Joseph Thomas, PhD

Reared on comic books, salacious playground rhymes, and stolen lascivious pulps, Associate Professor Joseph Thomas is a fan of all things carnivalesque, reveling in, as Bakhtin put it, the “peculiar logic of the ‘inside out’ (à l’envers), of the ‘turnabout,’ of the continual shifting from top to bottom, from front to rear, of numerous parodies and travesties, humiliations, profanations, comic crownings and uncrownings,” even as he is, again in the words of Bakhtin, “hostile to all that [is] immortalized and completed.” Having written the first book-length study on U.S. children's poetry, Poetry's Playground: The Culture of Contemporary American Children's Poetry (Wayne State UP), Joseph is now working on a book concerning Shel Silverstein's life and work, tentatively titled, “The Devil's Favorite Pet”: Shel Silverstein, an American Iconoclast. His book of Oulipo-inspired poetry, Strong Measures, has recently been published by Make Now Press. Intrigued by all things queer and uncanny, his interests range from contemporary theory, to the avant-garde, to children's literature (broadly defined), to childhood studies, to image-text studies, to pedagogical theory, to 20th century and contemporary poetry, to Situationist theory, to Dada, to“creative” writing, to “uncreative” writing, to plagiarism, to LANGUAGE poetry, to nonsense poetry, to film, to jazz (particularly that of the avant-garde variety). He's especially fascinated by how these varied areas relate to and inform one another. Although he abhors consistency, we can count on him disavowing all of his completed work, while passionately defending works-in-progress. A chameleon of rapid and self-interested change, Joseph is against the high cost of living, against the future, and for the absurd. Dada is a virgin microbe.