December 12, 2018
In Defense of Long Sentences
When it comes to prose style in contemporary literature, no two works have had a greater influence than George Orwell’s 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language” and Strunk and […]
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 20, 2018
Watching Her Library Burn
What is it about libraries that are so emotional? Susan Orlean asked this question during her recent appearance at Cleveland Public Library, and it’s one I’ve continued to ponder since. […]
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 […]
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
Poetry for People Who Hate Poetry – November
“I never got poetry,” someone says to me again. And I sigh. Because I never got it either—at least, not until I learned to stop worrying about “getting it.” In […]
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 […]