Samizdat Blog

So there I was, furtively engaged in that most shameful of activities — doing an online search for my own name. Since my dad has the same n...

"Sometimes," I recall my high school art teacher saying as he looked through my sketchbook, "it's by fucking up that we g...

The annual Art & Craft Northwestern Summer Writers' Conference kicks off in a few weeks, and I'll be sullying a schedule that i...

The zeitgeist is nothing if not promiscuous, and apparently she's been two-timing me with Ron Silliman, whose post today has to do with...

Gather round, boys and girls, and I'll tell you a tale of a long-ago magical time known as the Clinton Administration. Back in those ch...

Back from Paris, where I was at a fabulous, compact conference on poetry and "the public/private divide" at the Sorbonne. There w...

Sé qué usted es pensamiento. Usted es preguntándose cuando "El Kafka Sutra" estará disponible en Español. Pregúntese no más, el am...

As I forge my way forward through the second-last of the big writing assignments I took on for the summer, I thought I'd post links to a...

You know who's a good poet? Stephen Fowler . That's who.

What? No! Wrong again, ruffianos! I haven't died (though last Sunday I had a run-in with a bad burrito, the less said of which the bett...

There's a short review of The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century in the Boston Review , in which you may read of my ...

Ring the bells and sound the trumpets! Fire up the timpani and sackbutts in celebration: the University of Chicago has finally made a full-...