Joining the ranks of Herman Hesse and Sigmund Freud, Syrian-born poet Adonis is the first Arabic-speaking writer to win the triennial Goethe Prize for literature. The eighty-one-year-old poet, whose Selected Poems in a translation by Khaled Mattawa (Yale University Press, 2010) recently won the 2011 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, received fifty thousand euros at a ceremony last Sunday, Goethe's birthday. (The prize is worth approximately $71,365.)

Goethe himself introduced aspects of Arabic literature to European readers—inspired by the Persian poet Hafiz, Goethe published the poetry collection West-östlicher Divan (West-Eastern Divan) in 1819. In a reversal, according to the prize judges, "Adonis has carried the accomplishments of European modernity into Arabic cultural circles, with great effect."

"I wanted to draw on Arab tradition and mythology without being tied to it," said Adonis of his process in an interview with the New York Times (via the Guardian). "I wanted to break the linearity of poetic text—to mess with it, if you will. The poem is meant to be a network rather than a single rope of thought."

Adonis, who adopted his pen name at the age of nineteen (he was born Ali Ahmad Said Esber), is the author of more than twenty books of poetry including Mihyar of Damascus (BOA Editions, 2008), A Time Between Ashes and Roses (Syracuse University Press, 2004), and If Only the Sea Could Sleep (Green Integer, 2002).

Washington, D.C.–based poet Reginald Dwayne Betts, author of Shahid Reads His Own Palm and the memoir A Question of Freedom, blogs about headlining at the P&W-supported reading series LouderARTS earlier this year.

The LouderARTS reading series at Bar 13 is classic. Walking towards it, you could miss it if you weren’t paying attention. The stairs leading up to the entrance had me thinking of a horror film, where the expected becomes something frightening. The door opens to dim lights, a large space filled with people, a bar wet with alcohol, and poetry banging against the walls.

It’s only fair to admit that I’ve read at Bar 13 once before. Three, maybe four, years had passed since the last time I’d read there. The crowd seemed more aware of the little things that make a poet crave the mic. Patrick Rosal, author of the forthcoming Boneshepherds, was in the audience rubbing shoulders with young poets as they all enjoyed the moment with something cold to drink. I sat at the bar for near an hour waiting for my turn, listening to the crowd scream out lines of their favorite poems. I get a little nervous reading after six or seven poets have read and the audience has already been read to for an hour or so. 

That night I read poems I’ll likely never read again. A suite of sorts, and the intimacy of the space allowed it to happen. I get all these images in my head when thinking about poetry and poetry readings. The one that nestles most comfortably is my imaginings of Bar 13. It isn’t just the alcohol. It isn’t just that Lynne Procope and Marie-Elizabeth Mali are both electric poets and excellent hosts. It isn’t the slam competition. It’s that all of those things fit perfectly into this intimate space where people come to listen.

Photo: Reginald Dwayne Betts. Credit: Rachel Eliza Griffiths.

Support for Readings/Workshops events in Washinton, D.C., is provided by an endowment established with generous contributions from the Poets & Writers Board of Directors and others. Additional support comes from the Friends of Poets & Writers.

New York City's Center for Fiction, formerly the Mercantile Library, has announced the seven-strong shortlist for its Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize. The ten-thousand-dollar award will be given at the Center's annual benefit on December 6, where the organization will also honor Scribner editor in chief Nan Graham with the Maxwell E. Perkins Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Field of Fiction.

The shortlisted debut novels are The Free World by David Bezmozgis (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), The Sweet Relief of Missing Children by Sarah Braunstein (Norton), Daughters of the Revolution by Carolyn Cooke (Knopf),  The History of History by Ida Hattemer-Higgins (Knopf), Lamb by Bonnie Nadzam (Other Press), Shards by Ismet Prcic (Black Cat), and Touch by Alexi Zentner (Norton).

The award, formerly the John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize, has gone in previous years to Karl Marlantes, John Pipkin, Hannah Tinti, Junot Díaz, and Marisha Pessl.

In the video below, shortlisted author Sarah Braunstein discusses her debut, which was seven years in the making.

Washington, D.C.–based poet Reginald Dwayne Betts, author of Shahid Reads His Own Palm and the memoir A Question of Freedom, blogs about participating in a P&W-supported reading curated by the creative writing program at New York University in April 2010.

