Joshua Clover

Joshua Clover
US Poet Joshua Clover, as he appears on the jacket of Madonna anno domini: Poems.
Born	Joshua Miller Kaplan (1962-12-30) December 30, 1962 Berkeley, California
Language	English
Nationality	American
Alma mater	Boston University; Iowa Writers' Workshop
Genre	Essays; Poetry
Notable works	Madonna anno domini

Joshua Clover (born December 30, 1962 in Berkeley, California) is a poet, critic, journalist and author. He has appeared in three editions of Best American Poetry and 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 in 1996. The judge, Jorie Graham, called Clover "a physicist of syllables, a mesmerizing singer of near-apocalyptic lullabies, a rememberer, a forgetter, a reinventer, a destroyer—a philosopher of disappearances, an architect of mutabilities—this poet actually sees the new world we are emerging into—from the fission of subatomic matter to its cataclysmic effects on the deserts of both our planet and our inner lives." Clover was a student of Graham's at the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

Life

A graduate of Boston University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop MFA program, Clover is a 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 2002-2003.

He writes a column of film criticism for Film Quarterly, under the title "Marx and Coca-Cola," is a former senior writer and editor at the Village Voice, writes for The New York Times, The Nation, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, 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. Under the pseudonym "Jane Dark," Clover has written a number of film and music reviews for The Village Voice.

Clover is also a political activist. In January 2012, he and eleven students at the University of California, Davis, engaged in a sit-in to protest the financial arrangements between U.S. Bank and the university, which paid Clover a base salary of $81,087 for 2012. The protesters, who became known as the "Davis Dozen," were charged with "obstructing movement in a public place and conspiracy to commit a misdemeanor." One month before the trial was scheduled to begin, the Davis Dozen accepted a plea deal from the Yolo County District Attorney. Under the terms of that agreement, the protesters received an infraction notice ticket and agreed to perform 80 hours of community service.

Clover's given name at birth was Joshua Miller Kaplan but via legal change he took his mother's maiden name. In a June 8, 2001 email to author Brooke Kroeger, Clover explained the decision:

My father is indeed Jewish. My mother is Protestant, though both are pretty agnostic in their observances, and I was indeed originally named Kaplan. Did we cover this? Relevant to the topic at hand. There have been one or two suggestions that in changing my name, I was denying my Jewish heritage. I don’t really believe this. It just occurred to me that I like my mom so much more than my dad that I would rather be identified thereto. And I also have always admired her early commitment to feminism, which led her to be among the earliest wave of divorcees recouping their maiden names.

His mother, Carol J. Clover, is the originator of the final girl theory in a book on horror films and a professor emerita at the University of California at Berkeley.

Works

• Madonna anno domini: Poems. Louisiana State University Press. 1 January 1997. ISBN 978-0-8071-2147-4. Retrieved 30 August 2013.
• The Matrix (British Film Institute, 2005), 128 pp.
• The Totality for Kids. University of California Press. 2006. ISBN 978-0-520-24599-0. Retrieved 30 August 2013.
• 1989: Bob Dylan Didn’t Have This to Sing About. University of California Press. 7 October 2009. ISBN 978-0-520-94464-0. Retrieved 30 August 2013.

Articles

• Clover on The New Yorker, in the Village Voice, 2001 [1]
• Clover on Michel Houellebecq, in the Village Voice, 2003 [2]
• Clover on Semiotext(e), in Village Voice, 2002 [3]
• Clover on Courtney Love in the Village Voice, 2004 [4]
• Clover on Slavoj Žižek, in the Village Voice, 2005 [5]
• Clover on Guy Debord and John Ashbery in the Village Voice, 2005 [6]
• Clover on Gus Van Sant in the Village Voice, 2005 [7]
• Clover on Charles Reznikoff, in The New York Times Book Review, 2006 [8]
• Clover on Charles Baudelaire in The New York Times, December 2006 [9]
• Clover on "France:Still Revolting" in the Village Voice [10]
• Clover on Velvet Goldmine, Spin magazine [11]
• Clover on Poetry in the Village Voice [12]

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 [13]
• "The Rose of the Name", Fence magazine, 1998 [14]

Reviews of Clover's Poetry

• The Totality for Kids, Village Voice, 2006. [15]
• Zoned, The Boston Review, September/October, 2006. [16]
• The Totality for Kids, CutBank, January 21, 2007. [17]

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"[18]
• His father, Samuel Kaplan, taught sociology and film at several schools, including UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz, Boston University, and the University of Pennsylvania, and was a film critic in Boston for The Phoenix and WGBH-TV.

External links

• UC Davis homepage
• American Academy of Poets profile
• Video of Clover reading at Bowery Poetry Club in New York, 2006
• Joshua Clover at Davis Wiki
• Brooke Kroeger (10 November 2004). Passing: When People Can't be who They are. PublicAffairs. pp. 198–. ISBN 978-1-58648-287-9. Retrieved 30 August 2013.
• Claudia Rankine; Lisa Sewell (9 July 2007). "The Pleasures of not merely Circulating". American Poets in the 21st Century: The New Poetics. Wesleyan University Press. pp. 164–. ISBN 978-0-8195-6728-4. Retrieved 30 August 2013.
• Nerys Williams (6 April 2011). "Textured Information:Joshua Clover and Claudia Rankine". Contemporary Poetry. Oxford University Press. pp. 163–. ISBN 978-0-7486-8802-9. Retrieved 30 August 2013.