The Kenyon Review articles from March 2003

The Kenyon Review archives from March 2003

Editor's notes.(Editorial)
March 22, 2003... Teachers have always been among our best and most faithful readers. Not only do they care passionately about what is new and exciting in the literary world, many of them carry this passion--and this magazine--into their classrooms. The...

My bear.(Short Story)
March 22, 2003... My bear is of the polar variety. He squats at the other end of my kitchen table every morning, and he stares at me with his black, black eyes. He does not move, but I hear his even snorting. Gnnn, gnnn, gnnn. Like that, in a low guttural...

Elsewhere.(Poem)
March 22, 2003... ELSEWHERE When we were Pangaea, maps were smaller and vacations easier. Where do you want to go? I don't know... Pangaea. The idea that continents are restless is very American. At a party I talked with a man and...

To Err is Humid.(Poem)
March 22, 2003... TO ERR IS HUMID for D. Long ago we sat on a lake. He said Errata sounds erotic, I get excited by mistakes. Snow was falling in a lonely way, many feet between flakes. What if by accident two fell...

Red Licorice.(Poem)
March 22, 2003... RED LICORICE Turns out the universe is an accordion. I take this as vindication of the polka. If it began with the Big Bang will it end with the Big Suck? I like physics more than psychics. These days there are...

This Lesson You've Got.(Poem)
March 22, 2003... THIS LESSON YOU'VE GOT to learn is the someday you'll someday stagger to, blinking in cold light, all tears shed, ready to poke your bovine head in the yoke they've shaped. Everyone learns this. Born, everyone ...

Preparatory Science Fair.(Poem)
March 22, 2003... PREPARATORY SCIENCE FAIR There are the fathers lithe as young cheetahs, who fashioned their bodies with cardio and no carbs, whose shoes once were reptiles. They differ in fiber from this nearly dead father, who...

Borges at the Northside Rotary.(Poem)
March 22, 2003... BORGES AT THE NORTHSIDE ROTARY If in the following pages there is some successful verse or other, may the reader forgive me the audacity of having written it before him. --Jorge Luis Borges, foreword to his first...

From She Says: Three Untitled Poems.(Poem)
March 22, 2003... from SHE SAYS: THREE UNTITLED POEMS Translated from French by Marilyn Hacker For Andre Brincourt Without the wisteria the garden would have climbed over the fence to move in on the posh side of the road ...

Swan's song.(Short Story)
March 22, 2003... When Rilla heads to Jackpot to bail out her son, freedom's thrill doesn't hit Ferrell Swan. Though Rilla is his ex, they've just wintered as wife and man in his high desert home, and now Ferrell isn't sure about returning to the pleasures of...

Mummy of a Mouse.(Poem)
March 22, 2003... MUMMY OF A MOUSE Spit back to sun by an owl or a snake, it's a frail leather purse, gutless and de-boned, stiff enough to hold upright by the pink slip of its tail until I see, peering into the gut's open gash, ...

Agency.(Poem)
March 22, 2003... AGENCY They stumble now and then, the deer, like any other walking thing, even those not unlike themselves, four-legged but less elegant and fleet--cows in a bog, the clumsy, over-bred, domesticated dogs-- ...

The well-made world of the O. Henrys, 1961-2000.
March 22, 2003... Taken together the O. Henry Prize Stories volumes of the last eighty years, under four major editorships, provide a kind of case study--a unique opportunity to look into the form of American short fiction. This is particularly true of the...

Interview with the Not-Poem.(Poem)
March 22, 2003... INTERVIEW WITH THE NOT-POEM Interviewer: "But how can you call yourself a `not-poem'? You look, from all appearances, like a poem. You crouch, shuffle, swing and sway and arrange your lines, ...

Ash: 9/11.(Poem)
March 22, 2003... ASH 9/11 The light shifts earlier these days, While I, inspecting it from my one room, gaze Out, watching the inevitable change Gather almost imperceptibly among The lift and bow and graduals of limbs Over...

Crush Into These Blakk Feet.(Poem)
March 22, 2003... CRUSH INTO THESE BLAKK FEET After the painting Altar for Jean-Michel Basquiat by Ras Akyem, 1995. 1. Soaring at heart, dream kin they may be---Akyem and Basquiat--though the pair never met: Ras Akyem's...

Speckle trout.(Short Story)
March 22, 2003... Lanny came upon the pot plants while fishing Galley Creek. It was a Saturday, and after helping his father sucker tobacco all morning, he'd had the truck and the rest of the afternoon and evening for himself. He'd changed into his fishing...

That the End Could Be Beginning.(Poem)
March 22, 2003... THAT THE END COULD BE BEGINNING No less startling than the bush, flaming but unharmed, by which Moses drew silenced, is the tree that, without ceremony, makes its fiery offering. And the...

The Spiral Pilgrimage.(Poem)
March 22, 2003... THE SPIRAL PILGRIMAGE Rome, October 382 B.C. I mill around. I spill my thoughts. I spool them up again. I dream of wheelbarrows bearing pyramids of entrails. I set fires: to the damask...

