Samizdat Blog

So there I was, leafing through some of my old notes on Carl Sandburg, Theodore Dreiser, and Nelson Algren, pulling together a plan for the ...

As the tide of frothing-at-the-mouth anti-health-care-reform whack-jobs begins to recede a bit, many of us in the not-entirely-irrational co...

Back in the 1990s, that magical time when the air was still scented with Derrida's eau de cologne and the prose of academic journals so...

Whenever Valerie comes in with the mail and tells me there's a new issue of the Notre Dame Review , I always ask "am I in this one?...

"Partisan of what? What of Volta?" Okay. I admit: the title of this post sounds like some kind of indie rock band, made up of a ...

Okay, okay, enough about me. Now: what do others think about me? People who've written about my poetry have had all sorts of different...

What now? Can't you see I'm trying to fix the knackebrod on my Volvo with an Ikea catalog while the Swedish Chef socializes some lu...

So, as part of my ongoing process of poking away at the project whose working title remains "The Big Boring Book of Aesthetics, or: How...

I've been surprised by the amount of feedback I've been getting back-channel about the Poetry/Not Poetry Post (I suppose back-channe...

Where do we draw the line between what is poetry and what isn't poetry? Or, more specifically, what makes a poem a poem? Ask a poet li...

Anglophiles present, for the American professor of English, an occupational hazard. One inevitably has colleagues who've spent so many ...

Ow! My leg! Last Monday a suddenly-opened car door had a disagreement with my bicycle about the nature of my forward trajectory. "Slow...