Joshua Clover

Joshua Clover (born December 30, 1962 in Berkeley, California) is a professor at the University of California Davis. He is a published poet, scholar, critic, and journalist. He has appeared in three editions of Best American Poetry and two times in Best American Music Writing, and has received an individual grant from the NEA as well as fellowships from the Cornell Society for the Humanities, The University of California Humanities Research Institute, and Institute of Advanced Study, University of Warwick. His first book of poetry, Madonna anno domini, received the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets in 1996.^[1]

Life

A graduate of Boston University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, 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.^[2]

He writes a column on politics and popular culture, "Pop and Circumstance," for The Nation. He has written columns for Film Quarterly, under the title "Marx and Coca-Cola," and is a former senior writer and editor at the Village Voice. has contributed to 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 contributed to a number of film and music reviews for various outlets.

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. The protesters, who became known as the "Davis Dozen," were charged with "obstructing movement in a public place and conspiracy to commit a misdemeanor."^[3] 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.^[4]

Clover's given name at birth was Joshua Miller Kaplan but via legal change he took his mother's maiden name. 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. 
• Red Epic. Commune Editions. 7 April 2015. ISBN 9781934639160. Retrieved 9 March 2015. 

Articles

• Clover on The New Yorker in the Village Voice, 2001
• Clover on Michel Houellebecq in the Village Voice, 2003
• Clover on Semiotext(e) in the Village Voice, 2002
• Clover on Courtney Love in the Village Voice, 2004
• Clover on Slavoj Žižek in the Village Voice, 2005
• Clover on Guy Debord and John Ashbery in the Village Voice, 2005
• Clover on Gus Van Sant in the Village Voice, 2005
• Clover on Charles Reznikoff in The New York Times Book Review, 2006
• Clover on Charles Baudelaire in The New York Times, December 2006
• Clover on "France:Still Revolting" in the Village Voice
• Clover on Velvet Goldmine in Spin magazine
• Clover on Poetry in the Village Voice

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
• "The Rose of the Name", Fence, 1998

Reviews of Clover's Poetry

• "Matrix Reloaded," review of The Totality for Kids by Alan Gilbert, Village Voice, 2006.
• "Zoned," review of The Totality for Kids by John Palattella, The Boston Review, September/October, 2006.
• Review of The Totality for Kids by Christopher Burawa, CutBank, January 21, 2007.

Trivia

• Clover wrote a regular reviews column for Spin magazine between 1999-2001 called "Show Us Your Hits."
• Clover's article on Poetry was noted by Greil Marcus in his Salon column "Real Life Rock Top Ten"

References

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 16 December 2014. 
• 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.