Brown Prof. Keith Waldrop, 76, shows no signs of slowing down. His latest book is in the running for this year’s National Book Award for poetry.

The Providence Journal / Connie Grosch

PROVIDENCE — At Keith Waldrop’s house, four graduate students read their poems and wait, heads bent, for their peers to comment.

The other students –– part of Waldrop’s Master of Fine Arts class in poetry –– scribble notes, ponder and talk about images, the arrangement of words and “abstract building blocks.”

“I like this poem a lot, but I wonder about the line breaks and the form,” says a student.

During the two-hour class, professor Waldrop rubs his eyes and removes his oversized glasses. He wears black shoes, black socks, black pants and a black shirt. His long hair and beard are white.

“If you revise or rework something, keep the old version,” says Waldrop, who teaches the Brown University class in his book-heavy home on the East Side.

“You shouldn’t throw something away because it doesn’t sound right at the moment. I often make the opposite mistake, of keeping too much.”

Waldrop’s storehouse may pay off.

The 76-year-old professor’s latest book, “Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy,” is one of five finalists for this year’s National Book Award for poetry.

It includes material that is 20 years old, some of it published previously in France.

Waldrop shrugs.

“I don’t always have an idea of what I’m doing,” he says. “I put things down and I often have no idea what it will be a part of. At some point I say, well, I have this and I have that.”

WALDROP’S MUSINGS on memory, art and death have produced some 20 books of poetry, but it would be a mistake to call him just a poet.

An actor and director, he has helped found theater groups in Minnesota and Rhode Island, with offbeat names such as the Wastepaper Theater. He has taught at Brown for 41 years, where he is the Brooke Russell Astor Professor of Humanities.

By his own count, he has created more than 1,000 works of art, mostly collages, some of them reproduced this year in “Several Gravities,” a hardcover book from Siglio Press, a Los Angeles publisher dedicated to publishing books that “defy categorization and ignite conversation.”

He’s also a publisher.

In the 1960s, he and his wife, Rosmarie, started Burning Deck Press, printing books on a second-hand press. They publish four books a year, including works by French and German authors.

Critics and admirers have called him a poet’s poet, graphic designer, publisher and “hoodoo god.”

Says Publishers Weekly: “Waldrop has long been a major force in American avant-garde poetics.”

Even a National Book Award notice is nothing new to Waldrop.

His first book, “A Windmill Near Cavalry,” was nominated for the same award –– 40 years ago.

GROWING UP in Emporia, Kan., Keith Waldrop read comic books and the Bible.

His father, Arthur, worked as a brakeman for the Santa Fe railroad, and his mother, Opal, was a housewife and piano teacher and practical nurse later in life. A deeply religious woman, she moved the family to South Carolina, where Waldrop attended a fundamentalist school.

The marriage didn’t last. “It was a difficult separation, but together they were hell,” says Waldrop. He was a teenager when his parents divorced. “It was the happiest day of my life.”

Assuming his early education would be bad, Waldrop rarely took notes. In high school he began writing and reading literature –– Shakespeare and Greek plays –– “at a great gallop.”

He also developed a love for the theater. In elementary school he played Peter Rabbit “not because I was talented but because I was the smallest child and could crawl under the fence,” he says. When he was older, his father took him to see a famous actor –– he doesn’t remember the name –– in “Hamlet.” “It was sort of a revelation.”

At Kansas State Teachers College, Waldrop studied psychiatry. But his premed study was cut short by the draft. In 1953, he went to Kitzingen, Germany, as an Army engineer. He met his future wife Rosmarie there, and she joined him later in Ann Arbor, Mich., where they both earned Ph.D.s in comparative literature in the mid 1960s. At the college Waldrop and several others created the experimental theater group, the Wolgamot Society.

He also started an arts magazine, Burning Deck. But when the magazine proved too difficult to produce, he and Rosmarie –– also a poet and translator —started printing small books instead.

Michigan University published his first book of poetry, “A Windmill Near Calvary,” in 1968. Waldrop was 35.

“No one reviewed it,” he says, until it was short-listed for the National Book Award a year later.

He didn’t win. (John Berryman did for “His Toy, His Dream, His Rest.”)

“I thought the nomination would help me get a better publisher,” says Waldrop. Instead, Michigan University rejected his second book. “Not only couldn’t I get a better publisher, I couldn’t keep the one I had.”

From then on, he says, his books were published by small presses “and sometimes by very small presses.” Some were issued by his own Burning Deck Press.

OVER A 40-YEAR SPAN Waldrop produced more than 20 works of poetry and translations, including “The Garden of Effort,” “The Ruins of Providence,” “A Ceremony Somewhere Else,” “Hegel’s Family,” “The Opposite of Letting the Mind Wander,” “The Silhouette of the Bridge,” “The House Seen from Nowhere,” and this year’s “Transcendental Studies,” from the University of California Press.

He has translated the work of Claude Royet-Journoud, Anne-Marie Albiach, and Edmond Jabes, among others.

“There’s a lot of death in my books, and I’m very interested in memory,” he says. “I don’t usually start by saying, I’m going to write a book on X, Y and Z. My books grow together.”

His work has won awards, acclaim and money, including the Americas Award for Poetry, an Amy Lowell Traveling Poetry Fellowship and the Pell Award for Excellence in the Arts.

In 2000, the French government presented Waldrop with the rank of Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, for his lifetime contribution to French literature.

According to the National Book Award judges, Waldrop’s latest book is a powerful work that merges the metaphysical and the personal. The poems, they say, reconcile Waldrop’s romantic tendencies with formal experimentation, “revealing him as a transcendentalist for the new millennium.”

Although he turns 77 next month, Waldrop still has something to say.

He has completed a large book of poems, and is working on several new translations.

Wesleyan University recently published his translation of Charles Baudelaire’s “Paris Spleen,” a collection of 51 short prose poems. Also, a 1993 fictional memoir, “Light While There Is Light,” will be reprinted soon, he says. And Burning Deck Press is still in business.

“People keep asking me when I’m going to retire. I don’t know.”

In his 2004 work, “The Real Subject: Queries and Conjectures of Jacob Delafon, with Sample Poems,” the narrator offers a number of observations on life, experience and death.

The main character, Jacob, isn’t sure what he thinks about life, but he’s gotten used to it, he says.

At one point a friend laments the coming of old age. But Jacob insists he has lost nothing with the passage of time.

“He was, after all, never bold, never strong, never good looking,” Jacob says, adding, “And what could he do, back then, that he cannot do now?”

pdavis@projo.com