March 4, 2013 • KR Newsletter

March 2013

Why We Chose It

By David Baker, Poetry Editor

David Baker On Solmaz Sharif’s “Personal Effects”

Each time the question invariably makes sense. I’m at a workshop or taking part in a panel discussion or a class, and someone asks about my work as Poetry Editor of The Kenyon Review: “So, what are you really looking for?” The expectation is that I provide a rubric for excellence, or at least a means to getting a poem published in KR, or at least some rationale for my own personal tastes and intentions as a poetry editor. It is a well-meaning, sensible question, and yet I have no sufficient answer.

Continue reading to learn why KR selected Solmaz Sharif’s “Personal Effects” for the Spring 2013 issue of The Kenyon Review.

Join KR at AWP in Boston!

Visit us March 6-9, at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference at the Hynes Convention Center and Sheraton Boston Hotel. Check out our schedule of events!

Click here to learn more about KR events at AWP.

KR Launches New Writers Workshop For Teachers

Designed for high school teachers who love to write, the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop for Teachers, June 29-July 3, 2013, combines the generative spirit of the Kenyon summer writing workshops with a new focus on classroom practices meant to encourage student creative writing. Our five-day intensive program is part writers’ retreat and part professional development, exposing teachers to prompts and strategies meant to inspire their own work as well as the work of future students. Come to reconnect with your own inner writer—the one often lost beneath piles of grading!—and leave with new work and new techniques for incorporating creative writing and contemporary literature into your classroom teaching.

Click here to learn more about the Writers Workshop for Teachers.

Looking for a Summer Place to Write? Join Us For Two Innovative New Summer Writing Workshops!

KR is now accepting applications for two new summer workshops: a unique workshop devoted to literary hybrids and book arts, which will take place during KR’s acclaimed Writers Workshop, June 15-22, 2013, and an intensive novel workshop, June 29-July 3, 2013. Join us this summer, and expand your writing horizons!

Click here to learn about the literary hybrids and book arts workshop.
Click here to learn about the novel workshop.

Two Great Reads from the KR Fellows

Please join us in celebrating the publication of two first books of poetry by our KR Fellows: Chord Box: Poems by Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers, out from University of Arkansas Press on February 1, 2013, and No Object by Natalie Shapero, available from Saturnalia on March 12, 2013.

Sink Your Teeth Into KR!

The Kenyon Review has been featured on a list of 100 Essential Sites for Voracious Readers. Check out the whole list here.

The Kenyon Review Brings Sexy Back! (Way Back!)

KR’s Spring 2009 issue was recently included in Gulf Coast’s list of The Top 16 Sexiest Lit Mag Covers in the Last 6 Years. The post described the cover, a photo of a reader enjoying a 1945 issue of KR, as “pure class, and yet so meta.”

So, do you think we’re sexy?

In Spring 2001 (Vol. 23, No. 2), The Kenyon Review celebrated the centennial of the Nobel Prize with a special issue devoted to The Cultures of Creativity. 1995 Laureate Seamus Heaney contributed this meditation on violating boundaries in search of the springs of inspiration.

The Kenyon Review, New Series, Spring 2001, Vol. XXIII, No. 2

Castalian Spring

by Seamus Heaney

Thunderface. Not Zeus’s ire, but hers
Refusing entry, and mine mounting from it.
This one thing I had vowed: to drink the waters
Of the Castalian Spring, to arrogate
That much to myself and be the poet
Under the god Apollo’s giddy cliff—

Click here to finish reading this poem.

Don’t miss the buzz! Twitter is full of shout-outs for this tell-all essay by a former Sweet Valley High ghostwriter/PhD student.

The Ghost Writes Back

by Amy Boesky

There was nothing surprising about my professor’s lecture on Shakespeare until, out of the blue, she started talking about ghostwriting. I was in the back of the packed auditorium with the other teaching assistants. Taking notes, working fast to revise my plans for discussion section the next day in response to what she said in lecture. The ghostwriting reference stopped me short.

Click here to finish reading this essay. 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.

Tatau (Tattoo) Poetics

February 8, 2013 — Craig Santos Perez

Last week my Theory and Form of Poetry course discussed Somatic Poetics, so this week we discussed Tatau poetics, or the poetics of the tattoo. Specifically, we read Samoan author Albert Wendt’s famous essay, “Tatauing the Post-Colonial Body” (1996). This essay draws an analogy between Samoan tattooing practices and (post)colonial Pacific literature.

Click here to finish reading this blog post.