Samizdat Blog

It's been a couple of weeks since I heard the sad news that my former colleague, the poet Ted Schaefer,  had left us.  He was a good...

In A Room of One's Own  Virginia Woolf famously said that a writer who hoped to succeed needed  £500 a year and private room in whic...

Lake Forest College, where I’ve been teaching for something like sixteen years, minus sabbaticals and a visiting year in Sweden, pri...

The first thing to notice about James Bond is that he’s a god.   I’m not talking about the James Bond of Ian Fleming’s nov...

Experimental vs. formalist; formalist vs. free verse; post-avant vs. quietude; lyric vs. language-based — you know the old binaries that...

I find myself compelled, from time to time, to gorge myself on the work of a particular writer, for reasons that often remain opaque to ...

I don't suppose I'm alone among people who take an interest in poetry and poetics in being better read among Italian Renaissance...

Rereading the New Criticism , a book edited my Miranda Hickman and John McIntyre that includes a chapter I wrote on the ethical dimensi...

We've got good news, people, and we've got bad news.  Let's start with the bad: Hurricane Sandy has left NewYork in a bit of...

The medieval streets of Cambridge are haunted by the ghosts of all the great minds who’ve called the town home over the ce...