Wisława Szymborska, the noted poet and essayist, passed away this week at the age of 88. Szymborska published over 400 poems in her lifetime, and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996. The Nobel committee noted that she had been called ”the Mozart of poetry,” remarking that the title was “not without justice in view of her wealth of inspiration and the veritable ease with which her words seem to fall into place.”

In 1981, PUP published Sounds, Feelings, Thoughts: Seventy Poems by Wislawa Szymborska with translators Magnus Krynski and Robert Maguire. Of her poetry, Krynski and Maguire said:

“Her verse is marked by high seriousness, delightful inventiveness, a prodigal imagination, and enormous technical skill. She writes of the diversity, plenitude, and richness of the world, taking delight in observing and naming its phenomena. She looks on with wonder, astonishment, and amusement, but almost never with despair.”

Read on for “Memory at Last,” a wonderful  Szymborska poem about remembrance and loss. 

“Kathleen Graber, assistant professor of English in the creative writing department at Virginia Commonwealth University, won the 2011 Literary Award for Poetry for The Eternal City. Graber’s book suggests the miraculous in ordinary human experience, exploring the interplay among the personal, historical, and philosophical.”

With an epigraph from Freud comparing the mind to a landscape in which all that ever was still persists, The Eternal City offers eloquent testimony to the struggle to make sense of the present through conversation with the past. Questioning what it means to possess and to be possessed by objects and technologies, Kathleen Graber’s collection brings together the elevated and the quotidian to make neighbors of Marcus Aurelius, Klaus Kinski, Walter Benjamin, and Johnny Depp. Like Aeneas, who escapes Troy carrying his father on his back, the speaker of these intellectually and emotionally ambitious poems juggles the weight of private and public history as she is transformed from settled resident to pilgrim.

Some of Graber’s wonderful poems can be found online. The New Yorker published The Magic Kingdom in 2008 and The Drunkenness of Noah in 2010.

We invite you to check out our new 2012 literature catalog at: http://press.princeton.edu/catalogs/lit12.pdf

You will find new books such as The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, Michelangelo, Enigmas of Identity, Whatever Gets You through the Night, and more. New paperbacks are also available—great titles such as Allegory, Lincoln on Race and Slavery, and Not for Profit.

The MLA meeting is going on now in Seattle. We’re there at booth no. 408. Stop by to say hello and browse new books.

To help celebrate this year’s National Poetry Month in the United States, this week’s book giveaway is The Eternal City: Poems by Kathleen Graber.

A 2010 National Book Award Finalist, The Eternal City offers eloquent testimony to the struggle to make sense of the present through conversation with the past. Questioning what it means to possess and to be possessed by objects and technologies, Kathleen Graber’s collection brings together the elevated and the quotidian to make neighbors of Marcus Aurelius, Klaus Kinski, Walter Benjamin, and Johnny Depp.

Chosen by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon to relaunch the prestigious Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets under his editorship, The Eternal City revives Princeton’s tradition of publishing some of today’s best poetry.

“[N]othing short of a revelation. Graber is a new poet that we should have always had but didn’t until just now. Graber is the kind of poet who thinks out loud, though not in the tricky, needley way of John Ashbery, but like someone very smart and very well-read trying to get to the bottom of every troubling and exciting thought. She thinks about her day to day life, family and friends, their every day goings on, their deaths and big tragedies, and she thinks about big ideas–life, death, meaning–mostly in the same poem. She name-checks some of the big figures of Western thought–Marcus Aurelius and Walter Benjamin, for instance–but does so as if she were talking to or about friends. She manages to do a scholar’s work in these poems without the alienating haughtiness of many scholars. And despite their learned-ness, these are poems anyone could love. . . . If you only read one book of poetry this year, that’s not enough, but start with this one.”–Craig Teicher, Publishers Weekly

Here’s an Authors on Camera feature with Kathleen Graber reading from her book:

Can’t get enough? Then view this interview with the author at Virginia Commonwealth University and/or check out the book’s Facebook page.

To be a part of our weekly book giveaways, LIKE US on Facebook. Once you’ve LIKED US, you are automatically entered for our weekly random draw.

The Eternal City: Poems by Kathleen Graber.

