Samizdat Blog

What’s the matter with American poetry?  Apparently, the problem is Allen Ginsberg.  And Sylvia Plath.  And Susan Howe, and Alice Not...

“What,” ask the pundits, “do the Occupy Wall Street people want?” When they deign to answer their own question, they tend, if they are...

Here’s the full text of  “So a Poet Walks into a Bar: The Poetry Reading as Rhetorical Situation,” my contribution to this year’s ALSCW co...

Here's the beginning of a longish review I wrote of Robert Morrison's  The English Opium-Eater: A Biography of Thomas   De Quince...

So two American poets laureate, a Polish poet, and a Harvard professor walk into an emergency room. It sounds like the set-up for some ...

Near the beginning of his strange, brilliant book Crowds and Power , the Bulgarian writer Elias Canetti claims that our most primal fear...