April 2012

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The Kenyon Review Announces Earthworks Prize for Indigenous Poetry

KR, in partnership with Salt Publishing, UK, and the award-winning Earthworks Book Series, announces a competition for a first or second collection of poems by an Indigenous writer. The winning volume will be published by Salt, and the winning poet will give a reading at Kenyon College and receive a $1,000 honorarium.

KR is proud to announce a new collection from The Kenyon Review and University of Arkansas Press featuring nine interviews and accompanying poems from contemporary poets originally publishing in KR and KROnline. All interviews are by poetry editor David Baker. The collection includes work from Linda Gregerson, Fady Joudah, Ted Kooser, W.S. Merwin, Alice Notley, Meghan O’Rourke, Carl Phillips, Stanley Plumly, and Arthur Sze.

KRO Goes Audio—Listen in!

Enjoy audio KROnline content! Select KRO web features will be published with a recording of the author reading from her/his work. (Scroll down for a recording of Ashleigh Pedersen reading her story “Sleeping Giant,” currently on KRO.) Listen in anywhere you connect online, and take KRO with you on the go on your phone or tablet. Try out material from the most recent KRO update—just look for the speaker icon next to any title, and click for audio!

Tomas Tranströmer is the recipient of the 2011 Nobel Prize for Literature. His poem “April and Silence” appeared in KR’s Summer 1991 issue, the year after the stroke that left him unable to speak. He is the author of more than fifteen collections of poetry.

The Kenyon Review, New Series, Summer 1991, Vol. XIII, No. 3

April and Silence

Spring lies desolate.
The velvet-dark ditch
crawls by my side
without reflections.

The only thing that shines
is yellow flowers.

I am carried in my shadow
like a violin
in its black box.

The only thing I want to say
glitters out of reach
like the silver
in a pawnbroker’s.

Sleeping Giant

Tonight you find out there is a Peeping Tom prowling your neighborhood. Your neighbor Mrs. Chong, a tiny black-eyed woman who reminds you of a beetle, calls your parents with the news. When your mother hangs up with a roll of her eyes you beg her to explain what’s going on—what secret she knows. And it is this: Catherine Delano, the long-limbed high school girl, a lifeguard at your pool, saw a man in the shadows outside her window late Saturday night. She screamed. He ducked, and ran. There have been no other reports—not yet—but police have started cruising the neighborhood after sundown, their cars moving like slick white fish through the darkened streets.

Click here to finish reading this story or to download the audio.

KROnline is the online complement of The Kenyon Review. New fiction, essays, poetry, and reviews are published on a biweekly basis. Check back often to read some of the most cutting edge material you’ll find anywhere on the web. Click here to see our latest offering.

Craft Note: The Elegy (part one)

March 21, 2012 — Jake Adam York

I think I began to understand genre as a gaming arena when my first workshop teacher put W. S. Merwin’s “elegy” on the board:

          elegy

          who would i show it to

I had read Lycidas and “In Memoriam: W. B. Yeats” and enough traditional elegies to know that the elegiac poet usually needs time to tell us who died, so we’ll feel the poet’s loss, and then enough breath to transform the loss into comfort or hope, however complicated. Elegies tended toward the long and the longer, as if volume itself were a way to indicate the poem’s sense of its own importance or of the deceased.

Contents April 2012
KR Digital Subscription
Earthworks Prize
Talk Poetry
Streaming Audio
From the Archives
From KROnline
From the Blog

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