Karl Kirchwey
Encyclopedia
Karl Kirchwey is a prize–winning American
poet
who has lived in both Europe
and the United States
and whose work is strongly influenced by the Greek
and Roman
past. He often looks to the classical world for inspiration with themes which have included loss, loneliness, nostalgia and modern atrocities, and how the past relates to the present. While he is best known for his poems, he also is a book reviewer, award-winning teacher of creative writing
, translator, arts administrator, literary curator
, and advocate for writers and writing. He was director of the Unterberg Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y
for thirteen years and is currently a professor at Bryn Mawr College and from 2000–2010 directed its creative writing program. From 2010–2013 Kirchwey is serving as the Andrew Heiskell
Arts Director at the American Academy in Rome
.
Kirchwey was born in 1956 and graduated from Phillips Academy
in Andover
in 1974 in the boarding school's first co-educational class which included jazz musician Bill Cunliffe
, software executive Peter Currie
, actor Dana Delany
, painter Julian Hatton
, writer Nate Lee
, political commentator Heather Mac Donald
, restauranteur Priscilla Martel
, TV producer Jonathan Meath
, editor Sara Nelson
, and sculptor Gar Waterman
. He attended Yale
but described his first two undergraduate years as "unfocused and unproductive." He took a class on versification
taught by Penelope Laurans which gave him the sense that he had an "ear for verse" but his work was "less than diligent" in his own estimation. He took a year off and worked at Cutler's Record Shop in New Haven
. After his year off, he studied with poet John Hollander
and discovered that it was possible to build a life around the task of writing poetry. Kirchwey described Hollander as a master of both English
and American poetry and said:
Hollander taught him that poems were more than mere creations but have an inspirational force, and gave Kirchwey greater respect for intellectual and artistic pursuits as well as for Yale university as well.
Kirchwey graduated with a B.A.
degree in English literature
from Yale
and with an M.A.
in English literature
from Columbia
.
in Lugano, and at Elisabeth Irwin High School in New York City.
From 1995-97, Kirchwey drove weekly between New York City and western Massachusetts, where he taught writing at Smith College
. During these drives, he would listen to tapes of epic poetry
, including a translation of Vergil by Robert Fitzgerald
. During one drive, Kirchwey felt lost in the entangled ramps of what his grandmother had once termed the Hartford spaghetti stretch of Interstate highway 91 -- he described it as "bewildering, tortuous, and layered are the whorls of its entrance and exit ramps". Kirchwey wrote later how that driving experience had reminded him of Vergil's hero Aeneas
who, after having fled Troy
during its nighttime destruction by the Greek army, returned to the burning city to search for his missing wife Creusa
but who became lost temporarily. Creusa's ghost appears to Aeneas to tell him that her death had been fated and that there's nothing he can do about it and that he must continue with his life. Kirchwey wrote how his experience in Hartford was similar to that of Aeneas in Troy:
Kirchwey taught at Smith
, Yale
, Wesleyan
, and in the M.F.A.
program at Columbia
. He has taught at Bryn Mawr
since 2000 where he is an associate professor and director of the creative writing program, although .from 2010–2013 he is on leave from Bryn Mawr College. He teaches creative writing
courses in poetry
and memoir
and literature courses in Classical Myth
and its contemporary updates, modernist poetry
, and contemporary American poetry. He received Bryn Mawr's Rosalyn R. Schwartz Teaching Award in 2003.
According to one account, Bryn Mawr in the 1990s began a project to raise the national stature of its writing program as well as "its profile in the arts" according to provost Ralph Kuncl, and Kirchwey was hired in 2000 as part of this effort. College president Nancy Vickers
applauded Kirchwey's efforts to bring talented writers to lecture on the campus. Kirchwey said:
Kirchwey helped bring numerous writers to campus including Nobel laureates Derek Walcott
, Nadine Gordimer
, and Nigeria's
Wole Soyinka
, as well as writers such as Peter Cameron
, Sandra Cisneros
, novelist E. L. Doctorow
, Umberto Eco
, Jessica Hagedorn
, Maxine Hong Kingston
, James Lasdun
, Peter Matthiessen
, novelist Ian McEwan
, Sigrid Nunez
, Susan-Lori Parks, Robert Pinsky
, Zadie Smith
, Mark Strand
, playwright August Wilson
, and others. Actors Claire Bloom
and John Neville did a stage reading of Milton's
Samson Agonistes
. A Bryn Mawr publication described Kirchwey's efforts as successful, and wrote that he diversified and expanded the creative writing program to make it a "premier stop" for writers in the Philadelphia
region.
