ON THE KR WEB SITE
AN INTERVIEW WITH STANLEY PLUMLY

KR Poetry Editor David Baker talked with Plumly about his forthcoming volumes, Old Heart: Poems ( W. W. Norton, Sept. 2007) and Posthumous Keats: A Meditation on Immortality (nonfiction, W. W. Norton, 2008), a preview chapter of which appeared in the Summer 2007 issue of KR.

David Baker: Stan, it's a real pleasure to have this chance to talk about the culmination of your many years of devoted work on the life and poetry of John Keats. People know your poetry, of course, and your critical essays and reviews about contemporary poetry. But fewer are aware that you've been working for a long time on a book about Keats. We are excited for the chance to print “This Mortal Body” in The Kenyon Review. I want to start with that essay here, then venture further into the whole project from which this piece is drawn. Then I hope we will have time to discuss your own work, your new poems, and Old Heart.

“This Mortal Body” is about the great 19th century British Romantic poet, John Keats. Specifically, you focus in this essay on Keats and his circle the summer of 1818. Could you place that time in Keats' lifeline for us here just a bit? Why focus on this summer?

Stanley Plumly: The Keats book, as I've come to call it over the years, is titled Posthumous Keats, for reasons we can talk about later. The book is in seven chapters, seven sections to a chapter—I couldn't write it any other way than like a poem. The numerology gives it all a certain overt gesture toward structure; that way I can explore, juxtapose, circulate, whatever, within a structure. So that within the “superstructure” of the thing I am permitted asymmetry: none of the sections is equal in length, for instance, and though the chapters function somewhere between 40 to 45 manuscript pages, there is imbalance there too. The crucial "imbalance"— which brings us to your question about Chapter 3—is that at 50 pages this is what I think of as the fulcrum chapter.

DB: Seven chapters, seven sections: that's the structure, seven by seven, of your seminal poem, “Summer Celestial.” Maybe we'll come back to that. But would you dive a little more deeply into Chapter 3 just now? Why that summer of 1818?

SP: This is when Keats first comes to some terms with what will become his future. George is leaving for America; Tom is deathly ill; and Keats himself will, as if fated, set himself up for his own slow death by pushing his body past its limit on the Northern walking tour with Charles Brown. Bad roads, bad food, bad weather, and worse accommodations will insure his prolonged sore throat and stomach ailment, so that by the time he returns to London (having completed only half the planned tour) he is extra-vulnerable to the consumption killing Tom, whom he nurses for Tom's three last months in a confined space.

This chapter highlights a dominant motif (fact) in the book: the place of brothers or brother surrogates in a man's life. Chapter 3 is about the breakup of literal brothers and the reforming of male relationships for Keats here at the true beginning of his beyond-brief writing career. Brown will move into the center of the picture, but so will the example of Robert Burns, who dies young of drink and poverty, and whose “fame,” for Keats, seems extremely compromised. Keats writes —in addition to a lot of letters— quite a few poems on this Northern tour; the one poem he tries to destroy (rescued by Brown) is the “famous” “Sonnet written in the Cottage where Burns was born”: the sonnet that begins, “This mortal body of a thousand days/ Now fills, O Burns, a space in thine own room” and ends “Yet can I drink a bumper to thy name,-—/ O smile among the shades, for this is fame!”

A fiction writer could not invent a more dramatic, epiphanic example in Keats's life, in which his young past and younger future pour as one into the same moment.

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NEWS KR LAUNCHES FIRST ANNUAL LITERARY FESTIVAL

This fall, the first annual Kenyon Review Literary Festival will be held in Gambier, Ohio. Scheduled for November 9-10, the festival complements the sixth annual Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement, which will take place on November 8 in New York City. The award recipient this year is Margaret Atwood, whose poetry, fiction, criticism, and children's books have achieved critical and popular success, garnering dozens of awards from literary, cultural and social institutions throughout the world.

Highlighted by a keynote presentation by Atwood, who will travel to Gambier after the award dinner, the festival is designed to bring literature home with seminars, readings, and more, available to Ohio residents. The festival will also host the Midwest Literary Magazine & Small Press Fair in conjunction with the Council of Literary Magazines & Presses (CLMP), offering great discounts on literary magazines and attracting editors throughout the region to meet writers and readers.

In the months leading up to the festival, a special community outreach program—Knox Reads— will be held. Starting in September, this Knox County reading event will feature Atwood's best selling novel Oryx and Crake. Two discussions related to the book will be hosted by the Public Library of Mount Vernon and Knox County.

You can plan for the event now with this calendar. Times, locations, and more programs will be finalized soon and featured in KR's next e-newsletter. You can also visit our web site to keep up to date on developments.

• September 15 Kick-off of Knox Reads! Start reading Oryx and Crake and join us for the discussions in October and November.
  
• October 16 Tuesday, 7:00 PM. Community Discussion of Oryx and Crake led by John Chidester, Director, Public Library of Mount Vernon and Knox County. Location: Public Library of Mount Vernon and Knox County.
  
• November 7 Wednesday, noon-1:00 PM. “Putting Canada on the Map:  Atwood's Sense of Place,” a Brown Bag Chat with Deborah Laycock, Professor of English, Kenyon College. Location: Public Library of Mount Vernon and Knox County.
  
• November 9 Friday, 7:00 PM. Join us for the annual Writers' Harvest, a fund-raising event to benefit local charities. Location: Gund Commons, Kenyon College.
  
• November 10 Saturday. ALL DAY. The Lit Mag Fair/Community Book Sale—Great prices on literary magazines and used books! Location: Gund Commons, Kenyon College.
  
  MORNING and AFTERNOON. Roundtables, Readings, and Panel Sessions on publishing, literature, Ohio authors, and more. Location: Gund Commons, Kenyon College.
  
  7:30 PM. Keynote Event: An Evening with Margaret Atwood, followed by book signing and reception. Location: Rosse Hall, Kenyon College.

Think of this section as a bulletin from KR in which we brag about the accomplishments of the extended KR family and leave out the gall-bladder surgeries.

Gregory Blake Smith was named the Lloyd P. Johnson Norwest Professor of English and the Liberal Arts at Carleton College. He joined the Carleton faculty in 1987 and teaches American literature and creative writing. His story "The Madonna of the Relics" appeared in the Fall 2005 issue of KR.

A review of Jill Bialosky's novel The Life Room appeared in the New York Times earlier this month. The book's first chapter is also featured. Bialosky's poems were published in KR's Spring 2005 issue.

Williard Spiegelman, Hughes Professor of English at Southern Methodist University and frequent contributor to KR, lamented the pending loss of poetry journal Parnassus in the July 25 edition of the Wall Street Journal. Fortunately for all, Parnassus found a patron saint. The article, however, is still worth reading as Spiegelman takes a loving look back at Parnassus‘ beginnings, as well as that of Poetry.

Luke Kennard, 26, has been shortlisted for Britain's Forward Poetry Prizes—aka “the bardic Booker”— for his collection The Harbour Beyond the Movie. Kennard, who has served as an associate reader for KR and currently attends the University of Exeter as a PhD English student, is the youngest person ever to be shortlisted for the Forward Prize.

The Kenyon Review is supported in part by generous grants from the Ohio Arts Council, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Smart Family Foundation, and the New York Times Company Foundation.