Chris McCully was born in Bradford, Yorkshire in 1958. Educated at Malsis and Bootham, he took a first-class degree in English Language (Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 1982) and went on to complete a doctorate at the University of Manchester in 1988.
For many years Chris continued to work in the Department of English at Manchester, specialising in teaching and research on language-related topics, particularly poetic form, poetic history, English phonology, morphology, and metrical structure.
During the 1980's and 90's Chris authored, edited or co-authored collections of poems; essays; a fragment of angling autobiography (that ended up as fiction); a textbook on metrical theory; a dictionary of fly-fishing; conference proceedings....and continued producing academic papers, essays, reviews, and angling features. Some of this work appeared in two journals with which Chris has long been associated, PNReview and Trout and Salmon. Chris also engaged in at least one lecture tour across the USA, and gave poetry readings, papers and talks in the USA, Spain, Poland, Finland, Japan, Canada, France, Germany....and, once, somewhere near Peterborough.
In 2003 Chris gave up full-time academic work in order to develop a career as a writer. He's still not quite sure whether that was wise, but continues to produce the same range of work - indeed, a wider range, from alcoholism to Ezra Pound's lineation in the Cantos; from the structure and design of pike streamers to the phenomenon of garden gnomes; from level-ordered morphology to underwear. In 2004 Jessica Kingsley (London) published his memoir on alcoholism and recovery, Goodbye, Mr. Wonderful, and in 2005 Pearson Longman (London) brought out his co-authored textbook on The Earliest English - a work which was the subject of a positive (and very funny) review in the THES ('How Damgudthyng Conquered the World'). In 2006 - and much to Chris's surprise - CUP reissued in paperback his co-edited work English Historical Metrics. Meanwhile he has completed a new textbook for Cambridge University Press (The Sound Structure of English, scheduled to appear in 2009). In 2006 he also edited Passion for Pike, by the Dutch writer, artist and photographer Ad Swier (Westerlaan, 2006). In 2008 a selection of Chris's translations from Old English appeared from Carcanet Press under its imprint, Fyfield Books, and a further angling title, Sketches with Fishing Rods, with wonderful pencil illustrations by Ad, appeared from Westerlaan. In 2009 the Medlar Press bring out Chris's analysis of pike fishing, Pike Lures, and a new full-length collection of poems (Polder) will be published by Carcanet in 2009. A Selected Poems is scheduled for publication in 2011.
In 2003 Chris was granted the title of Honorary Senior Research Fellow, Faculty of Arts, University of Manchester, and (with Michael Schmidt and Stella Butler) he remains one of the directors of the Modern Literary Archives Project. He also teaches part-time in the Department of English at the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen and gives a range of training courses on different aspects of writing in the English language (please see 'Taalcentrum VU' on the Links page here).
Chris is married and lives in the north of the Netherlands, close to the Waddenzee. In his non-existent spare time Chris works with the Labrador, Tess, listens to Handel, tries to enjoy the garden ...and goes fishing.
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Horace in the Sabine Hills
In this loneliness
I've noticed an inclination to address fragments of poems
To the plants in the garden, which thrive on the lyric gift
In this loneliness
And a tendency to harrumph, to mock, or to repine
At the dismantling of the things, places and people
Who used to make life bearable, and even fair
In this loneliness
Hanging around in a dirty old habit,
Lusting after the ladies who bring me the news,
Finding everything harder to finish,
And forgetting - though forgetting is also a mercy
In this loneliness
I'll probably end up admiring exotic trees
Or banging on about Empire, while at the back of my head
There's a little refrain of interest to no one except the unfinished poem
Whose nature is both incremental and exhausting.
Well, one has done one's best
In this loneliness
Perhaps I should advertise. The problem there is
One finds oneself becoming over-ordered, and I should imagine that
Difficult to live with. And besides, I tried -
Only to find the structure deficient in those quantities
I managed with ease in the old days, and the hand
Always, and always unbidden, writing out the phrase
In this loneliness
(PNReview 2006)
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