Samizdat Blog

Among all kinds of writing there is none in which authors are more apt to miscarry than in humor, as there is none in which they are more am...

Very sad to hear that Liam Rector has died, apparently by his own hand. Looking at this 2001 poem of his from The Cortland Review , I suppo...

James Matthew Wilson is critical of my work in deeply intelligent ways in his article "Our Steps amid a Ruined Colonnade: Contemporary ...

What is it Blake says in the introduction to the Songs of Experience ? Hear the voice of the Bard! Who present, past, and future sees; Whose...

Hot damn! The fourth of July! Life, liberty, and the pursuit of high cholesterol snack foods! But before I run outside to awaken my neigh...

Way back in 2000, Eliot Weinberger wrote a short, sharp, ever-so-slightly snarky piece called Canonizing the Sixties about the University o...

So let's say you're on sabbatical, and you've been drinking coffee by the quart and reading stacks and stacks of French cultural...

You know who's a good poet? Joel Felix . That's who.

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...