Samizdat Blog

So here's the first thing I learned this weekend: when you want opposition from a group, there's no response more unnerving than a k...

No doubt you're well aware of the mysterious process by which Franz Kafka wrote certain passages of the Kama Sutra . But did you know t...

The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century is so hand-searingly hot off the presses that you can't get it from Amazon.com yet...

Good Lord — I'm it! I've been tagged as a "thinking blogger" by Steve Burt . It was Ron Silliman who tagged the unsuspect...

This just in from Peter Riley, regarding my earlier post "British Poetry Wars: The Battle of Chicago." . Riley, whose open letter...

"Hey Archambeau — you made me bite my cereal spoon!" Those were the words with which I was greeted as I walked into my English Li...

What distinguishes most contemporary poetry from prose isn't meter or rhyme or even line breaks, but a self-conscious spareness and a sl...

Come one, come all, to the antiseptic white bauhaus moderne yet somehow charming space that is Series A 's venue at the Hyde Park Art Ce...

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...