October 2012

Why We Chose It

By Hilary Plum, Consulting Editor

“Undertaking” by Anne Germanacos

“I can only make things taut; I have no interest in roundabout or loose,” we’re told in Anne Germanacos’s “Undertaking,” a confession that is at once straightforward and sly, telling us readers just what it is we’ve been experiencing. The word taut is a first step toward describing what’s extraordinary about this piece. How does Germanacos “make things taut” when working with such disparate fragments? “Undertaking” occurs in brief lines that leap one to the next to the next, its form more like a notebook than a “traditional” story—there’s no plot, quite; there are interlocutors but not quite characters; the story lives in the borderland in which fiction and essay clasp hands.

Art and Identity Symposium: Upcoming Events

Now that we’ve given away over three hundred free copies of The History of Love, we invite you to join us for two book-related events:

• KR Editor David Lynn will lead a book discussion at the Public Library of Mount Vernon and Knox County on Oct. 16 at 7:00 p.m.
• Sergei Lobanov-Rostovsky, Professor of English at Kenyon College, will give a Brown Bag Chat about The History of Love and the Art and Identity Symposium on Oct. 24 at 11:45 a.m. at the Public Library of Mount Vernon and Knox County.

The ninth annual Patricia Grodd Poetry Prize for Young Writers will begin accepting entries in November. The prize, which is open to high school sophomores and juniors throughout the world, is juried by David Baker, KR’s poetry editor.

The Arcadia Project

The Kenyon Review is pleased to share news of an excellent new anthology co-edited by our Editor-at-Large G.C. Waldrep. The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral is a nearly 600-page anthology bringing together seminal work in the genre of the pastoral as it has evolved into the twenty-first century. Published by Ahsahta Press, edited by poets Joshua Corey and G.C. Waldrep, and designed by Jeff Clark, the book includes sections on New Transcendentalisms, Textual Ecologies, Local Powers, and The Necropastoral.

Undertaking

A full self requires stillness.
I am coming upon the face, the shape of it.

      • •

Scratched pots and pans, wooden mallets hard enough to beat in a head. Sieves, bowls, scissors, tongs. Ladles.

Have we humiliated the house of our mother?

      • •

Saw both sons within a twenty-four hour period.
The accompanying sound: a kind of purr.

      • •

“ . . . Winnicott postulates the existence of a psychological intermediary realm between the subjective and the objective that he calls transitional space.”

Here we are.

. . .

Click here to finish reading this piece.

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.

In 2002, Diane Ackerman published Cultivating Delight: A Natural History of My Garden. Her author bio in The Kenyon Review that summer notes that “she has the unusual distinction of having a molecule named after her (dianeackerone).”

The Kenyon Review, New Series, Summer/Autumn 2002, Vol. XXIV, No. 3/4

The Savant of Sunflowers, The Apprentice of Roses

Something in a rose
knows to spread its roots
into a stable base,
how to shimmy up a trellis,
graft onto reliable stock,
open up rich with scent,
and slowly unfold another
flush of tawny bloom.

Forms of Enthusiasm: On Poetry Criticism, Book Reviews, and (yes, again) Blurbs

August 31, 2012 — Jake Adam York

You may have heard something over the last week or two about William Giraldi’s review of two Alix Ohlin books in The New York Times. It’s a wildly negative review that’s spawned a great deal of commentary that’s more interesting than the actual review.

Contents Oct. 2012
Why We Chose It
Art and Identity
Grodd Prize
The Arcadia Project
From KROnline
From the Archives
From the Blog

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