Joshua Clover

Joshua Clover (b. 1962, Berkeley, California) is a California-based poet, critic, journalist and author. He has appeared in three editions of "Best American Poetry", is a two-time winner of the Pushcart Prize, and recipient of an individual grant from the NEA; his first book of poetry, "Madonna anno domini", received the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets.Fact|date=February 2007 John Ashbery wrote of "Madonna anno domini," "Private passions charged with awareness of the upheavals and conflagrations of our time find utterance in Joshua Clover's brilliant first collection of poems. His voice is truthful, tender, caustic, and elegiac all at once; the results are breathtaking." Judith Butler called his second book of poems, "The Totality for Kids," a "stunning collection" in which "the fragmented world of a late and lost modernity has its own moving and lucid affect, its forms of aliveness. We encounter here an enormous clarity of language in the service of a poetics that brilliantly queries our historical moment in and as form."

A graduate of Boston University and the Iowa Writer's Workshop, Clover is an Associate Professor of English Literature and Critical Theory at the University of California, Davis, and was the distinguished Holloway poet-in-residence at the University of California, Berkeley in 1999-2000. [http://holloway.english.berkeley.edu/history/page19/page19.html] He is a frequent contributor to the "Village Voice," writes for "The New York Times," and is a former senior writer for "Spin". His film criticism includes a book on "The Matrix" for the British Film Institute, and the Criterion Collection essays for "Band of Outsiders" and "Straw Dogs." His birth name was Joshua Miller Kaplan; via legal change, he took his mother's maiden name [See Clover's statement in Brooke Kroeger, "Passing" (2004), p. 207] His mother, Carol J. Clover, Ph.D., is the originator of the final girl theory and a professor emerita at the University of California at Berkeley.

Under the pseudonym "Jane Dark", Clover has written a number of film and music reviews for The Village Voice [cite news
first = Dale
last = Singer
title = Six Stories Explore People Who Can't - or Won't - Be Themselves
url = http://brookekroeger.com/passing/stlouis.html
publisher = St. Louis Post Dispach
page = C15
date = October 12, 2003
accessdate = 2007-02-01] , and maintains a blog entitled "jane dark's sugarhigh!" [cite web
url =http://www.calarts.edu/blackclock/contributors.html
title= Black Clock contributors list
accessdate=2007-02-05
format=
work= Black Clock, published by CalArts]

Works

* "Madonna anno domini" (Louisiana State University Press, 1997) 68 pp.
* "The Matrix" (British Film Institute, 2005), 128 pp.
* "The Totality for Kids" (University of California Press, 2006), 76 pp.

Articles

*Clover on "The New Yorker," in the Village Voice, 2001 [http://www.villagevoice.com/books/0115,clover,23757,10.html]
*Clover on Michel Houellebecq, in the Village Voice, 2003 [http://www.villagevoice.com/books/0329,clover,45507,10.html]
*Clover on Semiotext(e), in Village Voice, 2002 [http://www.villagevoice.com/books/0206,clover,32055,10.html]
*Clover on Courtney Love in the Village Voice, 2004 [http://www.villagevoice.com/music/0408,clover,51258,22.html]
*Clover on Slavoj Zizek, in the Village Voice, 2005 [http://www.villagevoice.com/film/0546,clover,70012,20.html]
*Clover on Guy Debord and John Ashbery in the Village Voice, 2005 [http://www.villagevoice.com/books/0514,clover,62725,10.html]
*Clover on Gus Van Sant in the Village Voice, 2005 [http://www.villagevoice.com/film/0528,fclover,65777,20.html]
*Clover on Charles Reznikoff, in The New York Times Book Review, 2006 [http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/22/books/review/22clover.html?ex=1162443600&en=67bcecea6ab1977d&ei=5070]
*Clover on Charles Baudelaire in The New York Times, December 2006 [http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/31/books/review/Clover2.t.html?ex=1169614800&en=ffb49c2df3532a36&ei=5070]
*Clover on "France:Still Revolting" [http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0546,clover,69886,2.html]
*Clover on Velvet Goldmine, "Spin" magazine [http://www.toddhaynes.net/text/reviews/haynspin.shtml]
*Clover on Poetry Magazine [http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0248,clover,40199,1.html]

References

Reviews of Clover's Poetry

*"The Totality for Kids," Village Voice, 2006. [http://www.villagevoice.com/books/0619,gilbert,73122,10.html]
*"Zoned", The Boston Review, September/October, 2006. [http://bostonreview.net/BR31.5/palattella.html]
*"The Totality for Kids,"CutBank, January 21, 2007 [http://cutbankpoetry.blogspot.com/2007/01/totality-for-kids-by-joshua-clover.html]

Essays

*"Good Pop, Bad Pop: Massiveness, Materiality, and the Top 40", anthologized in "This is Pop", Harvard University Press, 2004. ISBN 0-674-01321-2 [http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/WEIPOP.html?show=contents]
*"The Rose of the Name", "Fence" magazine, 1998 [http://www.fencemag.com/v1n1/work/joshua_clover.html]

External links

* [http://www.janedark.com/ jane dark's sugarhigh!]
* [http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/240 American Academy of Poets profile]

*video of Clover reading at Bowery Poetry Club in New York, 2006. [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgfMT58xkTg]

*Joshua Clover at UC Davis wiki [http://www.daviswiki.org/Joshua_Clover]

Trivia

*Clover wrote a regular reviews column for "Spin" magazine between 1999-2001 called "Show Us Your Hits."

*Clover's article on Poetry Magazine was noted by Greil Marcus in his Salon column "Real Life Rock Top Ten" [http://archive.salon.com/ent/col/marc/2003/01/02/83/print.html]