The Press is publishing a plethora of new poetry titles this April, so we have a lot to celebrate! We are pleased to announce two important translations, the first annotated critical edition of a major poem by W. H. Auden, and two books in the revived Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets. Don’t forget to join the Lewis Center for the Arts later this month for the second biennial Princeton Poetry Festival and you can check out the Press’s poetry offerings here.

	Poems Under Saturn: Poèmes saturniens Paul Verlaine Translated and with an introduction by Karl Kirchwey The first complete English translation of the collection that announced Paul Verlaine (1844-1896) as a poet who would come to be regarded as one of the greatest of nineteenth-century writers. This new translation, by respected contemporary poet Karl Kirchwey, faithfully renders the collection’s heady mix of classical learning and earthy sensuality in poems whose rhythm and rhyme represent one of the supreme accomplishments of French verse.
	The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue W. H. Auden Edited and with an introduction by Alan Jacobs This volume–the first annotated, critical edition of the poem–introduces this important work to a new generation of readers by putting it in historical and biographical context and elucidating its difficulties. Alan Jacobs’s introduction and thorough annotations help today’s readers understand and appreciate the full richness of a poem that contains some of Auden’s most powerful and beautiful verse, and that still deserves a central place in the canon of twentieth-century poetry.
	New Impressions of Africa Raymond Roussel Translated and introduced by Mark Ford This bilingual edition of Raymond Roussel’s most extraordinary work, New Impressions of Africa, presents the original French text and the English poet Mark Ford’s lucid, idiomatic translation on facing pages. It also includes an introduction outlining the poem’s peculiar structure and evolution, notes explaining its literary and historical references, and the fifty-nine illustrations anonymously commissioned by Roussel, via a detective agency, from Henri-A. Zo.
	At Lake Scugog: Poems Troy Jollimore The eagerly awaited collection of new poems from the author of Tom Thomson in Purgatory, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was hailed by the New York Times as a “snappy, entertaining book.” A triumphant follow-up, At Lake Scugog demonstrates why the San Francisco Chronicle has called Troy Jollimore “a new and exciting voice in American poetry.”
	Carnations: Poems Anthony Carelli Often taking titles from a biblical vocabulary, Anthony Carelli’s remarkable debut, Carnations, reminds us that unremarkable places and events–a game of Frisbee in a winter park, workers stacking panes in a glass factory, or the daily opening of a café–can, in a blink, be new.

FACT: Nouvelles Impressions d’Afrique is the last work that the French poet, playwright, and novelist Raymond Roussel published during his lifetime. He began drafting it in 1915, but the poem was not to appear until the autumn of 1932, less than a year before its author was found dead in his room at the Grande Albergo e delle Palme in Palermo, Sicily at the age of 56.

New Impressions of Africa
Raymond Roussel
Translated and introduced by Mark Ford

Raymond Roussel (1877-1933) was one of the French belle époque’s most compelling literary figures. During his lifetime, Roussel’s work was vociferously championed by the surrealists, but never achieved the widespread acclaim for which he yearned. New Impressions of Africa is undoubtedly Roussel’s most extraordinary work. Since its publication in 1932, this weird and wonderful poem has slowly gained cult status, and its admirers have included Salvador Dalì–who dubbed it the most “ungraspably poetic” work of the era–André Breton, Jean Cocteau, Marcel Duchamp, Michel Foucault, Kenneth Koch, and John Ashbery.

This bilingual edition of New Impressions of Africa presents the original French text and the English poet Mark Ford’s lucid, idiomatic translation on facing pages. It also includes an introduction outlining the poem’s peculiar structure and evolution, notes explaining its literary and historical references, and the fifty-nine illustrations anonymously commissioned by Roussel, via a detective agency, from Henri-A. Zo.

We invite you to read the introduction online at:
http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/i9413.pdf

This interview was taped at The Getty in Los Angeles when Andrei gave a lecture on The Poetry Lesson.

For more “Art Lessons” click over to The Getty’s site to view more interview segments on lessons like “Learning requires a blind path toward a labyrinth of bones” and “Laughter and silence as subversive tools for creativity”.

Prepare for the publication of Whatever Gets You Through the Night in June by reading excerpts from Andrei’s earlier PUP books: The Posthuman Dada Guide and The Poetry Lesson.

