RICHARD KENNEY
Sword Upstairs
Is this tower the chanter / of the sky’s pipes, or the dry syrinx / of the dead bird of the sky?
Is this tower the chanter / of the sky’s pipes, or the dry syrinx / of the dead bird of the sky?
Featuring an interview, essay and three poems.
by Jake Uitti | Contributing Writer
“How can poetry, with only words at its disposal, work on us the way the world works on us?”
Jason Whitmarsh on the poetry of Richard Kenney
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
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
“Green ferns bend a breeze / under summer’s awning”
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, concerned citizens can change the world.
Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” – Margaret Mead
Sub-rosa cues on race— / the gutter-tongue that plays / to an ever-baser base— / what’s so hard to see?
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 …