March 2014

KR Welcomes 2014-16 Fellows

The Kenyon Review is thrilled to introduce poet Jamaal May and fiction writer Melinda Moustakis as our new Fellows for 2014-16. Chosen from a pool of more than 400 applications (read more about the selection process in Why We Chose Them, below), May and Moustakis promise to bring dazzling talent, energy, accomplishment, and distinctive voices to their writing projects as well as to their teaching and editing responsibilities, and to become valued members of the KR community.

Why We Chose Them

By Sergei Lobanov-Rostovsky, Associate Editor

How do we select two KR Fellows from the huge pool of terrific writers who sent us their work? Let’s face it, it’s an impossible task. A painful task, even, since reading our way through the writing samples submitted to us made us wish that we had many more fellowships to offer. But our task was to choose two writers who will come to Gambier to write, to teach, and to join us in our editorial work. We wanted them to show extraordinary promise, of course, but that’s something we saw in many of our applicants. We also wanted them to surprise us, to challenge us, to shake up how we understand what this generation of young writers will bring to us all. That’s what we found in the work of our new KR Fellows, Melinda Moustakis and Jamaal May.

Writing for Emergent Media? We’ve got you workshopped!

Learn what you need to know in KR’s Writing Online Workshop, June 14-21. This workshop will help you make the most of the tools and technologies now available to professional writers and professionals who write. Seeking new ways to promote your work? Looking to expand your professional writing repertoire? Writing Online is the workshop for you. No previous experience with course media required, but enrollment is limited. Apply soon!

Doubly creative? Consider the KR Literary Hybrid/Book Arts Workshop

Are you drawn to the verbal and the visual? If you’re a writer curious to work in more genres, or an artist wishing to deepen your engagement with text, the KR Literary Hybrid/Book Arts Workshop blends techniques of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, visual arts, and the art of the book to generate new creative content and form. Join us for this innovative adventure, June 14-21. Hurry! Enrollment is limited.

Roger Rosenblatt on KR’s Monthly Podcast

Indulge yourself with a delicious listen. Even if you’ve already read the excerpt from The Boy Detective: A New York Childhood in the current Winter 2014 issue of KR, you have a treat in store when you hear the inimitable Roger Rosenblatt read aloud from this delightful memoir. Try downloading our podcast this month. Your commute or exercise session has never been more entertaining.

The Kenyon Review, Autumn 1950, Vol. XII, No. 4

Art, Nature, Politics

I derive no doctrines about literature, or about anything else, from within literature itself, beyond the most conventional ideas of grammar, syntax, and style. My literary principles I mostly derive first from the philosophy of naturalism and then from my idea of politics.

“Listen Now Again”: A Credo in Echoes

My love of poetry started with Shakespeare’s sonnets. When I was in college, I wrote a paper on poetic devices, and I have a vivid memory of feeling the doors in my brain unlock when I saw how Shakespeare made puns out of metrical substitutions. Take, for example, the line “Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang,” in Sonnet 73—the first three syllables are stressed, and the last three syllables (arguably) are also stressed. When I recognized that pattern, I felt the echo echo through me, the spondees transforming man to tree to church. I was hooked by the way Shakespeare layered words like chords, and by the way rhythm made meaning.

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.

Birds and Brush Strokes

February 23, 2014 — Cody Walker

As readers, we have certain lines (or stanzas, or paragraphs) that we can’t get out of our heads. Maybe it’s just a phrase: Dickinson’s “Buccaneers of Buzz,” Larkin’s “not untrue and not unkind.” In Nicholson Baker’s The Anthologist, the narrator proposes an anthology made of single lines (“They flee from me that sometime did me seek,” “I had no human fears”) and even single words (though he quickly admits, “That’s not going to work”). My own ever-changing anthology consists—this week, anyway—of two prose paragraphs: one by Donna Tartt, one by Bill James.

A Micro-Interview with Kimiko Hahn

Kimiko Hahn’s poem “Circling a Nest” can be found in the Winter 2014 issue of The Kenyon Review.

Is there a story behind your KR poem “Circling a Nest?

The poem came from a return to science for triggering material—yet again, from The New York Times. For my previous collection, Toxic Flora, I moved from one article to a single draft poem. This time, I made up rules that included moving from an article working up a number of responses. “Circling a Nest” is from an article by Natalie Angier, “The Circular Logic of the Universe.” The word “egg” triggered the play.

Contents Mar. 2014
KR Fellows 2014-16
Why We Chose Them
Writing Online Wkshp
Book Arts Workshop
Rosenblatt Podcast
From the Archives
From KROnline
From the Blog
KR Conversations

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