In the caveat to this irreverent and hilarious satire, Clay Reynolds 
writes, “No poet writing today could be this lucky, this tragic, this 
infamous. Indeed, it wouldn’t be tolerated.” No, one will have to 
admit, it wouldn’t. Offered in the same vein as Jane Smiley’s Moo 
and Richard Russo’s Straight Man, Reynolds’s Ars Poetica 
explores the life of a modern-day Don Juan, a hedonistically 
ambitious poetaster of our own times, a self-styled Lothario, but, as 
the tragicomedy ultimately reveals, a man who ultimately discovers 
that he has more in common with Coleridge’s mariner than with any 
swashbuckling versifier of old.

    At times a light-hearted romp through the wasteland world of 
contemporary creative writing where only the phony seem to 
survive and prosper, at times a vicious attack on the hypocrisy of 
political correctness and contemporary sexual mores, and at times 
a sordid slog through the back alleys of a single soul’s despair, Ars 
Poetica evolves as a parable of a passionate poet in a postmodern 
world, one fraught with the perils of pretense and one that offers 
meaningful achievement only at the price of the poetic soul.

    “In the grand tradition of raging misanthropic poets (from 
Aristophanes to Robert Frost), the protagonist of Ars Poetica is a 
character who spares no one from his pitiless scrutiny. In this 
masterfully told tale of an aging poet who finally turns his back on 
the system that he feels failed him, Clay Reynolds gives us a story 
to remember.”—George Garrett

    “Clay Reynolds’ Ars Poetica kept me up to three A.M. two nights in 
a row as I raced through this hilarious satire of the academic world 
and the power of poetry to ruin a life and redeem it. The book also 
kept my wife up to three both nights because I kept laughing out 
loud and waking her up. And once she was awake, I read passages 
of the book to her so she could laugh with me.”—Andrew Hudgins

    “In the title Ars Poetica, Clay Reynolds has taken irony to a new 
level of dignity and comic outrage, and the story—marvelously 
consistent in tone, as if we were hearing it in a stalled elevator—
has the haunting feel of an unforgettable fairytale for adults. It’s a 
dark joy.”—Miller Williams

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CLAY REYNOLDS has written six previous novels, including The 
Vigil, Franklin’s Crossing (Pulitzer Prize entrant and Violet Crown 
winner) and Players and Monuments (Spur finalist and also a Violet 
Crown winner). His most recent book is The Tentmaker. A 
professional editor and consultant, Reynolds is author of more than 
seven hundred publications ranging from nonfiction books to short 
fiction to book reviews and scholarly articles. An NEA Fellow, he is 
a member of the Texas Institute of Letters and presently serves as 
professor and associate dean for arts and humanities at the 
University of Texas at Dallas.