The Kenyon Review articles from January 2003

The Kenyon Review archives from January 2003

Editor's notes.(Editorial)
January 1, 2003... In November 12, 2002, the Trustees of The Kenyon Review presented E. L. Doctorow with the Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement. Although you may already have heard this news--it generated some considerable notice--I am happy to mark...

Edge-Effect Requiem for Tom Bigelow.(Poem)
January 1, 2003... EDGE-EFFECT REQUIEM FOR TOM BIGELOW Pushkin was sparse in his use of metaphor. Should I talk to you of the dynamics, the I-You, addressee, addressed? Build the text by metonym? Boots, walk, grip, track, map. I...

Advice to a Nightwalker.(Poem)
January 1, 2003... ADVICE TO A NIGHTWALKER You do not want to linger on a bridge engulfed in fog or return any growling you might hear in the dark. Make sure to wear something white. And be careful which tune you whistle as you...

The Stare.(Poem)
January 1, 2003... THE STARE With a basin of warm water and a towel I am shaving my father late on a summer afternoon as he sits in a chair in striped pajamas, screwing up his face this way and that to make way for the razor,...

Actor.(Poem)
January 1, 2003... ACTOR You give me up You go away You walk on a stage and are re-made. I long for you but you have a strophic relationship to longing. You move so gracefullly between what the author...

Heart.(Poem)
January 1, 2003... HEART To you, joking, I'd said: You're an actor. Act like you love me. You laughed and turned away into the characters you played, acting like an actor. We were caught in the force field, the imagination's need...

Anniversary.(Poem)
January 1, 2003... ANNIVERSARY Exhausted by pity, I sit in the sun near the pool. The wind lifts the chimes you repaired so patiently last year, knotting the strings from which the silver cylinders depend. The sparrow I...

Desolation.(Short Story)
January 1, 2003... 1. A melancholy seriousness settles on the faces of people attending concerts; it is a look both distracted and concentrated, disturbed and imperturbable. Something says: we shall endure this, it will eventually pass; we shall orient our...

The Kamasutra: it isn't all about sex.(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2003... The Kamasutra, which many people regard as the paradigmatic textbook for sex, the sex text, was composed in North India, probably in the third century C.E., in Sanskrit, the literary language of ancient India. (Virtually nothing is known...

A moment.(Poem)
January 1, 2003... A MOMENT What I perceived is what I remember. I didn't know her name. She was thirteen or fourteen, I was twelve, And we were somewhere in California. Her family had rented a campsite On the lake side of a...

Carousel.(Poem)
January 1, 2003... CAROUSEL He'd just switched off the overhead light and stretched out Full-length on the sofa. An open window. A shade between The rose and ochres of a long twilight in mid-September Swamped the outlying, mottling sands...

Flat stones beg to be recycled.(Poem)
January 1, 2003... FLAT STONES BEG TO BE RECYCLED We go back, my mother and I, back to Zloczow, where Ukrainian girls in red and black em- broidery sing a song, offer us bread and salt, for we are guests in their ...

Malacology.(Poem)
January 1, 2003... MALACOLOGY In memory of Stephen Jay Gould All the world is in a snail! Really? Well, the world's a handed in/out whirl, matter through mind. You do mean the world is like a...

A writer's harvest.
January 1, 2003... What if I wrote a story and it had in it the word "jickjacking"--as in "jickjacking around," an activity I first encountered recently in a story in the New Yorker and then, the way things do happen, there it was again in a story by David...

From the spirit autobiography of S. M. Jones.(Short Story)
January 1, 2003... I was born in 1836 with a veil over my face, a fact to which some might attribute the story I am about to tell. I write not to gain eccentric notoriety, but do so out of a good and honest heart, through the influence of some mysterious power....

Trompe L'Oeil.(Poem)
January 1, 2003... TROMPE L'OEIL All over Genoa you see them: windows with open shutters. Then the illusion shatters. But that's not true. You knew the shutters were merely painted on. You knew it time and again. The...

Didyma.(Poem)
January 1, 2003... DIDYMA 1. Disoriented, a woman wanders in the riverbed east then west then east, asks us how to get to County Road 101G. We stare at vertebrae and long bones that protrude out of her plastic bag, discern how one...

