September 11, 2020
Puritanism, Old and New: In Conversation with Marly Youmans on her New Novel
Marly Youmans, author of several books of poetry and fiction, released her new novel, Charis in the World of Wonders, just as the country was going into pandemic lockdown. I […]
August 1, 2018
When Things Fall Apart: Leadership in Desperate Times
I’ve been thinking about the connection between literature, politics, and leadership because I gave a talk, “When Things Fall Apart: Leadership in Desperate Times,” in James M. Van Wyck’s terrific […]
February 27, 2018
Gentrified Hegemony
We rarely talk about how cultural hegemony works within the process of gentrification, although the process itself is inherently one of cultural and social environment change. We talk about the […]
February 21, 2018
Commodities, Bodies, and Budgets
The Trump administration budget request for fiscal year 2019 made the news this week due to many of the changes proposed. There are now tons of articles discussing the drastically […]
January 20, 2018
Interview with Andrew Seguin
Combining the poetic, photographic and historic, Andrew Seguin’s collection The Room In Which I Work (winner of the 2015 Omnidawn Open Book Contest) is immersive on a variety of different […]
August 9, 2017
The Politics of Renewing the Tongue
It hardly needs to be said that there’s plenty of crazed language in our public discourse. Surely this has always been the case, but just now the crazy is more […]
April 24, 2017
Positive Negation: Saying No in Poetry
The old creative writing class imperative to “write what you know” may have its place, but lately I’ve been thinking of the power of poetry not to “know,” but to […]
March 8, 2017
Quo Vadis, White Guy?
It’s a question that keeps coming back to me: Why are white guys so angry? Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against white guys, being one myself. It’s just […]
February 7, 2017
On Poetry and Politics
Despite American poetry’s grand political past, such as Whitman’s hymns to democracy and human variety, and its ongoing achievements, some strains of American critical thought suffer from isolationism, at least […]
December 9, 2016
A Fable
It is the last day of life on earth, but the United States populace is forbidden to acknowledge the fact. Anyone caught without a smile on their face is subject […]
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 […]
November 1, 2016
Utopia 500 Years Later
Now that 500 years have passed since the first publication of Thomas More’s Utopia, and we find ourselves in a season of promises to remake our world again, what might […]