Joshua Clover

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, 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. A graduate of Boston University and the Iowa Writer's 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. http://holloway.english.berkeley.edu/history/page19/page19.html] 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

He has also been a political activist at Davis, where along with eleven students he engaged in a sit-in to protest the campus's financial arrangements with U.S. Bank. Clover and the eleven students, known as the "Davis Dozen," have each been charged with 20 counts of obstructing movement in a public place and one count of conspiracy.

Clover's birth name was Joshua Miller Kaplan but via legal change he took his mother's maiden name [See his statement in Brooke Kroeger, Passing (2004), p. 207] 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. His father, Samuel Kaplan, who taught at Berkeley as well as Boston University, is a retired sociologist who published extensive film criticism and occasionally published poetry.



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.
 * 1989: Bob Dylan Didn't Have This to Sing About (University of California Press, 2009), 198 pp.

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 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"
 * Clover on Velvet Goldmine, Spin magazine
 * Clover on Poetry Magazine

Reviews of Clover's Poetry

 * The Totality for Kids, Village Voice, 2006.
 * ''Zoned", The Boston Review, September/October, 2006.
 * The Totality for Kids,CutBank, January 21, 2007

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 magazine, 1998

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"