December 17, 2018
“Transformed this way into your own atlas of being”: A Conversation with Gillian Cummings
Gillian Cummings is the author of The Owl Was a Baker’s Daughter, selected by John Yau as the winner of the 2018 Colorado Prize for Poetry (The Center for Literary Publishing […]
December 13, 2018
On Eckes, Harvey and Myles
It sounds like a middling 70’s folk rock act, right? Maybe in some alternate universe it is a middling 70’s folk rock act, but in my own universe it’s been […]
December 11, 2018
“We transform among chaos”: A Conversation with Hala Alyan
Hala Alyan is a Palestinian American writer and clinical psychologist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Guernica and elsewhere. Her poetry collections have won the Arab American Book Award and […]
November 28, 2018
“Beauty is embedded in the impulse”: A Conversation with Allison Titus
Allison Titus is the author most recently of SOB STORY (Barrelhouse) and The True Book of Animal Homes (Saturnalia). She embroiders erasures from discarded library books and with the poet […]
November 19, 2018
“A SUCCESSION OF IMAGES”: H.D., POOL GROUP, & THE POET AS FILMMAKER
While primarily remembered for her poetry, Modernist writer H.D. worked across mediums, experimenting with fiction, translation, memoir, and silent film over the course of her artistic career. These forays into […]
November 14, 2018
“The need to find beauty”: A Conversation with Allison Benis White
Allison Benis White is the author of Please Bury Me in This, winner of the 2018 Rilke Prize, and Small Porcelain Head, selected by Claudia Rankine for the Levis Prize […]
November 7, 2018
“Spare this body, set fire to another”: Speech & Silence in Work by Kaveh Akbar, Brenna Womer, & Henk Rossouw
In the one volume of writing that he published during his lifetime, Ludwig Wittgenstein claimed that “the limits of my language are the limits of my world.” Indeed, grammar, and […]
November 2, 2018
The Poetics of Disbelief
In 1817, Samuel Taylor Coleridge famously coined the term “suspension of disbelief,” meaning a willingness to silence one’s critical faculties and believe in something purely conjectural for the sake of […]
October 30, 2018
As Midterm Elections Approach, Poets Respond
For almost a year now, I’ve been teaching at The Speakeasy Project, where I serve as a Poetry Mentor. I have never in my life enjoyed this kind of workshop experience as […]
October 26, 2018
Improvisation: New Orleans’s Gift to the Modern World
Since the cave-dwellers of Lascaux shaped their drawings to conform to the bulges and crannies of their cave walls, improvisation has always been with us. But if there is a […]
October 22, 2018
Clifton, Pain, and Poetry
If you haven’t read Lucille Clifton’s “Wishes for Sons” before, you might assume from the title that it’s a poem about hoping for sons – a mother’s prayerful request for a […]
October 22, 2018
VERVE {IN} VERSE: IN CONVERSATION WITH MONICA LEWIS
Note: Verve {in} Verse is my new poet-focused feature here at The Kenyon Review in which I converse with poets about their work and interests both on and off […]