In 2010, Kirchwey was named the Andrew Heiskell Arts Director at the American Academy in Rome
, which is an independent privately–funded institution which encourages scholarly and artistic projects associated with the culture of Rome
. Its mission is to "to foster the pursuit of advanced research and independent study in the fine arts and humanities," according to a statement on its website. He plans to serve there until returning to Bryn Mawr for the fall 2013 semester. A Bryn Mawr publication described Kirchwey's role in Italy
as "shaping and articulating the Academy’s broad vision for the arts" in terms of guiding programs.
and Greece
and has a European orientation
in some of his poems as well as a religious sensibility
. For example, his poem entitled "Mutabor" meaning change had references to the Hindu
god Parvati
and Shiva
and a section of the poem, which appeared in the online publication Poetry Daily
, described a boy and a girl in a gorge. Kirchwey based the poem on his memory as a youth of a cold stream called the Petite Gyronne near a bridge which ran in a secret gorge between the village of Chesières and the ski resort of Villars in the Alps mountains in the French–speaking part of Switzerland
. He wrote there was a place near the gorge where it had been said that "the bravest of the boys would walk the entire length of the narrow bridge-railing, a hundred feet or more above the stream bed, even (once) blindfolded." In Kirchwey's poem, the boy and the girl are lovers
in a hollow near a heap of melting snow in May who "faced with the water's endlessness" and the "untranslatable grief of the bird's paraphrase" became wise in their lovemaking: "they were never wiser than in that knowledge," he wrote in the poem. In addition, events in his life, such as the death of his mother, have influenced his poetry.
Kirchwey spent from September 1994 to July 1995 at the Academy in Rome as part of the Rome Prize, and described the experience as having "completely shaped" his third book of poems.
In 1998, Kirchwey's The Engrafted Word was published by Holt in hardcover and paperback versions. It revealed Kirchwey's wide inquiry into disparate areas including obstetrics
, physics
, superstition
, mythology
, biology
, religion
, chemistry
, and Roman history. He engrafted technical words upon each other, sometimes words which seemed initially to have little in common with each other, and magically engrafts the "past with the present", according to one reviewer.
In 2002, At the Palace of Jove: Poems was published by Marian Wood Books/Putnam's. The book had classical references and was described by Publishers Weekly
as an exploration of how the past
impacts the present
. The magazine felt that Kirchwey's poems entitled Elegies weren't strictly about mourning
but rather were "quiet inquiries into what the mind does to compensate for spiritual silence."
In 2007, Kirchwey published The Happiness of this World which included poems such as "Reading Akhmatova" in which a child's speech therapy is contrasted with a Russian
poet's experience and in which Kirchwey wrote phrases such as the widening diction of experience. The book included a prose memoir
entitled A Yatra for Yama which described a journey Kirchwey made through Asia
which related to a family story in which a namesake uncle died in a World War II
plane crash during the battle for Saipan
. A yatra is a journey.
Kirchwey's poems have appeared in AGNI, Grand Street, The Kenyon Review, The Nation
, The New Criterion
, The New Republic
, Salmagundi
, The New York Review of Books
, The New Yorker
, Parnassus, Partisan Review
, Poetry (Chicago), Slate
, The Southwest Review, American Scholar
, Sewanee Review
, Arion
, Tin House, The Yale Review
and elsewhere.
While known best for his poetry, Kirchwey also wrote the play Airdales & Cipher, which was presented as a public reading at several venues, including the Appalachian Summer Festival in Boone, North Carolina
as well as the 92nd Street Y. The play was based on a work by Greek playwright Euripides
entitled Alcestis and won the Paris Review Prize in 1997 in the category of poetic drama. He has also read aloud the works of other writers such as Eudora Welty
.
In 2010, Kirchwey has finished a sixth volume of poems tentatively titled Mount Lebanon, and there are plans for this book to be published by Marian Wood Books–Putnam's
in the spring of 2011. In addition, he is working on a translation
of Paul Verlaine's
first book of poems which will be called Poems Under Saturn, and Kirchwey's translation is slated to be published by Princeton University Press
in the spring of 2011.
in New York, and became Director in 1987, and he held this post until 2000. He curated
the Poetry Center's annual reading series which included writers in all genres
such as poetry, fiction, non–fiction, and drama. He staffed and taught a creative writing program for nonmatriculating adults. He also curated a series of lectures by literary biographers called " Biographers and Brunch" . He instituted programs which explored connections between literature and other art forms such as music
and visual arts
. He was described as focusing on verse drama and presented plays by Nobel laureates Seamus Heaney
and Derek Walcott
, as well as ones by Rita Dove
. In addition, there were programs for high school students from New York City. The center won grants from the Lila Wallace–Reader's Digest Fund which helped make possible a national stage tour of Robert Pinsky's translation of Dante's Inferno
. There was a thirteen-part radio
series entitled The Poet's Voice broadcast on WNYC radio and later on National Public Radio. The annual budget for the poetry center grew by a quarter of a million dollars, according to an account from the 92nd Street Y.
