Samizdat Blog

What's your poetry worth? And who's to say? Ernest Hilbert is a good guy to ask when it comes to these questions. Not only is ...

Remember that guy in the big London scene in Wordsworth’s Prelude —the battered old veteran begging on the streets, holding a sign th...

Those photos from Ankara, with the Russian ambassador lying dead on the floor? They're haunting, and not just because they depict an...

Whatever the reason—his insightful writing on Polish literature for the TLS , his poems, or the kind of courtesy he showed when we both ...

Rejoice! This troubled world has been blessed with two new lights in the darkness—the latest issues of The Battersea Review  and Plum...

The good people at Spuyten Duyvil are putting together a collection of poems to coincide with the inauguration of the man chosen by a minori...

In one of Aesop's fables, "The Frogs Who Desired a King," the frogs of the local pond grew disillusioned with the king Zeu...

If you're like me, you're probably thinking that this is not a good year to sit down to Thanksgiving dinner with extended family...

Utter silence on the train platform among the normally talkative commuters. An old woman in a coffee shop crying quietly, alone. A m...

Back in the 1990s, when I edited the poetry broadsheet Samizdat , my favorite part of the job involved receiving dispatches about poetr...

Inventions of a Barbarous Age: Poetry from Conceptualism to Rhyme —my latest book of essays—has just rolled hot off the presses at Ma...