Since my last com­ments about reruns of Dynasty in the U.S. Senate, Car­o­line Kennedy has not only expressed inter­est in the Senate seat vacated by HRC, but is start­ing to clear the field with polit­i­cal anglings and manuev­er­ings of var­i­ous kinds (includ­ing but cer­tainly not lim­ited to secret phone calls and upstate New York “listening tours”).

Geral­dine Brooks, though, gives us the reason to end all rea­sons for Kennedy’s wor­thi­ness for U.S. sen­a­tor in a Daily Beast column:

She reads. She reads poetry. Anyone who doesn’t think that’s rel­e­vant needs to be reminded of William Carlos Williams’ obser­va­tion: “It is dif­fi­cult to get the news from poems, yet men die mis­er­ably every day for the lack of what is found there.”

Blago­je­vich, you rotten scoundrel. Not one day–not ten hours!–after we say some­thing nice about you for the first time ever, in our entire lives, you go and get your­self arrested for sell­ing Barack Obama’s Senate seat? Sure, you made my head­line sound awfully pre­scient, but come on: if you really wanted to make a buck off Barack, couldn’t you have gone off and started a com­mem­o­ra­tive coin com­pany or something?

And on the day before your birth­day, no less? For shame.

From the (bank­rupt, but that’s a post for another day) Tribune:

Blago­je­vich and Harris were accused of a wide-​ranging crim­i­nal con­spir­acy that included Blago­je­vich con­spir­ing to sell or trade the Senate seat left vacant by President-​elect Barack Obama in exchange for finan­cial ben­e­fits for the gov­er­nor and his wife. The gov­er­nor was also accused of obtain­ing cam­paign con­tri­bu­tions in exchange for other offi­cial actions.

Blago­je­vich was taken into fed­eral cus­tody at his North Side home this morning.

…

On the issue of the U.S. Senate selec­tion, fed­eral pros­e­cu­tors alleged Blago­je­vich sought appoint­ment as Sec­re­tary of Health and Human Ser­vices in the new Obama admin­is­tra­tion, or a lucra­tive job with a union in exchange for appoint­ing a union-​preferred candidate.

(Tri­bune photo by Nancy Stone.)

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UPDATE (10:44am): How cor­rupt was this SOB?

Martha Ronk’s essay on Bar­bara Guest’s “Wild Gar­dens Over­looked by Night Lights,” first pub­lished in Chicago Review’s Bar­bara Guest spe­cial issue, is up for the read­ing at Poetry Daily. Here’s Ronk on Guest’s ekphrasis:

As Guest’s ekphra­sis enables a move­ment beyond what she calls “the locked king­dom of linearity,” it also sug­gests the ways in which ekphras­tic fail­ure, a fail­ure built into the very project itself, pro­duces var­i­ous sig­nif­i­cant effects. No matter the effort, a poet can never bring the visual fully into lan­guage. Yet it is ekphrasis’s very apophatic nature that has the poten­tial to unleash the unseen, the mys­te­ri­ous, the hal­lu­ci­na­tory. Ekphra­sis per­forms both impos­si­bil­ity and its over­com­ing in alter­nat­ing fashion.

I’ve posted some photos from last Thursday’s Chicago Review launch party. The event fea­tured a set of tremen­dous read­ings by Eleni Sike­lianos, Ed Rober­son, and Dan Beachy-​Quick, as well as a bril­liant per­for­mance of Bar­bara Guest’s “The Office” directed by Peter Thomas.