All posts tagged: Richard Kenney

Summer & Fall 2019

Featuring Bruce Bond, Anna Maria Hong, Richard Kenney, Kenji C. Liu, Allan Peterson, Michael Prior, David Rigsbee, Elizabeth Robinson, Cintia Santana, Mark Svenvold, Ellen Welcker, Yu Xiang & more

Winter & Spring 2018

Featuring John Ashbery, Catherine Bresner, Meredith Clark, Olivia de Recat, William Fargason, Dobby Gibson, Richard Kenney, Owen McLeod, Allison Morton, Alyson Provax, Elizabeth Scanlon, Sarah Sloat, Bianca Stone, & more

Hello Goodbye Hello

Kevin Craft (Editor 2010 – 2016) Signs Off   Most poetry readers I know chuckle wearily at the steady stream of “poetry is dead” articles that have appeared with astonishing tenacity in various venues, including The New York Times, these past few years. The authors of these articles agonize in some way or another over poetry’s irrelevance to modern culture: poetry is too abstract and obscure, they argue, too much an insider’s game, divorced from the real wants and needs (to borrow a phrase from Whitman’s early review of Keats’s poems) of actual bodies in the 21st century. But why should poetry worry over its relationship to popular culture? Must it be popular (or topical) in order to be vital, in order to sustain a reader, or fortify a readership? What happens to those who win (or live by) popularity contests in the contemporary cultural grind? We know all too well that the speed of the attention-getting news cycle is debilitating. Presidential primaries come and go, talk radio blathers on, discourse hardens, partisans lob grenades …