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!

Hope you can join us at Labyrinth Books in Princeton, NJ next week, where Andrei Codrescu will be reading from and signing copies of his latest book, The Poetry Lesson!

Of The Poetry Lesson, Chris Waddington of the New Orleans Times-Picayune wrote, “This genially disillusioned, free-associative romp delivers plenty of pleasures in the course of 118 pages. . . . Faced with time and mortality — the quintessential poetic subjects — Codrescu does what great artists have done for millennia: He tells stories, writes poems, and, yes, he teaches.”

Don’t miss your chance to meet Andrei Codrescu! See event details below.

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A goatskin dream notebook. Hypnosis. Cable TV. These are all objects listed as “Tools of Poetry” in The Poetry Lesson, the latest work by celebrated writer and former teacher, Andrei Codrescu. Neither a memoir nor a novel, but a mixture of both, the book takes readers through the first day of a creative writing course taught by a quirky poet and English professor embarking upon his final semester of teaching before retirement. Along the way, he introduces students to The Tools of Poetry, The Ten Muses of Poetry, and assigns them “Ghost-Companion” poets, all the while regaling them with wild stories from his poetic coming of age in the 1960s and 70s.

The book’s cover, with its pleading skeleton, unyielding title, and otherwise Spartan design, at first seems to contradict its funny, irreverent content. After talking to Book Designer Jason Alejandro, however, it becomes clear that the cover only contributes to the sense of irony and whimsy that pervades The Poetry Lesson. The hint of mystique rising from the apparent contradiction between cover and content inspires readers to pick up the book and start reading–as any well-conceived cover design should do!–and motivated us to ask Jason a few questions about the work that went into this book’s cover design. Click to read the Q&A with Book Designer Jason Alejandro about The Poetry Lesson‘s cover.

On November 18, Andrei Codrescu, author of The Poetry Lesson, will share his views on how poetry is written, as part of the Prose Pros programs. Prose Pros pairs two writers, linked by agreement or opposition, and invites them to discuss their writing experiences. Codrescu will be speaking with CA Conrad, author of The Book of Frank, who also has unusual ideas about writing poetry. You won’t want to miss this unique event!

Coming up next week: an evening of poetry, fiction, and criticism sponsored by the Ukrainian Institute of America in New York City, featuring three of the most outstanding figures of the twentieth century united by the common Utopian goal of reshaping humanity — the founder of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Vladimir Lenin; the father of Dadaism and grandfather of Surrealism, Tristan Tzara; and the poet-laureate of Marxism-Leninism, Vladimir Mayakovsky.

In honor of these three men, the poet, novelist, essayist, teacher, and lecturer, Andrei Codrescu, will read from his books Jealous Witness and The Poetry Lesson as well as from his critical essay, “The Posthuman Guide: Tzara and Lenin Play Chess”. Literary scholar Robert Romanchuk and poet, playwright, novelist Yuriy Tarnawsky will also be present. Romanchuk will analyze Mayakovsky’s poems “V.I. Lenin” and “Soviet Passport,” and Tarnawsky will read his Surrealist story, “Lenin’s Brain.”

If you are in the NYC area, be sure not to miss this unique literary event!

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Tonight at 7:30, Edwidge Danticat will be reading from and signing copies of her latest book, Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work at the Free Library of Philadelphia. She will be joined by author, poet, editor, and translator Linh Dinh, who will be discussing his debut novel, Love Like Hate.

This is a free event, so no tickets are required! If you’re in the area, don’t miss your chance to meet these two talented authors, tonight at 7:30 at the Free Library of Philadelphia. For more information about this event, click here or check out the Facebook Event.

Tom Gresham at the VCU News Center posted this excellent and inspiring interview with Kathleen Graber earlier this week. The National Book Award finalist talks about how she decided to become a poet, contemporary poetry, and her interesting writing process for her latest collection, The Eternal City (hint: it involved her garage and the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius).

Watch the entire video and read Tom Gresham’s feature here.

Congratulations to Kathleen Graber, whose book, The Eternal City: Poems, has been declared a finalist for the 2010 National Book Award in Poetry!

Graber’s book was one of five nominated for the NBA by poetry judges Rae Armantrout, Cornelius Eady, Linda Gregerson, Jeffrey McDaniel, and Brenda Shaughnessy. The winners will be announced at the 61st National Book Awards Benefit Dinner and Ceremony at Cipriani Wall Street in New York City on Wednesday, November 17th.

Publishers Weekly praised Graber as “one of the most interesting, slippery and philosophical new poets to come along in a while. . . . [W]hat makes Graber’s poems so fresh and wild are the associative slips that happen between the distant past and the urgent present.”

Great job and good luck, Kathleen!

To see a list of other recent award-winning books from PUP, please click here.

Princeton University Press is proud to announce Kathleen Graber’s The Eternal City is a finalist for the 2010 National Book Award in Poetry.

Many congratulations to Kathleen on her truly excellent collection, and to series editor Paul Muldoon! As the inaugural title in the revived Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets, we can only hope that this nomination speaks to a larger story about the vital role poetry has to play in academic and popular culture, and about the importance of university press publishers in nurturing poetry and the highest quality arts and scholarship in the twenty-first century.

From the Chronicle Review’s PageView blog:

In a Louisiana classroom, a charismatic middle-aged Romanian-born writer conducts an “Introduction to Poetry Writing” seminar. It’s the first session of the semester, and he wants to assign each student a ghost-companion—a “poet you will study all semester, read deeply, understand well, Google till you’re satisfied, and call on when you feel some difficulty.”

