Culture Industry

[ Last night our department's graduate program held a "faculty juvenilia" reading, in which faculty members were invited to re...

Down to Earth , John Wilkinson (Salt, 2008) I'm very keen on John Wilkinson's work, tho I'm sensible as well of the possible cri...

We've all seen it happen: the reviewer pronounces the new movie "an astonishing waste of time – banal beyond belief." Then the...

In February 1867, in a letter published in Time and Tide (something of a run-up to Fors Clavigera , a series of letters to Thomas Dixon, a ...

Just made my way, in the interstices of the various course books & things, thru Ruskin's Munera Pulveris: Six Essays on the Elements...

Covers , Tony Lopez (Salt Publishing, 2007) Covers , the dust jacket tells us, is a "deeply derivative" work – derivative, not in ...

Sigh. After a spate of weird comments – all computer-generated, all in ideograms, linked apparently to a malware site – first from someone n...

Interviewer : What is the role of the poet in our world? Geoffrey Hill : He has none. In London, when a taxi driver who loves to talk with...

reading Iain Sinclair's White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings , a kind of dark delirium of late Victorian London, counterpointed against the ...

Into the 2nd week of the semester. I've decided House of the Seven Gables is actually a very good book. Not really a patch on Moby-Dic...

[A recent snap of Geoffrey Hill, channelling the elderly Ruskin] Once in a while a blog post comes along that "convicts" me, as th...

When I did my own MFA back in the dark ages (late 80s), the workshop was a bare-boned affair: 8 or 9 students, a resident poet, and sometime...

Everything seems to hit the shelves or the internets right at the end of summer, as the imminent classes are breathing down my proverbial ne...

It's not that summer ever really ends down here – today it was well over 90 out, with the humidity hovering in the sauna range, & i...

Some of you might know that many years ago, before I found my true life-niche as a dilettante poetry-culture blogger, obscure-poet biographe...

Amid much anticipation, the new (and rather vast) issue of Big Bridge has made its way online. Among all of the other riches is a " Ga...

So we're back, as of Monday night. No, the suitcases aren't really unpacked yet, & we're bracing for the various cartons of ...

Scribe , Norman Finkelstein (Dos Madres, 2009) Finkelstein’s last full-length volume, Passing Over (Marsh Hawk, 2007), was something of a d...

Sign , David Mutschlecner (Ahsahta, 2007) I’ve never been inclined one way or another in regards to “religious” or spiritual poetry, tho I’v...

The Ms of My Kin , Janet Holmes (Shearsman, 2009) I’d begun to get intimations that Ronald Johnson’s technique in erasing swatches of Paradi...