The Kenyon Review articles from January 2004

The Kenyon Review archives from January 2004

Editor's notes.(Editorial)
January 1, 2004... What will follow is a series of celebratory announcements. But as I write these notes we have received the unhappy news of George Plimpton's death. And so it seems fitting to pause, to interject a salute in his memory. Urbane,...

Folded Back.(Poem)
January 1, 2004... FOLDED BACK I. In Plath's late poem "Edge," the perfected woman's two dead children have been folded back into her body. However one envisions this, the image is disturbing: finality of dead against...

The Lost Watch.(Brief Article)(Poem)
January 1, 2004... THE LOST WATCH Its hands have stopped. No one will bother it. Its face marks the corroded decision. The band which held it close to skin is gone. Such absence cannot be overcome. There were no children, no...

In The Park.(Short Story)
January 1, 2004... Translated from Chinese by Mabel Lee I haven't strolled about in a park for a long time. I never have the time to spare, or the inclination anymore." "It's the same with everyone. After work, people just hurry home. Life's always a...

Let Me Remind You You Are Still Under Oath.(Brief Article)(Poem)
January 1, 2004... LET ME REMIND YOU YOU ARE STILL UNDER OATH Out of marsh out of the bronchial tree limbs out of low clouds we grow up to be President, we emerge as nurses or green grocers or red lips waiting for a cigarette....

The penance practicum.(Short Story)
January 1, 2004... Father Dom was pleased with his reflection in the mirror. To the front of his cassock he had stapled a big dot cut out of white paper; below the cincture he had stapled two more. Tonight was the seminary Halloween party. He was going as a...

The Haunting.(Brief Article)(Poem)
January 1, 2004... THE HAUNTING It may not be the ghostly ballet of our avoidances that they'll remember, nor the long sulks of those last months, nor the voices chilly with all the anger we were careful...

Ghost Watch.(Brief Article)(Poem)
January 1, 2004... GHOST WATCH The blood pooled in the fresh fosse and up they drifted out of Erebus like smoke from every side in a listless swarming all around Odysseus, crowding, pressing, merging together, a cloud bank ...

Take Off.(Brief Article)(Poem)
January 1, 2004... TAKE OFF We didn't fall out of love, old love, we rose--we rose as in a plane, as in the moment when the wheels lift and the whole craft shudders against the gravity it then forgets as all at once...

Spring Break.(Inscriptions On Wax Tablets)(Brief Article)(Poem)
January 1, 2004... INSCRIPTIONS ON WAX TABLETS Spring Break I'm sixteen in the Bahamas. A drunk gift on a balcony in a sundress with a pina colada. Burning, I'm about to slip out of my own memory altogether-- ...

Dream.(Brief Article)(Poem)
January 1, 2004... Dream He's back. The death was faked. Yes, he jumped from the plane, OK, but he had a parachute, and now we're drinking scotch in his motel room, and I'm afraid. It's summer and the sky is full of swaying lamps...

Party.(Brief Article)(Poem)
January 1, 2004... Party I misplaced the invitation, and forgot to go, but that night from my bed I thought I heard the sound of ice in glasses, dropped by silver tongs. I looked outside. In the sky, a few bears and vultures ...

Spring Break.(Brief Article)(Poem)
January 1, 2004... Spring Break Later, the football coach's son will carry me to bed and leave me there, untouched. I'll wake up with one arm flung into my suitcase, and the other covering my head. I had been wandering...

Summer, Here.(Poem)
January 1, 2004... SUMMER, HERE In the beginning, the unbelievable burgeoning. Did I plant these things in the garden? What in God's name are they? In the beginning... Electricity turned to flesh. A billion nerves softened...

Episode from the history.(Short Story)
January 1, 2004... For Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop One evening the twins' mother came to where a few of us were sitting. "Come, come see." We went quickly up the stairs behind her. At the door to the twins' room she put a finger to her lips and...

Mercury Seven With Signs Following.(Short Story)
January 1, 2004... Part 1: Middle True A Young Woman. An empty space with an unmade bed and white linens; they'd be "crisp white linens" if they weren't so rumpled. Dark. Silence. Low light strikes across the space. A southern Ohio evening. Very...

Techno.(Brief Article)(Poem)
January 1, 2004... TECHNO I was tracking the stars through the open truck window, my friend speeding the roads through the black country-- and I was thinking how the songs coming from the radio were like the speech of a single human...

Suttee.(Brief Article)(Poem)
January 1, 2004... SUTTEE Cars oiling slowly through the rich grid of the Basin. White, red, the chaining hemoglobes, from the ridge you watched them, their shhh and wahhh wafting up through the canyon, the medicine-smelling...

The Washing.(Poem)
January 1, 2004... Everyone's got their massacre site just around the corner. --Jim Landale, Hague Spokesman, Kosovo THE WASHING 1. In the mirror, open your mouth. Press down on your tongue and say Ahh. Ah. Red tipped, ...

Visiting The Lady With The Plant.(Brief Article)(Poem)
January 1, 2004... VISITING THE LADY WITH THE PLANT It was almost going to be too late for me To go along because there were shadows Under the buckeye trees along our street, But the lady with the plant had called my mother ...

Ralphie's Clarinet.(Short Story)
January 1, 2004... Mrs. Gleason she noticed. Dolores Gleason was hard not to notice. The blue bouffant through which shone the bony hemisphere of her scalp, the three-pronged aluminum cane she pumped with the precision of a drum major, the little bronchial...

The Feelers.(Poem)
January 1, 2004... His plays scourge our society. A two-hour monologue literally flattened me by the end, and in fact did bring on a fever, so that I had to lie down, while others showed him out of my apartment. --from a confidential letter of...

Five Pounds.(Poem)
January 1, 2004... FIVE POUNDS This non-aerosol prayer dates from the forties. --The Inside Collector 1. But aren't all prayers aerosol?--they leave in a breath, and rise through air, as air, until they finally reach an...

Dummies, Shakers, Barkers, Wanderers.(Short Story)
January 1, 2004... That winter, Mona was in the habit of rising before dawn while wright still slept and, after dressing, going out to the barn to check on the mare. She liked stepping out into the cold, looked forward to those first breaths of icy air that...

Poem For Fathers And For Sons.(Poem)
January 1, 2004... POEM FOR FATHERS AND FOR SONS After the long slow sacrament in the bath and bedroom, Squeezing into the girdle her body didn't need or want, After the precisely weighted choosing of a dress And the shoes among the...

When Blackness Rhymes With Blackness.(Poem)
January 1, 2004... On Bard and Balladry in Robert Hayden An Essay in Verse I. Let's begin with a conclusion: Robert Hayden's sense of form Was sporadic--beautifully so--and was set in motion less By a cataloging of syllables and lines, but rather more...

The Worlds of Irving Howe.(Biography)
January 1, 2004... Waiting for Socialism What would happen if men remained faithful to the ideals of their youth? --Pietro Spina in Ignazio Silone's Bread and Wine Irving Howe was fond of telling this story: In the village of Chelm, the man whose job...

'Jealous of dead leaves': the reach of the living sonnet.(reviews of four books on sonnets)(Book Review)
January 1, 2004... Review The Sonnets. By William Shakespeare. Ed. Stephen Orgel, with an introduction by John Hollander. New York: Penguin Books, 2001. 208 pp. $4.95. A Century of Sonnets: The Romantic-Era Revival, 1750-1850. Ed. Paula R. Feldman and...