After 27 years, Katha Pollitt will finally follow-up her debut collection poetry with a new new book of poems, “The Mind-Body Problem.”

Pollitt won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry in 1982 with her “Antarctic Traveller” book, but it took the author nearly three decades to finish this new collection. At Granta, critic Adam Gopnik interviewed Pollitt about writing and publishing in this new century.

Here’s an excerpt about political poetry in the age of Barack Obama: “There is not a lot of explicitly political poetry that I love. Berthold Brecht would be an exception … Adrienne Rich has written political poems that are original and profound, and others that seem to me not so interesting as writing. Mostly, I think that if you can say it in an article, or a leaflet, or a letter, or an email, then do so! It’s not going to make much of a poem.”

How do you build a better literary panel discussion? The NY Observer talked to a star-studded line-up of literary experts at the opening gala for the PEN World Voices Festival, getting some varied answers to that burning question.

New Yorker festival organizer Rhonda Sherman explained that journalists and authors David Remnick, George Packer, and Adam Gopnik are some of the best moderators in the business. PEN American Center President Francine Prose (pictured) recalled a recent panel that lasted, amazingly, five-and-a-half hours.

Sherman also offered this sage advice: “In general, it’s not a party unless there’s blood on the floor … There needs to be tension on a panel. You need to have some disagreement. If everyone agrees on the panel, it’s a total snooze-a-thon.” (Via Literary Saloon)

2008 Nobel Prize winner Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio was a surprise addition to the PEN World Voices line-up this morning.

The author will join four other French authors in the festival. Le Clezio has produced 30 novels, and the Nobel judges called him an “author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization.”

You can buy tickets here. Here’s the announcement, via Twitter. Official links and ticket info to follow this afternoon: “We’ve just a few minutes ago confirmed Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio for a special pre-World Voices Festival event. Friday April 24 at 8pm in conversation with Adam Gopnik at the 92nd St Y.”