Sunday, February 10, 2013

Amanda Coplin, The Honest Pint, and good mail

Friend of Tavern Books, poetry advocate, and Portlander Amanda Coplin has recently published the critically acclaimed novel The Orchardist (Harper Collins, 2012). The Orchardist, which is forthcoming in numerous translated editions around the world, has been garnering unabashed praise from The Daily Beast, NPR, and The New York Times Book Review (just to name a few). We'd like to congratulate Amanda on being a finalist for the 2012 Barnes and Noble Discover Award for Fiction. This recent news has our office abuzz.

In the coming months, Coplin will be a contributing author in our Honest Pint series (more info on the Pint here). For those who haven't encountered her prose, you're in for a treat.

The Honest Pint has taken off, and we couldn't be happier with its trajectory. We're delighted by the Pint's growing subscription list, and we feel its diverse readership reflects the scope of this series. We want the collective Honest Pint publications to truly reflect the way writers interact with poetry; we want a literary venue free of partisan aesthetics, fenced-in ideas, and school-of-thought attitudes; we want to explore a landscape of poetics where Bob Kaufman passes the salt to Theocritus. We have forthcoming Pints written by novelists, film critics, poets, philosophers, story writers, and instillation artists. The subjects of these Pints range from the Concrete poems of Ian Hamilton Finlay to the epics of Robinson Jeffers to the lyric connection between Andrei and Arseny Tarkovsky. Our ultimate goal with the Honest Pint is to collect each of these individual pieces into a grand, sweeping, quirky, and refreshing anthology of poetics...and we couldn't be more pleased with how things have started out.

Since our first Honest Pint mail-out in January (Albert Goldbarth's meditation on the 17th-century poet Margaret Cavendish, Ray Palmer, and the metaphors of 'smallness'), we've been getting emails from subscribers thanking us for doing something different, something new, something outside the halls of institutional thinking. It's not every day that you get an actual art object in the mail that hovers somewhere between the realm of pamphlet and fine printing, between scholarship and whimsey, between writer and reader. Thanks to all of you who have subscribed! We can't wait to send you the next installation.

Happy reading, and here's to another good mail day!

Michael McGriff