, Frederick Seidel, Mark Strand, Charles Wright, and other poets.

Twentieth-century British and Commonwealth novels

Major novels, including work by Joseph Conrad, E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Graham Greene, Iris Murdoch, Doris Lessing, Kazuo Ishiguro, Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, and others.

Poetics

Historical poetic statements, manifestoes, and defences, including work from Plato, Sir Philip Sidney, William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and T. S. Eliot. Also philsophical work from Immanuel Kant, Martin Heidegger, and Giorgio Agamben.

Dissertation

I'm not quite there yet, but I hope to be looking at contemporary American long poems and examining their constructions of history and temporality.