Samizdat Blog

Poetry and stupidity are, it seems, secret kissing cousins. Who knew? Lawrence Raab, that's who. Check out his short, punchy essay ...

Mark Scroggins is, hands down, bar none, my favorite critic of contemporary poetry. His latest collection is out now from MadHat which,...

Some interesting reflections on my most recent book of poems, The Kafka Sutra, are up at the Queen Mob's Teahouse site.  Stu Watson ...

Here's the cover of my next book, Inventions of a Barbarous Age: Poetry from Conceptualism to Rhyme . I'll post something about...

The barbarians are here! They've breached the walls of the fortress! The city lies in ruins! Poetry is at their mercy! Well, it...

I like just about everything about Sweden, even the weather. I like their intellectuals, too, mostly for being both meti...

Like you, I love to have a small notebook in my pocket.  Me, I like Moleskines, preferably green (I am deeply superstitious about color)...

You're probably yearning for a 2400 word reading of John Ashbery's "The Skaters," aren't you? Well, you're ...

So I've been editing down the manuscript of my book-in-progress Making Nothing Happen: Poetry in Society, Poetry for Itself , and ha...

Rejoice! The latest issue of the Journal of Poetics Research , John Tranter's latest creation (you may remember him for running t...

W.H. Auden—what's not to love? And I don't just love Auden's writing, I love the enormous body of writing about him—memoirs,...

Sheena, the Ramones inform us, is a punk rocker.  She wasn't always, though—I once tried to combine the history and prehistory of th...