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June 13, 2008 • KR Blog • Uncategorized

National Pigeon Day

By Heather Christle

THE INTRO-RATIONALE
Today is National Pigeon Day. One must celebrate! Because of their iridescence, their cooing and their regarding of humans from alternating sides of the head. (Have you ever tried it? It’s full of affectionate suspicion. Or suspicious affection. Affable soup??on! Whatever it is, I love and recommend it.)

MUSICAL INTERLUDE
Probably you will want to spend the day practicing singing “Feed the Birds (Tuppence a Bag).” Luckily, a version with subtitles exists. Prefer to sing about pigeons in German? No problem.

PERSONAL ANECDOTE
When I was 10 or so, visiting family in England, we went to Trafalgar Square to feed the birds, and one promptly shat on my head. Not from high above–it actually landed on my head and let loose. I admired its boldness. I would like to write a poem in that spirit.

IDENTIFICATION
Oh it can be difficult! Even for the geniuses among us:

Pigeons on the grass alas.

Pigeons on the grass alas.

Short longer grass short longer longer shorter yellow grass. Pigeons large pigeons on the shorter longer yellow grass alas pigeons on the grass.

If they were not pigeons what were they.

REBUTTAL
James Thurber objects!:

It is neither just nor accurate to connect the word alas with pigeons. Pigeons are definitely not alas. They have nothing to do with alas and they have nothing to do with hooray (not even when you tie red, white, and blue ribbons on them and let them loose at band concerts); they have nothing to do with mercy me or isn’t that fine, either. White rabbits, yes, and Scotch terriers, and blue-jays, and even hippopotamuses, but not pigeons. I happen to have studied pigeons very closely and carefully, and I have studied the effect, or rather the lack of effect, of pigeons very carefully. A number of pigeons alight from time to time on the sill of my hotel window when I am eating breakfast and staring out the window. They never alas me, they never make me feel alas; they never make me feel anything.

HOORAY
Pigeons have everything to do with hooray. They never make me never feel anything. They are to avoid a great sadness. I do not understand a love of an absence of pigeons. Even David Berman cannot convince me.

RESOURCEFULNESS
Pigeons are resourceful. If by chance you are not surrounded by pigeons, you should go ahead and make some yourself.

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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