Samizdat Blog

It shouldn't surprise us that the latest round of internecine British cultural warfare has occurred on American soil. I mean, this coun...

Remember the ending lines of Allen Ginsberg's "A Supermarket in California" ? Ginsberg imagines turning to Walt Whitman, and ...

I find myself, dear reader, in the middle of a chickenshit monsoon related to next week's Lake Forest Literary Festival (clicking on th...

We're just past the middle of the spring semester in my leafy corner of academe, and you know what that means, don't you, class? Ye...

Rejoice! The latest Notre Dame Review is out, and there's almost too much to love. From the very cool cover photo by Catherine Gass (w...

So there I was, at the age of ten or eleven, sitting on the floor of my parents' weekend place in the Canadian wilderness. I had a perf...

Last summer Lake Forest College's composer-in-residence Rami Levin and I worked together on "Two Sonnets for Music," which wil...

Imagine if you will your humble blogger seated at his study table, surrounded by ghostly spirits. As they swirl in their disembodied way ab...

A bunch of Chicago-area poets will soon be braving weather conditions that would probably send a Floridian to an early grave in order to as...

Maybe it's because I've been hanging out with Ray Bianchi lately that I've been thinking a bit about the en masse movement of ...

Ray Bianchi's got an interesting post up about César Vallejo , the great Peruvian poet, revolutionary, and denizen of Parisian bohemia (...

Welcome, welcome, please find a pew and be seated! Reverend Archambeau's sermon today is his much-anticipated exordium concerning inter...