Samizdat Blog

Rejoice! The new issue of Copper Nickel is out.  It includes an essay of mine called "Reggie Watts and Karl Pilkington Wrestle in H...

The laws of logic may well maintain that something cannot be simultaneously wrong and right—but the laws of poetry beg to differ.  The ...

Years ago, Ron Silliman wrote an essay called "Disappearance of the Word, Appearance of the World," where he claimed that popu...

The always-interesting journal Galatea Resurrects  has been kind enough to run a review of my recent book written with John Matthias an...

In the last years of his life, Pierre Bourdieu turned with increasing urgency to political questions.  Seeing in globalization an ever-g...

Poussin's paintings, Shakespeare's epitaph, Thom Gunn's existentialism, and many other things animate the elegantly written ...

I've always romanticized the Grand Old Literary Newsprint Journals—the  New York Review of Books,  the London Review of Books  and, ...

Rejoice! David Caplan has edited a collection of essays called On Rhyme , with contributions from a host of interesting people. Here...

How to write in the time of Trump and Putin? In words and images, John Matthias, Jean Dibble, and Robert Archambeau give you an...

Here’s a poem called “Shawl Dance.” It’s by Eric Elshtain, from his 2015 book This Thin Memory A-Ha. The sky of it causes harmony in ...

The good people at the Huffington Post have interviewed me about what’s going on in the poetry world. Here’s a snippet: I’ve always t...

Not long ago, as I was shuffling my way through the local used bookshop, I saw a pristine copy of the November 1968 issue of Evergreen ...