Kathleen Graber’s second collection The Eternal City: Poems–and Paul Muldoon’s first pick in the revived Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets–has been selected as a National Book Critics Circle Finalist in Poetry, 2010.

The collection was also a finalist for the National Book Awards, so many congratulations to Kathleen Graber and Series Editor Paul Muldoon on this second major nomination!

The winners won’t be announced until March 10th, but until then, you can read the official press release from NBCC’s Critical Mass blog here.

This week, in honor of Robert Burns’s birthday (Jan. 25th, 1759), we are giving away the book, The Bard: Robert Burns, A Biography by Robert Crawford.

No writer is more charismatic than Robert Burns. Wonderfully readable, The Bard catches Burns’s energy, brilliance, and radicalism as never before. To his international admirers he was a genius, a hero, a warm-hearted friend; yet to the mother of one of his lovers he was a wastrel, to a fellow poet he was “sprung . . . from raking of dung,” and to his political enemies a “traitor.” Drawing on a surprising number of untapped sources–from rediscovered poetry by Burns to manuscript journals, correspondence, and oratory by his contemporaries–this new biography presents the remarkable life, loves, and struggles of the great poet.

“Crawford’s Burns, merrily mixing high and low culture, seems eerily contemporary. He shares with great hip-hop artists a genius for catchy, sexy, and memorable rhymes gloriously liberated from the hegemony of standard English.”–New Yorker

Anyone who LIKES us on Facebook is automatically entered in the giveaway. A winner will be randomly drawn this Friday.

The Bard: Robert Burns, A Biography by Robert Crawford

If you are near New York City, don’t miss your chance to see Edwidge Danticat TOMORROW at Queen’s College in NYC, in LeFrak Concert Hall. The event will begin at 7pm and is $20 for admission (and free with CUNY student ID!). Danticat will read from her latest work, Create Dangerously, and then will be interviewed by WNYC’s Leonard Lopate.

If you haven’t already, RSVP to the Facebook event, and tell your friends! Hope to see you there!

“Intro to Poetry Writing is always like this: a long labor, a breech birth, or, obversely, mining in the dark. You take healthy young Americans used to sunshine (aided sometimes by Xanax and Adderall), you blindfold them and lead them by the hand into a labyrinth made from bones. Then you tell them their assignment: ‘Find the Grail. You have a New York minute to get it.’”

– The Poetry Lesson

If you’re in the Princeton area, swing by Labyrinth Books today to meet Andrei Codrescu and get your copy of The Poetry Lesson signed! The event will begin at 3 PM. Details are below.

Over at the Atlantic, Adam Roberts has been writing a fascinating five-part series about contemporary poetry. In the fourth part of the series, Roberts proposes that contemporary verse might take a cue from the Slow Food and other Slow movements and “help us transition away from monocultural reading habits.” He goes on to praise small presses:

In the world of literary culture, the small press is probably the closest equivalent to your local farmer’s market. (The carrots might look funnier, but, after you’re used to it, they taste about five times better.) There are tons of small presses, spread out over the country, and they’re often run at either no-profit or a loss. These are labors of love—not engaged in the production of commodities for consumption, but something closer to Lewis Hyde’s notion of “the gift.” Hand-sewn chapbooks take time to make, the poems in them take time to read, and the poets (most likely) took a lot of time to write them. Their production occurs on a smaller (and less grandiose) scale, and like the Slow Food and broader Slow Culture movement, they want to restore to us a sense of time that our current world system strips away from us. Perhaps they wouldn’t want to be in the airports, even if we let them. But they can, like the local food economy (which is growing at a spectacular rate, nationally), become viable alternatives with our support.

Princeton University Press hasn’t yet made his list of recommended small presses, but with the return of the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets, which includes Kathleen Graber’s The Eternal City (a National Book Award finalist), and the new Facing Pages series, you can support what Roberts calls “obscure, high-brow lit”–or come spring, the cheeky offerings of Troy Jollimore’s At Lake Scugog and the lush and spiritual poems in Anthony Carelli’s debut collection Carnations!

You can (and should) read his other posts in the series here, and for more information on Slow Poetry visit the Slow Society site. Don’t forget to savor all of your reading experiences!