As he goes through this three-hour Sorting Hat exercise, the professor sometimes feels great waves of tenderness for his students’ youth, intelligence, and promise. But those warm sentiments are accompanied by alienation and near-disgust: Who are these callow lazy over-wired 18-year-olds who barely seem to know what World War II was about?

During the course of the class, the professor frets about his inability to operate a CD player, much less an iPod. He scornfully meditates on the university’s emergency-text-alert system, which seems unlikely to do anyone much good in a real crisis.

Also, there are feelings of lust.

Many of you will have recognized that we’re in the world of Andrei Codrescu, who retired last year after 25 years as an English professor at Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge.

Click over to read a Q&A between Andrei Codrescu and The Chronicle Review’s David Glenn on the subject of his new book The Poetry Lesson.

Over at Blavatsky News (yes, it exists and it is for all who want to know more about Helena Petrovna Blavatsky), they pick up on a tidbit from Andrei Codrescu’s new book The Poetry Lesson. In it, Codrescu instructs his students to come to class prepared with a Mont Blanc fountain pen, offering “extra credit if it belonged to Mme. Blavatsky.” In fact, Codrescu tells his students that owning such a pen could account for up to 1/4th of the final grade.

The best of all fountain pens is the Mont Blanc, but it’s terribly expensive because of its gold nib and reputation. A Mont Blanc that belonged to Madame Blavatsky would be the instrument through which the disembodied voices of angels and demons would have traveled into the many volumes dictated to her by these otherworldly entities. In other words, you would be possessing an angelic instrument that, should it turn up in eBay, would fetch easily one to three hundred thousand dollars. Your extra credit for owning such a pen would amount to one fourth of your final grade.

However, as is the case with most extra credit assignments, this one is near impossible. Why? Because according to Blavatsky News, Madame Blavatsky pre-dates the Mont Blanc fountain pen.

“Since the company that produced Mont Blanc pens was not started until 1906, it would have been difficult for her to use one,” writes Blavatsky News.

To add further insult to injury, they note that Madame Blavatsky was known to use a gold-nib pen, manufactured by John Foley of New York and post a photograph of Madame Blavatsky at work with some other sub-par (at least where extra credit is concerned) pen.

The conversation took place in the bat cave deep beneath Andrei’s secret castle
in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas. As usual, he was kicking back in his vintage
velvet Prussian throne and I was sitting on a pile of petrified guano. Around us,
our ghost companions were watching the discussion in various states of
indifference. On Andrei’s side, Ted Berrigan and Francois Villon were chilling
out with Tzara and Pasternak. On my side, Rimbaud was pretending to ignore
Edward Abbey and Bukowski, who were becoming increasingly intoxicated.
Meanwhile, the walls oozed with the literary perspiration of the Earth.

Spitzer: I’ve read pretty much all your works, but I was stuck by The Poetry Lesson in particular. I think it’s the funniest, most intriguing, organically satisfying Codrescu-concoction out there. In a way it reminds me of Céline’s Conversations with Professor Y in that it’s a novella-sized conversation that plunges in and out of various discussions on literature and aesthetics while incorporating regular tangents in which you contemplate the lives and deaths of poets. These threads then take the reader other places, a lot like the “chautauquas”—or contemplations or meditations—which Robert M. Pirsig used in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance as philosophical detours from the main narrative. In a way, the construction is similar to the first half of Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom, where you’ve got all these sexy stories inside sexy stories, but you always shoot back to the plot—which is basically this: it’s the first day of your last Intro to Poetry class of your teaching career and you are assigning students ghost companions to study and “enter into psychic communication with.” Anyway, what I’m trying to do right now with this run-on question is to set the stage for future readers of The Poetry Lesson as to what the book is about and how it goes about doing a very unusual thing in contemporary lit: you’ve either invented a new form of storytelling or you’ve innovated on an old one—I’m not sure—but at one point you write “This is not a novel, but then neither is it poetry . . . and it’s no essay or memoir either.” So what is it?

At this precise spot, The Poetry Lesson began.

Andrei: This is a wonderful review/question that places me most flatteringly in the vicinity of your own heroes, Mark, so I’ll say this: you’re great. As for what this book is, I’m convinced that I invented a new form. I wrote it at Highlands Coffee in Baton Rouge, after my three-hour undergraduate poetry seminar. In the morning, before class, at the same coffee house, I wrote The Posthuman Dada Guide. After class, I had fun using the class to expand into a kind of synthetic expression of all my classes and teaching poetry for a quarter of a century. I shouldn’t even call it “teaching poetry,” because it was mostly playing and instructing students in the poetic mode, in thinking poetically, and even living that way if they had strong livers. I used some composite of youths of the 21st century and wrote without fear of digression because I would inevitably return to class the next week and come back to my characters. So, it’s a lived piece of reportage, in one sense, an autobiographical invention on the other, and a meditation on poetry scenes that had a bearing on the “lesson.” Writing this it occurred to me just how boring “teaching creative writing” is these days, and how many unimaginative drones who were themselves “taught” by unimaginative drones are fouling the air in our institutions of so-called “higher” learning. Most teacher-poets of the last four decades in America were dull bastards who nearly destroyed the art. Maybe they did.

Read more after the jump.