Listen
Up
KR
is proud to announce that we've begun podcasting.
What is podcasting? Click
here to find out more.
Currently, we have four podcasts available for download: Conversations
with poet Dana
Roeser, former poet laureate Mark
Strand, poet Jason
Schneiderman, and Fiona
McCrae, publisher and director of Graywolf Press.
In the future, we plan to offer many more interviews, author readings,
and conversations with people in and around the world of literature.
The KR Podcast Series: Because your ears love literature, too.
Exchanging Words
Recommended reading from the KR staff, editors, authors, and readers.
Tell us what you're reading—send us your faves (books, magazines, blogs, etc.) and be sure to include your name, affiliation, and any web addresses for your recommended reading list. Click here to send us your list.
Robin Ekiss, poet... Broadsided Press—On the first and fifteenth of every month, they post poems interpreted by artists to their website, to be distributed by "vectors," folks who offer to print them out and post them in coffee shops, libraries, bus stations, grocery stores—anywhere poetry should be, but isn't. It's an interesting take on e-publishing.
Nicole Beer, poet...Brian Barker’s book The Animal Gospels, recently published by Tupelo Press as a winner of their Editors Prize. And lest the fact that he is my husband make me appear unfairly biased in his favor, here’s what Mark Doty has to say: "Brian Barker's elegant ear, schooled in the cadences of southern speech, is tuned to an intensely physical musicality...his work pushes into bold new territory, his splendid rhythms both broken and fiercely alive, inescapable, rescuing fragments of a life into music."
Reginald Shepherd, poet... Dan Beachy-Quick's new book of poems, Mulberry, just out from Tupelo Press. It deftly combines delicate lyricism, verbal investigation, and close inspection of the natural and human worlds and their intersections.
Roy Kesey, fiction writer...My favorite website/blog these days is Riley Dog. Steve, whoever he is, has the best nose for real poetry that I've ever, um, seen.
Jynne Martin, poet and assistant director of publicity, Random House...Josh Bell’s No Planets Strike, which to me read like poems of a fallen god, hysterically funny and absolutely all-encompassing in their enormous, spastic reach.
Report from the 2006 KR Summer Programs
GAMBIER,
Ohio— Summer
is high tide for Kenyon Review Programs. We
began the season in early June when nineteen participants traveled to
a special writing/reading workshop in Vitorchiano, Italy. In this charming,
medieval village north of Rome, one group wrote fiction with KR Editor
David Lynn, while the other read Ovid’s Metamorphoses with
Kenyon College President Georgia Nugent and David Baker (KR poetry
editor). All gathered daily in a local workshop space dating to the twelfth
century, with a breathtaking view of the lush, eternal landscape that
inspired Ovid himself. The spirit of Tuscia was captured in many of the
stories and poems written by the group during the eight-day visit.
Kenyon Review Site Links
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Contact
Info
The Kenyon
Review
104 College Drive · Walton House
Gambier, Ohio 43022
740.427.5208
kenyonreview@kenyon.edu
by Nancy Zafris
[This
interview is part of a series of conversations with authors who have work
in KR. It is funded in part by a grant from the National Endowment
for the Arts.]
I
FIRST MET Philip Deaver through his work. I eagerly followed his stories
for years, purchasing any literary magazine that carried a story of his,
until we began an email correspondence a few years ago. Then we finally
met at an AWP conference. It was a happy occasion for me to meet someone
as nice as his work is good.
Philip Deaver's book Silent Retreats was the 13th winner of
the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. He has held fellowships
from
the National Endowment of the Arts and Bread Loaf Writer's Conference.
His work, which can be found mostly in literary magazines, has appeared
in Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards and has been recognized
in Best American Short Stories and The Pushcart Prize
anthology. Many of his current stories are set in a fictionalized version
of his hometown, Tuscola, Illinois. He has edited an anthology of creative
nonfiction baseball essays, Scoring from Second: Writers on Baseball,
due out in spring 2007. Next spring he also has an essay to be published
in Creative Nonfiction's baseball issue. Deaver also writes poetry.