As director, Kirchwey encouraged New Yorkers to experience live readings by authors, since the format permits a "certain volatility" and spontaneity, in his view; readers benefit from hearing the author speak aloud, in person, and don't hear the usual "pre-packaged video and radio." Kirchwey said that in some situations, authors who had been prepared to read a certain passage had changed their minds at the last instant upon seeing an audience, and read something else; in this sense, the medium is more dynamic than broadcast media such as television
or radio
. Kirchwey commented in 1998 that he thought that more people were attending live readings, and that audiences were getting younger on average. Kirchwey introduced writers such as Alice Walker
. Kirchwey has read his own poems on occasion. Kirchwey attended events such as one honoring poet Stanley Kunitz
. Kirchwey formally left the post of director of the 92nd Street Y in June, 2000. Upon his departure in 2000, executive director Sol Adler said:
in the New York Times suggested Kirchwey's book of poems was transformative and elegant. Salter applauded Kirchwey's "sensual accuracies" in such poems by commenting on one of Kirchwey's poetic lines. Salter writes: "A sonogram
––that routine magic whereby a mother's womb turns into a crystal ball––opens Karl Kirchwey's elegant third collection of poems."
Salter suggested that the repeated syllables with the uck sound evoked the sound of the experience of a sonogram, including the discomfort. She described Kirchwey's poetry as being "steeped in allusions to classical mythology
, history
, literature
. For example, she notes how Kirchwey transforms the word sinuses into Siracusa's. She describes Kirchwey's breaking up of the word hemoglobin into he–moglobin because the writer is talking about the birth of a baby boy, and Salter discusses the rhyming patterns. She notes how Kirchwey spent a year in Italy
; many of the poems in this book are set there. She finds in his writing a quality of "tenderness", and sees a poet who "can't shake his shockability".
Salter compared Kirchwey to poet Marianne Moore
in terms of how the "alliterative, assonant words hang heavy as lemons from their commas" and in terms of stylistic approaches such as breaking words at the ends of lines and having a fairly "loose treatment of meter." The Engrafted Word was listed as a "notable book" of 1998 by The New York Times.
Kirchwey reviewed a poetry book by Derek Walcott
and described the Nobel Prize
winner's latest collection of poems as "intensely personal, revealing a deeper autobiographical intimacy." Kirchwey reviewed poetry of Jeffrey Yang as well, writing that Yang "speaks in tongues as if touched with a Pentecostal flame" and "leads the reader through a net of allusions in poems barnacled with hard words."
Kirchwey reviewed the novel
The Dream Life of Sukhanov by Olga Grushin
in 2006 for the Chicago Tribune
. The novel is about an artist–turned–party official working for the communist
media as an art critic named Sukhanov whose "past catches up with him during the last days of the Soviet Union
." Kirchwey wrote:
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
poet
Poet
A poet is a person who writes poetry. A poet's work can be literal, meaning that his work is derived from a specific event, or metaphorical, meaning that his work can take on many meanings and forms. Poets have existed since antiquity, in nearly all languages, and have produced works that vary...
who has lived in both Europe
Europe
Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...
and the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
and whose work is strongly influenced by the Greek
Ancient Greece
Ancient Greece is a civilization belonging to a period of Greek history that lasted from the Archaic period of the 8th to 6th centuries BC to the end of antiquity. Immediately following this period was the beginning of the Early Middle Ages and the Byzantine era. Included in Ancient Greece is the...
and Roman
Ancient Rome
Ancient Rome was a thriving civilization that grew on the Italian Peninsula as early as the 8th century BC. Located along the Mediterranean Sea and centered on the city of Rome, it expanded to one of the largest empires in the ancient world....
past. He often looks to the classical world for inspiration with themes which have included loss, loneliness, nostalgia and modern atrocities, and how the past relates to the present. While he is best known for his poems, he also is a book reviewer, award-winning teacher of creative writing
Creative writing
Creative writing is considered to be any writing, fiction, poetry, or non-fiction, that goes outside the bounds of normal professional, journalistic, academic, and technical forms of literature. Works which fall into this category include novels, epics, short stories, and poems...
, translator, arts administrator, literary curator
Curator
A curator is a manager or overseer. Traditionally, a curator or keeper of a cultural heritage institution is a content specialist responsible for an institution's collections and involved with the interpretation of heritage material...