Rumi and the fish.(Short Story)
March 22, 2003... The Qur'an says, "We are all returning,." Whoever brought me here will have to take me home, says Rumi. What I am supposed to be doing I have no idea. Well, if that isn't to the point I don't know what is. Rumi, of course, is flying some...

Pity the Self-Middle-Aged.(Poem)
March 22, 2003... PITY THE SELF-MIDDLE-AGED Lying in the body is the self, lying to everyone that it's great--bloated insomniac homunculus--rolling in the ruins of the layered skin and spin of fat, sneaking tidbits at night from...

A Pair of Tanagers.(Poem)
March 22, 2003... A PAIR OF TANAGERS The scarlet male, his green mate, their black wings Beside the AC unit in the dull dirt: They look at first like a child's abandoned toys. But ants and iridescent flies have found them, ...

Virtuoso mio.(Short Story)
March 22, 2003... Perla Ramirez is cat-faced and sullen, foul-mouthed and resentful, and at twelve she is already a vandal, a pickpocket, a sneak, and a snitch. The entire neighborhood hates her. Does she care? It seems she does not. "Ay, Perla!" rings at her...

Questions for The Drowned at Sea.(Poem)
March 22, 2003... Questions for the drowned at sea Are you loose and vague as a sea grown still after rain? Or cool as salt water when the season's fall, when the sun is low and the air is chill? Can you move? Do you say, I...

In Earnest.(Poem)
March 22, 2003... IN EARNEST Fall's gold is gone. The American will reek another week or two before the circling birds stop dropping black along the river's edge to feed upon the rotting fish. One marks this season by the...

Miserere.(Poem)
March 22, 2003... MISERERE We're bathing together when Alina kneels in steam to reveal crimped flaps of skin, drawn shades the surgeons have fashioned: system of pulleys worked by little metal wheels screwed into each shoulder. She...

Wedding Dress.(Poem)
March 22, 2003... WEDDING DRESS That Halloween I wore your wedding dress, our children spooked & wouldn't speak for days. I'd razored taut calves smooth, teased each blown tress, then--lipsticked, mascara'd, & self-amazed-- ...

Erotic Roman Antiquities.(Poem)
March 22, 2003... EROTIC ROMAN ANTIQUITIES Naples for Mihaela Even in the museum we held hands-- like those schoolchildren sporting yellow tees & blue bandannas, each clasping a partner, noisy little clones ...

Miscegenation.(Poem)
March 22, 2003... MISCEGENATION In 1965 my parents broke two laws of Mississippi: they went to Ohio to marry, returned to Mississippi. They crossed the river into Cincinnati, a city whose name begins with a sound like sin, the sound of...

I Mean Everything I Say.(Poem)
March 22, 2003... I MEAN EVERYTHING I SAY A boy's first fistfight he's crying all the way through it, sumptuously alive, and the girl raging in her room against the elite of the earth, it's so unconventional, emotion in the chest, the...

Three figures out of schools.(Short Story)
March 22, 2003... They act up in me. Dorse, Faroux, and Jenson: figures from the boarding schools I was sent to, memory's parents from my displaced homes. The names are listed on my letterhead, as on a firm's. I don't invent them. Dorse was founder and...

On Christopher Cessac's Republic Sublime: winner of the 2002 Kenyon Review Prize in Poetry. (New Voices Commentary).
March 22, 2003... Two years ago The Kenyon Review entered into a relationship with a new independent book publisher, Zoo Press, located in Lincoln, Nebraska. Neil Azevedo, Zoo's founding editor, invited us to cosponsor a first-book award to be called the...

From Republic Sublime. (New Voices).(Poem)
March 22, 2003... from REPUBLIC SUBLIME Letter of Introduction to Gostan Zarian from Troia Morning and Lesbos slowly climbing out from fog--those thousand ships replaced by dozens of boats bearing booze and frozen seafood for dodgy...

Repetition and singularity.(The Seven Ages)(Never)(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... The Seven Ages. By Louise Gluck. New York: HarperCollins, Ecco Press, 2002.68 pp. $23.00. Never. By Jorie Graham. New York: HarperCollins, Ecco Press, 2002. 112 pp. $22.95. Books by poets whose work we are already familiar with pose...

From revolution to canon.(The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism)(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Edited by Vincent Leitch, William E. Cain, Laurie A. Finke, Barbara E. Johnson, John McGowan, and Jeffrey J. Williams. New York: Norton, 2001. 2,600 pp. $67.45. Once so disorienting and...

The goldilocks formula.(The Playwright's Guidebook )(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... The Playwright's Guidebook By Stuart Spencer. New York: Faber & Faber, 2002. 374 pp. $16.00. In an early essay, Susan Sontag expressed admiration--or was it dismay?--at playwright Peter Weiss's "staggering ambition" to combine dicta from...