June 29, 2018
Precedent for the Present: Further Reading
Now we witness undocumented migrants detained and deported en masse on US soil; we witness vulnerable humans turned back from our shores and borders; we witness children – babies in […]
November 23, 2016
The (un)rest is history
In the weeks leading up to the election and following the election, I fell silent here on The Kenyon Review blog, and in my life as well, to some extent. In the […]
June 10, 2016
First Person Plural: Part III (Muhammad Ali)
Throughout my last two posts, I’ve been thinking about strength (and complication) in numbers—the first person plural: “We.” In between those posts and this one, the news broke that boxer […]
February 16, 2016
Life of a Poem, Part II
In my last post, I spent some time with the first line of George Starbuck’s poem “Of Late.” “‘Stephen Smith, University of Iowa sophomore, burned what he said was his […]
February 12, 2016
Life of a Poem Part I: The First Line
For a long time, the poem I have wanted to write has been George Starbuck’s “Of Late.” The yearning to want to write what someone else has already written is […]
November 30, 2012
Effaced Ballads: An Interview with Matthew Rohrer, Anthony McCann, and Joshua Beckman on Erasing the Romantics
KR: It makes sense to me why a group of contemporary poets with more avant-garde than conservative aesthetics (though I use those terms with some trepidation) would choose to erase […]
October 25, 2012
Politics, erasure, and a ‘sometimes genuine music’
The question I want to ask is whether or not the act of erasure produces another voice—if the process of effacing (or defacing, as such may be a more accurate […]
October 17, 2012
The doublespeak of texts and subtexts: indicting the found political poem
The found political poem is a sort of chimera, a cross-breeding of two genres in which questions of authorship and ownership—and the fine distinction between them—run amok. One of its […]
May 7, 2010
Poetic Political Engagement: Yes and Yes
I’m in the middle of packing madness, so I just have time for a quick discussion of “This Land Is Your Land.” This article by David Biespiel appeared on the […]