Author: Brian

In 1968, the year I was born, Ronald Reagan was considered too extreme to be the Republican nominee for the presidency. Richard Nixon was the nominee and served a term and a half before resigning under threat of impeachment. In 1980, Ronald Reagan won the presidency and subsequently became a god in conservative circles, even … Continue reading The More Things Change

Claire Berlinski over at Ricochet responded to Charles Murray's inane piece (but I repeat myself) in the Washington Post about elitism and the Tea Party, pointing out the obvious problems with his reasoning. But the fun thing she did is take Murray's claims and turn them into a handy little quiz to test your level … Continue reading How elite am I?

Let me begin by saying that I agree wholeheartedly with the sentiment Alexander McCall Smith puts forward in his Wall Street Journal piece today. Overwriting drives me nuts, and it's something I actively discourage in my composition, literature and creative writing classes. I even break out a study by Daniel M. Oppenheimer titled "Consequences of … Continue reading Hey now, don’t blame us!

I've wanted to write this post for days now, but I've been too swamped with other work to even think about it. I'm still not caught up, but I just finished a truckload and dammit, I'm going to blog before I start on the next one. The title of this post comes from Seth Abramson's … Continue reading “A dark horse among dark horses”

A couple of friends of mine pointed me to this post about a plan from Warner Brothers to bring back Pépé le Pew in 3-D, voiced by Mike Myers, in one of those CG-laden crapfests. The AV Club says this, in part: Pepé Le Pew, occasionally characterized by people who take these things too seriously … Continue reading Not a Good Idea

It's also not the solution, and I'm not sure there's a problem in the first place. It seems to me that in nearly every generation of writing, one group of people is convinced that no one has ever done it as well as they are doing it right now, while another group is convinced that … Continue reading The MFA is not the problem…

About 3 or 4 weeks ago, I saw someone on Twitter announce that an online journal was just starting up and hunting for submissions, so I thought I'd drop some work on them and see how it went. Well, the editor liked my poems enough that he accepted all of them, and what's more, he's … Continue reading More Shameless Self-Promotion

The Essential American Poets series selection this week is Carl Sandburg. I'd never heard his voice before, and it was nothing like I'd expected. I suppose I'd assumed he sounded mid-western, Chicagoan, perhaps deep and barrel-chested. Nope. I thought about not posting this, as I don't want the competition, but No Tell Motel's reading period … Continue reading Poetic Lives Online

I have two poems in the latest issue of storySouth, both from my upcoming book, A Witness in Exile, which is in the design stages right now. I'm very excited about that as well, and as soon as I have a photo of the cover, I'll post it. I might even use the photo to … Continue reading Shameless Self Promotion

The complaints about MFA programs and their proliferation are many and legion, and in some cases, I even agree with them, or at least with the possibility that such conditions could possibly exist. But I can promise you that what Clayton Eshleman is worried about isn't really an issue. The hundreds of undergraduate and graduate … Continue reading No One Writes Poetry For the Job Prospects