Samizdat Blog

Secret revealed:  I was almost an unemployed art historian.  I was also almost an unemployed philosopher, and an unemployed historian. Tha...

Keith Tuma, debonair man of letters Sometimes, when you're reading a couple of seemingly unrelated books simultaneously, there...

Why should anyone care about the theater of the absurd?  I found myself arguing about this with a colleague a while back.  We’ been thin...

Are we autonomous individuals, or inextricably bound to our communities?  Is art created in freedom, for its own sake, or does it come i...

Brooklyn The prettiest girl I ever saw was sipping Hoffman's through a straw, give or take a word.  Right from the can. A tree ...

Not long ago the poet Alfred Corn noted that “Year’s Best lists are strewn all over the print and electronic media. One publication I saw ...

Rita Dove's Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American Poetry continues to generate controversy. Here are a couple of articles that ...

One of the most notable things about contemporary poetry is that there's so much of it.   If one were tempted to keep up with...