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 […]
December 10, 2018
Poetry for People Who Hate Poetry – December
What makes poetry poetry? Ask that question of a dozen poets, scholars, or readers and you’ll get as many different answers, maybe more. Some won’t be much help: “Poetry is […]
December 6, 2018
Asking College and High School Students How They Want to be Taught
After teaching college for ten years, some days I feel like a wrinkled old pro, but many days I still find the practice of conveying information to young people to […]
December 5, 2018
An Accidental Memoirist: The Education of a Young Poet by David Biespiel
Sze-Lorrain: In the first chapter of your latest book of prose, The Education of a Young Poet, you write: Perhaps the hardest thing about my education as a poet is […]
December 3, 2018
Kenyon Review’s Holiday Reading Recommendations
Ah, the holidays, season of lists. At KR, we celebrate by asking our editors and staff to enthuse about books—new and old, in any and every genre—that have captured their […]
December 3, 2018
Should Writers Be Conscious of the Artistic Movements of Their Time?
There’s a scene towards the middle of At Eternity’s Gate, the new biopic about Vincent van Gogh, in which Van Gogh (Willem Dafoe) and Paul Gauguin (Oscar Isaac) discuss in […]
November 30, 2018
What I Learned About Teaching College From Being a Parent of Young Kids and Vice Versa
When I got the email asking preschool parents to lead an activity with their kids, I started preparing a poetry writing exercise. I could tell the teachers were dubious as […]
November 29, 2018
In Defense of Walter Scott
In E.M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel, a book made up of a series of lectures the author gave at Cambridge in 1927 and which I’ve discussed on this blog […]
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 16, 2018
Adventures in Pedagogy: Teaching Your Students to Become Textual Flâneurs (plus pedagogy links)
This is the first essay in my new series on teaching for the Kenyon Review, Adventures in Pedagogy. Each year that I teach college English, film, composition, and creative writing, […]
November 15, 2018
On Why I Like Travel Writing
Travel writing is a surprisingly divisive topic: I have quite a few literary friends who look down on the genre as a self-indulgent exercise, the product of privileged men and […]