From the patience of rivers: dreaming the river.(Short Story)
January 1, 2003... The water ran black between the boats, and doilies of foam floated past as the teams backpaddled to stay behind Vern Lefevre's outstretched arm. "Standard canoes back off the racers," Vern called. "Standard canoes one boat length behind...

Paul Goodman as an advance-guard writer.
January 1, 2003... When Paul Goodman died in 1972, he was as famous as a public intellectual can become in America. His books stood on the shelves in every college bookstore, his ideas part of the legacy of social experiment and political protest we call "the...

Sweet.(Poem)
January 1, 2003... SWEET 1. The girl with the sweet mouth is singing. On stage, she forgets her hunger and sings beyond her body, beyond the sour borders of the life each fan longs to taste. Oh, if they could...

The Manson girls.(Poem)
January 1, 2003... THE MANSON GIRLS No one thought about the girls for years. And then one evening, decades later, Barbara Walters brought them to our living rooms. She seemed to say, Look! They are not so different. Not, she meant,...

Say a person suddenly.(Poem)
January 1, 2003... SAY A PERSON SUDDENLY finds himself saying (herself saying)-- in the shower, perhaps, or while eating a bowl of cereal-- I don't know what to do, I just don't know what to do. Let's assume that within the scope of daily...

Standard candle.(Poem)
January 1, 2003... STANDARD CANDLE The same irrefragable irrefragables: the car, the barbecue grill, the swing set, oxidizing like plowshares in the steady, end-of-millennium rainfall. Or else it's a voice from three states...

Postulation and Reply.(Poem)
January 1, 2003... POSTULATION AND REPLY Lord, what can I, worthless here on earth, do to justify your mindfulness of me (of me, of me, of me...)? What makes you think I am mindful? you perhaps ask, the dialogic opening having been...

You're no one's nothing special: a short play.(Play)
January 1, 2003... Characters: RHONDA--mid-thirties; CHET--mid-thirties. Location: a city in the desert. Time: now. 1. AN INTERESTING AIRPORT [RHONDA carries a small hard suitcase. She wears "travel clothes" --something nice, maybe a hat. CHET is...

The boyfriend.(Short Story)
January 1, 2003... The cockatoo came in wheezing. Its owner, a tall young woman with tired eyes, scooped the bird from a plastic eat carrier and placed it on the table before the vet. "He doesn't act right," she said. "Since yesterday. Won't eat or anything."...

Syntax: rhythm of thought, rhythm of song.
January 1, 2003... The best time to visit doting literate parents and their first child is between years one and two. They won't ask you to change the diaper, and you'll see confirmed the two seminal theories of language acquisition: Piaget's tabula rasa, the...

Quai De Valmy.(Poem)
January 1, 2003... QUAI DE VALMY The 3eme becomes the 10eme and 11eme on the other side of the Place de la Republique: beyond that, the canal Saint Martin, color of piss and phlegm, is slow and local. The tow-bridges squeak back...

Rue De Bretagne.(Poem)
January 1, 2003... RUE DE BRETAGNE After Jacques Roubaud That afternoon in the rue de Bretagne (I think back often to that afternoon) I pushed a shopping cart through Monoprix where anything you'd like to eat or own: Roquefort or...

Turenne / Francs-Bourgeois.(Poem)
January 1, 2003... TURENNE / FRANCS-BOURGEOIS A winter Tuesday morning: people shopped with damp dogs bundling under their purchases in light rain, fine as an unspoken wish while merchants scoured and scrubbed their premises. From...

Troisieme Sans Ascenseur.(Poem)
January 1, 2003... TROISIEME SANS ASCENSEUR A square of sunlight on the study wall is worth her notice, so she makes a note. Various printings of the books she wrote fill shelves encroaching on the narrow hall but not her workroom:...

Forms of memory.(Book Review)
January 1, 2003... Squares and Courtyards. By Marilyn Hacker. New York: W. W. Norton, 2001. 107 pp. $12.00 paper. A Long-Gone Sun. By Claire Malroux, translated by Marilyn Hacker. Riverdale on Hudson, N.Y.: Sheep Meadow Press, 2001. 183 pp. $17.00 paper....