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The Indiana Daily Student

IU Professor researches the effects of poetry

Campus Filler


Assistant professor of English Nikki Skillman struggled to determine what area of English she was most passionate about in her undergraduate studies. After changing her focus from classical studies to contemporary poetry she found her passion.

Skillman was one of five recipients of IU’s Outstanding Junior Faculty award for 2016-17 for her research in poetry. Skillman’s research is concentrated on contemporary and modern poetry, specifically post-World War II American poetry.

“I found it was the very granular work with language that really focused my attention and I found exciting,” Skillman said.

Although Skillman said she’s always loved poetry, it wasn’t until late into her undergraduate career that she realized contemporary poetry was her passion, she said. In Skillman’s senior year of high school, her English teacher recommended she write her final paper on Adrienne Rich, a contemporary feminist poet.

Skillman said she preferred reading Latin poetry to American poetry, and Horace, Catullus, Ovid and Virgil to contemporary poets, such as Rich.

“I was a big geek,” she said.

Skillman declined because, at the time, she said she didn’t like contemporary poetry. Today, however, Rich is an influence in Skillman’s research on contemporary poetry.

Skillman’s first book, “The Lyric in the Age of the Brain,” explores old philosophical questions poets have been attempting to answer for years.

“What is a person?” Skillman asked. “What is the difference between self and other? Where do I end and where does the rest of the world begin? Where do you locate the self? What is the difference between a mind and a self and a soul? Is the word soul – in our secular age – still a useful term for people?”

With the advancement in brain science, Skillman said these questions seem to be answerable. By using neuroimaging, or brain imaging, some of the answers to these philosophical questions can be determined, she said.

“These are deep questions about what it means to be human,” Skillman said. “Traditionally, it’s been the job of poets to answer because poetry is supposed to be a self-expressive genre — just a single self speaking.”

Because some of these questions can be answered through science, Skillman said scientists feel they have a duty to ask them. This provides poets and philosophers with material resources, which help them better understand these age-old questions, she said.

Skillman is currently working on a project about the aesthetics of injustice, which will explore what it means to experience or witness historical injustice through language.

Skillman said romantic poets looked for a sign of divinity in nature, but contemporary poets have replaced nature with language and divinity with history, which is how the project came about.

“Where nature was, language is.” She said. “Where divinity was really big, forces of history are.”

There are certain words, when read or heard, which can cause people to have an epiphany, Skillman said. She said these moments can allow them to access periods of historical injustice, but in modern times.

For example, overhearing a microaggression used toward black people can allow them to recognize the historic injustice of black people and the legacy of this injustice, she said.

Skillman said these epiphanies can occur anywhere language exists.They can trigger an individual as they carry out their daily activities, such as shopping at a supermarket.

“I think this is something that’s very common in contemporary poetry — for there to be these points in language that open out into an almost sublime sense of the forces that determine our lives, without us knowing,” Skillman said. “They’re always working on us — in the way that divinity might.”

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