Samizdat Blog

I'm very happy to announce the call for papers for Poetry City: The Founding of a New American Poetry at Buffalo, 1963-2003.   It w...

Where, you ask, is the place to be on the evening of Tuesday, September 15th? From 7:00-8:00 pm in Chicago it'll be the Poetr...

You know what would really bother Gore Vidal, were he living today? A lot of things—the persistence of homophobia, say, or the banali...

Hardly anyone thinks of Sun Ra as a poet.   A visionary outsider figure even in the realm of music, where his work is only occasional...

The good people at "Where do you write, my lovely?" (who appear to have an expansive definition of loveliness) asked me to wr...

Great news! The new issues of two of my favorite literary journals, The Laurel Review  and The Notre Dame Review , have dropped from the...

Behold! The cover of my next book, The Kafka Sutra , due out this fall from MadHat Press.  The title sequence is one of the odder things ...

Even though the concept of a literary canon has been in tatters for decades, the fact of a literary canon still, for better or for wo...

What I like about you, David Yezzi, is that you wrote the poem "Crane," which I read when I was working my way through the sma...

What I like about you, Kathryn Starbuck, is that you wrote "Sylvia En Route to Kythera," which I read in the June 2015 issue o...

"Hot damn!" I thought, when I finally cleared some time to pick up my June issue of Poetry , "It's Tim Yu!"  Tim...