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April 24, 2008 • KR Blog • Writing

Geometry & My Feelings & Poems

By Heather Christle

It started with shapes. A friend is writing this incredible series of poems full of shapes that do not behave as one might expect them to behave. They are gone up to. They open and they chase you around. I love them vigorously.

So because my brain was full of triangles, squares, rhombuses and cones, I began to consider what my real feelings about these figures might be, what associations and imaginings I have to do with them. I do not trust squares. They are so eager to please! So immediately friendly. They are like Californians. Triangles I adore, more specifically isosceles. Equilateral triangles are too spiritual and scalene seems a little violent.

And then as I was happily assigning human traits to various polygons, playing around with numbers and emotions, stanzas crept in and asked for some attention. I said okay. I said couplets you are triangles to me. I know this is wrong. But I am trying to be honest.

So, I reasoned, if couplets are triangles, then what is a tercet? And I had no answer. Oh I have not at all mastered the tercet. And the quatrain is out of the question.

I thought again of the Pirah??, of having no words for numbers other than one, two and many. One line I can handle. Two lines are easy. But as soon as I hit the tercet mark, I am into the territory of many.

I can read tercets and quatrains as readily as anything. Yet to come at it from the inside, from the making, seems awfully peculiar. I feel like a plant who’s grown in comfort to the limits of its pot and is suddenly transferred to the windowbox. My root goes where?! You must be joking!

Then I thought this world is full of people for whom tercets and quatrains are delicious and simple to write. I am using the terms “full” and “this world” loosely. But you all do exist and have feelings. And I want to know what your feelings are. And then maybe I could have them when you are done with them. Thank you in advance. I will love you vigorously.

The Kenyon Review was founded in 1939. The resources for the new literary journal were provided by Gordon Keith Chalmers, President of Kenyon College, while the inspiration to establish the journal and raise the national stature of the institution had come from his wife Roberta Teale Swartz, herself a poet and a friend and protege of Robert Frost. Frost encouraged the idea and visited Kenyon more than once. The poet and critic John Crowe Ransom was recruited to Kenyon by Chalmers with the express purpose in mind of his launching a distinguished magazine. During his 21-year tenure, Ransom published such internationally known writers as Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, William Empson, Mark Van Doren, Kenneth Burke, and Delmore Schwartz, as well as younger writers: Flannery O'Connor, Robert Lowell, and Peter Taylor, to name a few. It was perhaps the best known and most influential literary magazine in the English-speaking world during the 1940s and '50s. In 1969, discouraged by the quarterly's financial burdens and sagging reputation, Kenyon College ceased publication of The Kenyon Review. The journal was revived in 1979, and in June 1990, internationally acclaimed poet and editor Marilyn Hacker was hired as the Review's first full-time (and first female) editor. She quickly broadened the quarterly's scope to include more minority and marginalized viewpoints. In April 1994, the trustees directed that The Kenyon Review be continued, but with significant cost-reducing and revenue-enhancing initiatives. Hacker left and David Lynn (acting editor in 1989-90), Kenyon English professor, was named editor on a two-thirds time basis. The magazine's financial picture has since stabilized and improved dramatically. The creation of a Kenyon Review Board of Trustees and a renewed commitment by Kenyon College combined to guarantee the financial health of the Review and to free its editors to pursue increased excellence. Such is the status of The Kenyon Review today.
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