Raina J. Leon, January Gill O’Neil, and myself—I couldn't have asked for more. The three of us at NYU on a rainy Friday night. And, Cornelius Eady and Yusef Komunyakaa sat in the audience alongside emerging poet Rickey Laurentis and Catherine Barnett, a professor at NYU. The room was claustrophobic...in a good way. People squeezed in tight with nothing but poetry keeping them from going out into the rain.

I still remember Raina’s final poem about her brother. Haunting, the poem has left a lasting impression. Many of her poems do this, give me pause. And January, January read the best sex poem I’ve heard in years! A poem so filled with yearning and the unexpected that I thought the audience would soon depart to find love in the rain. The audience stayed, and allowed me to read a poem or two.

A few weeks before the reading, I Skyped with Catherine Barnett’s class. Some students from that class showed up, and one of the coolest things happened. Paul, one of Catherine's students, gave me The Prison Diary of Ho Chi Minh. He took the time to pass on the book and make some really humbling comments about my work. Folks read and write for millions of reasons, but the one that is most important to me is connecting with others.

Photo: Reginald Dwayne Betts. Credit: Rachel Eliza Griffiths.

Support for Readings/Workshops events in Washinton, D.C., is provided by an endowment established with generous contributions from the Poets & Writers Board of Directors and others. Additional support comes from the Friends of Poets & Writers.

The Academy of American Poets announced this afternoon that Anna Moschovakis has received its 2011 James Laughlin Prize. She receives the honor, which comes with a prize of five thousand dollars, for her second collection, You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake, published by Coffee House Press.

"Moschovakis boldly writes as though Plato had never kicked poets out of the Republic," says judge Brian Teare. "In You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake, she takes up the citizen's task of thinking through political and existential issues relevant to lives lived in increasing dependence on Internet access and globalization both."

Beneath their controlled and imperturbable surfaces, her poems perform the painful experience of the complicity with injustice that comes with citizenship—while lamenting colonization, opportunism, and capitalism, her poems search themselves for the common root of the urge toward empire, asking: 'Is it more than you would have done?'"

Teare was joined in the selection of the winning book by poets Juliana Spahr and Mónica de la Torre.

Moschovakis, who splits her time between New York City and the Catskills, is also an editor with the Ugly Duckling Presse publishing collective and a translator. Her first book is I Have Not Been Able to Get Through to Everyone (Turtle Point Press, 2006).

The Academy awards the James Laughlin Prize annually to recognize a second poetry collection.

Anna Moschovakis Reads from You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake (Feb. 2011, Coffee House Press) from CoffeeHousePress on Vimeo.

The James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction, established nearly a century ago, was awarded over the weekend to California author Tatjana Soli for her first book, The Lotus Eaters (St. Martin's Press, 2010). Soli received the award, which carries a prize of ten thousand pounds (more than sixteen thousand dollars) and is administered by the University of Edinburgh, at the Edinburgh Book Festival.

A panel of University of Edinburgh professors and postgraduate students selected Soli's Vietnam War–era novel from a shortlist that included David Mitchell's The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (Random House) and two other debut novels, Julie Orringer's The Invisible Bridge (Knopf) and Michael Nath's La Rochelle (Route). Orringer also hails from the United States (Mitchell and Nath are from the United Kingdom).

Past winners of the award include Nadine Gordimer, Graham Greene, Aldous Huxley, D. H. Lawrence, Muriel Spark, and Evelyn Waugh. The prize was founded in 1919 by the widow of publisher James Tait Black to honor novels published in the previous calendar year.

In the video below, Soli discusses her origins in the short story and how she built her novel over time, as well as what she's learned about the importance of being an advocate for one's own work. "The career is so hard," she says, "that I wanted to wait and write the kind of stories that I want to write. And so I thought...if the novel gets published, good, and if it doesn't, at least I did what I wanted to do."

In Peter Schjeldahl's article, "Roots: Hopper's House," which appeared in the July 11 & 18, 2011, issue of the New Yorker, he describes the history of the Edward Hopper House Art Center in Nyack, New York, mentioning that performance artist Karen Finley conducted writing classes there this summer, during which she assigned her students to "imagine and describe their personal summer interiors." Now that the season is coming to a close, imagine your summer interior and write a poem that describes it.