His poems have appeared in magazines such as The Reaper, Poetry Miscellany,
and the Florida Review, and are collected in a new volume, How
Men Pray, just out from Anhinga Press. Deaver is Associate Professor
of English and permanent Writer-in-Residence at Rollins College, Winter
Park, FL, and teaches in the Spalding University limited residency MFA
program.
We've
all received those holiday bulletins from friends and
acquaintances—you
know the ones—"Chip's on the International Space Station.
Judith was awarded the Nobel Prize. Cliff and I finished our transglobal
sailing expedition last November and, gosh, it's good to be back
at the manor." 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.
-
Beth Bachmann received a fellowship from the Tennessee Arts Commission and will be the John Atherton Scholar in Poetry at this summer’s Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference.
-
David Baker, KR's poetry editor, has a new book forthcoming in August from Arc Publications (UK): Treatise on Touch: Selected Poems.
-
Nicky Beer was named one of the 2006 Discovery/The Nation award winners, and her manuscript The Diminishing House was a finalist for Sarabande’s 2006 Kathryn A. Morton Prize. Her work appears in the latest issue of Bat City Review; her poem “Stumphumper” is also currently featured on their website. Nicky served as nonfiction editor for the the latest issue of Center (published by the University of Missouri-Columbia), featuring essays by Debra Anne Davis and Arthur Saltzman, interviews with Alan Shapiro and Naeem Murr, and poetry by Robert Wrigley.
- Carol
Cosman's translation of Albert Camus' short story "The
Adulterous Wife," which appeared in the Spring 2006 issue of KR, is now available in the volume Exile and the Kingdom, published by Penguin UK.
THE SUMMER OF 1941 was a bleak one. In July, the USSR and the United Kingdom officially agreed to support each other in war against Germany. In August, the first wartime meeting between British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and President Roosevelt took place. Although officially still neutral, the U.S. joined Britain in issuing a joint declaration that became known as the Atlantic Charter and was later to serve as the vision for the United Nations. Wendell Willkie, the former presidential candidate who ran against Roosevelt, embarked on a campaign to awaken America from its isolationist slumber, urging unlimited aid to Britain in its struggle against Nazi Germany, while France's Petain gave full support to the Nazis. By September, the Jews living in Germany would be required to wear a yellow Star of David.
The Summer 1941 issue of KR was no less preoccupied with events in Europe. Here, from our archives, are two selections.
the pattern
MARGUERITE YOUNG
Now the rain
crow's crying, now the rose petal falls,
And these are two separate pursuits to the end
As now the rain crow's crying, as now the rose
Loosens its petals in the finite wind.
But this is the mental sorrow of all ending,
The shattering image of that still-born heir
As this cold star must generate the last
Generation colder than its star,
Even as the fin-footed children of the surf
Or in darkness the pilot star-nosed mole,
As the white mountain goat feeding on anenomes,
As whatever does seem beautiful,
The rain crow crying, and the last red rose,
The rabbits quivering in meadow holes.
For in the abstract there were these present flaws
Whereof the rain crow cries, rose petal falls.
the nazis purge philosophy
MARTEN TEN HOOR
In view of the universal occupation with the threatening military and diplomatic activities of present day Germany, even those whose particular business it is to keep a sharp and expectant eye on the philosophic scene, namely the philosophers, may be pardoned for having failed to follow carefully the feverish activity of the German National-Socialist philosophers. There is the further excuse that Hitler's Mein Kampf and Rosenberg's Der Mythus seemed so extravagant in thought and so unprofessional in method that we American philosophers, who are on the whole a very serious and sober lot, did not really expect any appreciable number of our German colleagues to "rally around" these semi-hysterical leaders and to make so concerted and so extensive an attempt to provide the National-Socialist party with a philosophy. The fact is, however, that literally dozens of philosophers have for the last five or six years been producing numerous volumes, the sole purpose of which seems to have been to provide National Socialism not merely with a philosophy but with an officially acceptable one. In truth, dialectical as well as industrial machinery has been working at top speed in Germany. It is no wonder, therefore, that the product has some of the characteristics of a "Blitz-philosophie."
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.
