a continuation of this series, we now announce the final Old Series nominee for “Best Issue Ever,” selected from The Kenyon Review, 1960-1969. For previous posts in this series, read about The Kenyon Review in the 40’s and Hannah’s nominee ~or~ the 50’s and Kate’s nominee. Vote for your favorite decade, and its representative issue in our upcoming KR newsletter!
If I were forced to pick just one Kenyon Review from the 60’s, it’d have to be Autumn 1960. And not just for its snappy cover either…
Although admittedly, it’s certainly part of the appeal. Autumn 1960, and it seems flowers are exploding…dare I say, just like the pages of The Kenyon Review! as it charges out of the gate into this first year of its third decade with an elegant, enchanting and impressive mix of poetry and prose.
In my estimation, Autumn 1960 deserves our attention for its monumental features, a duo act of prowess and command, the perfectly balanced, stunning symmetry of Flannery O’ Connor paired with none other than the Sylvia Plath.
Flannery O’Connor’s “The Comforts of Home” wastes no time introducing us to a furious young narrator named Thomas, who is begging his bleeding heart of a mother to cast out the femme fatale Nymphomaniac ex-con Sarah Ham (who’d rather you call her ‘Star’) before she takes them all down with her. If only he knew what O’Connor has in store…In this sad and startling southern tale, it seems like Mom, helplessly virtuous as she is, can’t help but welcome Star inside, indefinitely…and Star can’t help but throw eyes and flirt with the tense Thomas, even visiting him naked in the middle of the night.
Tom takes no interest, and actively rebels against Star’s advances. In an elegant trap that explodes like a perfect firework, O’Connor concludes with a bang. The nervous Thomas, pushed to his limits, discharges his father’s pistol, but instead of shooting Star, the bullet claims his mother instead, earning him–instead of her–a corner cell in the county jail.
One explosion–as often tends to be the rule–leads to another. Not missing a beat, Autumn 1960 featured two stunning, signature poems by Sylvia Plath, pieces that announce her then as I have known her now. They are confident, cock-eyed and intricately beautiful.
“The Colossus,”–also the title of Plath’s first volume of poetry, published that same fall of 1960–introduces a belabored speaker who begins her lyric in futile lament, announcing in her first line, “I shall never get you put together entirely, / Pieced, glued, and properly jointed.” As the speaker examines the assembly’s possible endlessness–and maybe even the infinity possible in the lyric–Plath’s narrator finds ways to take shelter among the dark ruins, concluding simply and dutifully, “My hours are married to shadow.”
As her husband Ted Hughes practiced amateur beekeeping in the physical world, Plath too got in on the act in her confessional work, offering up as well a portrait of “The Beekeeper’s Daughter” in her virtual world of verse. If we’re looking for explosions, this may be the nuclear core, where each word exceeds the ones before it. It is a poetic chain reaction, where each line ignites and adds to the furious sparking of those that follow:
A garden of mouthings. Purple, scarlet-speckled,black
The great corollas dilate, peeling back their silks.
Their musk encroaches, circle after circle,
A well of scents almost too dense to breathe in.
Hieratical in your frock coat, maestro of the bees,
You move among the many-breasted hives,My heart under your foot, sister of a stone.
Trumpet-throats open to the beaks of birds.
The Golden Rain Tree drips its powders down.
In these little boudoirs streaked with orange and red
The anthers nod their heads, potent as kings
To father dynasties. The air is rich.
Here is a queenship no mother can contest-A fruit that’s death to taste: dark flesh, dark parings.
In burrows narrow as a finger, solitary bees
Keep house among the grasses. Kneeling down
I set my eye to a hole-mouth and meet an eye
Round, green, disconsolate as a tear.
Father, bridegroom, in this Easter egg
Under the coronal of sugar rosesThe queen bee marries the winter of your year.
Bees would swarm again and again in Plath’s work, and obviously, for good reason. So vote for the bees! Vote for Plath and O’Connor! Vote for Autumn 1960! Vote for the decade with the best! Vote for Pynchon and Delillo! Wright and Lowell, Lessing, Rukeyser, Naipaul, Lispector, Bishop and even Joyce Carol Oates! Vote cause you love Xerox, the twist, the pill and JFK! Vote cause back then, we were still calling it ‘Autumn’! Be groovy, vote 1960!
