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During 2014, Wave Books editor Joshua Beckman traveled around the country giving lectures on poetry. Collected here as two books in conversation—and inaugurating Wave’s Bagley Wright Lecture Series publications—these talks provide a rare and unique insight into a deeply literary life. In The Lives of the Poems, Beckman offers three variations of the same talk that—through repetition and adjustment, a sort of echolocating—illuminate the intimate experience of making a particular set of poems. In Three Talks, he explores the fluid social dynamics of poetry as it lives between readers, poems, and books.
About the author
Joshua Beckman was born in New Haven, Connecticut. He is the author of many books, including The Lives of the Poems and Three Talks, The Inside of an Apple,Take It, Shake, Your Time Has Come, and two collaborations with Matthew Rohrer: Nice Hat. Thanks. and Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty. He is editor-in-chief at Wave Books and has translated numerous works of poetry and prose, including Micrograms, by Jorge Carrera Andrade, 5 Meters of Poems (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010) by Carlos Oquendo de Amat and Poker (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2008) by Tomaž Šalamun, which was a finalist for the PEN America Poetry in Translation Award. He also co-edited Supplication: Selected Poems of John Wieners. Beckman is the recipient of numerous awards, including a NYFA fellowship and a Pushcart Prize. He lives in Seattle and New York.
Summary
Lectures that meander, accumulate, and adjust in an echolocating search for the in-between places where poetry lives.
Foreword
- Will promote the book heavily to Wave's dedicated audience—this is a must-have for any Wave fan, even the most casual.
- Beckman travels extensively and is well-known in many communities of poets in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and elsewhere.
- Will follow the success Madness, Rack, and Honey to help position this book in similar venues and among similar reviewers.
- Full trade marketing campaign, with extensive review mailings to both literary and general readership publications.
- Marketing to proximate audiences, including the ALA and MLA and attendant publications.
- Co-op available
