May 2012

KR Welcomes Its First Fellows

Editor David Lynn writes, “I’m thrilled to announce that Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers and Natalie Shapero, younger authors of exceptional talent, will be Kenyon Review Fellows for the next two years. This marks the renewal of a tradition going back to the early days of the journal: identifying and supporting prodigiously gifted writers and launching them into the literary world. Earlier KR Fellows, for example, included Flannery O’Connor and W. S. Merwin.”

Cassie Gonzales Wins 2012 KR Short Fiction Contest

Cassie Gonzales, of London, England, has won the fifth annual Kenyon Review Short Fiction Contest. Gonzales’s story, “Sleeping Out,” was selected by judge Nancy Zafris from just under 700 entries, and will be published in the Winter 2013 issue of The Kenyon Review. Gonzales will also receive a scholarship to attend the 2012 KR Writers Workshop.

Ben Berliner Receives First S. Georgia Nugent Award in Creative Writing

Ben Berliner, a graduating senior at the Field School in Washington, D.C., has been named the recipient of the first S. Georgia Nugent Award in Creative Writing, a new merit scholarship named in honor of the Kenyon president and designed to attract the most talented writing students to the College.

Introducing Kenyon Review Digital Subscriptions

The Kenyon Review is now available in a digital format exclusively in the Amazon Kindle Store. Customers can subscribe to the free digest edition for a limited selection of each issue’s content, or subscribe to the extended edition for only $12 a year, with access to all of the magazine’s fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and editorial content. Start reading the magazine today on any Kindle, and on free Kindle reading apps for iPad, iPhone, iPod touch and Android devices.

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.

Can it really be fifty years since the summer of 1962? For those of us too young to remember, it was the summer of the Port Huron Statement, the death of Marilyn Monroe, and the recording of “Love Me Do.” The first communications satellite, Telstar, was launched, and the Soviets agreed to send arms to Cuba. The Rolling Stones made their London debut. The first WalMart store opened in Rogers, Arkansas. In KR that fall, Robert Lowell published “The Scream,” based on the story “In the Village” published nine years earlier by his friend Elizabeth Bishop. It was a summer of shouts and screams and wild singing. We can still hear those voices echoing.

The Kenyon Review, Autumn 1962, Vol. XXIV, No. 4

The Scream

A scream, the echo of a scream,
now only a thinning echo . . .
As a child in Nova Scotia, I used to watch the sky,
Swiss sky, too blue, too dark.

A cow drooled green grass strings,
made cow flop, smack, smack, smack!
and tried to brush off its flies
on a lilac bush—all,
forever, at one fell swoop!

Garden in Nazareth

Already birds are flying into your garden,
Lark and quail, sand in their wings.

The garden is in front, the desert is not far.
Somewhere a bus is burning.

Your wife enters, tray in hand—heaped with fennel shining,
Cut apples, loquats, pears, . . .

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

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Craft Note: Duet—Part Two (Ending With A Post By Tarfia Faizullah Ending With A Line By Vallejo)

April 20, 2012 — Jake Adam York

The poem that begins with a borrowed line begins spending its inheritance right away. It feels free, cavalier, perhaps even prodigal at times. It seems to thrive on its own liquidity, its sometimes casual, even forgetful relationship to what started it. This sort of poem almost forgets itself. It creates for itself an opportunity to remember what began it, which it may embrace or not. This is a poem that begins with a choice that actually seems to heighten the sense of opportunity in the choices that follow.