Samizdat Blog

I've been tapping away on the laptop at a ferocious pace lately, drafting the John Ashbery chapter of Making Nothing Happen: Poetry ...

A few years ago, I was at my local Democratic Party ward captain's house, listening to a congressional hopeful give a speech to rall...

When I first started teaching at Brooklyn College, I had to teach a genre course for students who presumably had never read a poem bef...

The good people at Jacket2 have been publishing a series of short essays in which a poets and critics respond to a poems they're se...

When people ask me what I’m doing—especially if they ask in the summer, or when I’m on sabbatical, they run the risk of me telling t...

W.H. Auden once wrote out a description of Eden as he would wish it to be.  I've long wanted to go through his various categories...