, and advocate for writers and writing. He was director of the Unterberg Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y
92nd Street Y
92nd Street Y is a multifaceted cultural institution and community center located on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City, United States, at the corner of E. 92nd Street and Lexington Avenue. Its full name is 92nd Street Young Men's and Young Women's Hebrew Association...
for thirteen years and is currently a professor at Bryn Mawr College and from 2000–2010 directed its creative writing program. From 2010–2013 Kirchwey is serving as the Andrew Heiskell
Andrew Heiskell
Andrew Heiskell was chairman and CEO of Time Inc. , and also known for his philanthropy, including for the New York Public Library...
Arts Director at the American Academy in Rome
American Academy in Rome
The American Academy in Rome is a research and arts institution located on the Gianicolo in Rome.- History :In 1893, a group of American architects, painters and sculptors met regularly while planning the fine arts section of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition...
.
College years
Phillips Academy
Phillips Academy is a selective, co-educational independent boarding high school for boarding and day students in grades 9–12, along with a post-graduate year...
in Andover
Andover, Massachusetts
Andover is a town in Essex County, Massachusetts, United States. It was incorporated in 1646 and as of the 2010 census, the population was 33,201...
in 1974 in the boarding school's first co-educational class which included jazz musician Bill Cunliffe
Bill Cunliffe
Bill Cunliffe is an American jazz pianist and composer based in Los Angeles He has been described by The New York Times as being in the "modern jazz mainstream" and as an "accomplished pianist and composer." Ernie Rideout of Keyboard Magazine described Cunliffe's playing as "inventive, melodic,...
, software executive Peter Currie
Peter Currie
Peter L. S. Currie is a business executive notable for being the chief financial officer for Netscape during the 1990s. Currie was described by Wall Street Journal reporter Jessica Vascellaro as one of the "Silicon Valley wise men". He advised Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg about business matters in...
, actor Dana Delany
Dana Delany
Dana Welles Delany is an American film, stage, and television actress, producer, host and health activist.After various roles in the early career, Delany garnered her first leading role in 1987 in the short-lived NBC sitcom Sweet Surrender and achieved wider fame in 1988–1991 as Colleen McMurphy...
, painter Julian Hatton
Julian Hatton
Julian Burroughs Hatton III is an American landscape abstract artist from New York City whose paintings have appeared in galleries in the United States and France. The New York Times described his painting style as "vibrant, playful, semi-abstract landscapes" while New York Sun art critic John...
, writer Nate Lee
Nate Lee
Nate Lee is an American author and former senior editor at Chicago's Newcity weekly magazine who advocated passionately for live theater. At Newcity, Lee wrote features, a weekly column called Urbanitie, theatre and film reviews as well as stories on architecture and historic preservation, and at...
, political commentator Heather Mac Donald
Heather Mac Donald
Heather Lynn Mac Donald is an American political commentator and thinker notable for her advocacy of secular conservatism. She has advocated her positions on numerous subjects including crime prevention, immigration reform, academia, the art world, and politics. She is a prolific essayist...
, restauranteur Priscilla Martel
Priscilla Martel
Priscilla Martel is an award–winning American chef, food writer, and consultant notable for desserts, baking, pastries and fireplace-cooked meals. Her recipes appear in magazines such as Food & Wine. She is a contributing writer at Flavor and the Menu Magazine. She teaches and has written...
, TV producer Jonathan Meath
Jonathan Meath
Jonathan Meath is an award–winning American TV producer based in Boston who is notable for earning numerous Emmy nominations and the coveted George Foster Peabody Award in 1993. He is known for his commitment to children's educational television...
, editor Sara Nelson
Sara Nelson
Sara Nelson is an American publishing industry figure who is an editor and book reviewer and consultant and columnist and who is currently the book editor at Oprah's O Magazine. Nelson is notable for having been editor in chief at the book industry's chief trade publication Publishers Weekly from...
, and sculptor Gar Waterman
Gar Waterman
Gar Waterman is an award–winning sculptor based in New Haven in Connecticut who is notable for large public arts projects which beautify public places as well as creations which mimic sealife. He works in marble, stone, bronze, wood, and sometimes glass. Some of his sculptures resemble "giant...
. He attended Yale
Yale College
Yale College was the official name of Yale University from 1718 to 1887. The name now refers to the undergraduate part of the university. Each undergraduate student is assigned to one of 12 residential colleges.-Residential colleges:...
but described his first two undergraduate years as "unfocused and unproductive." He took a class on versification
Versification
Versification may be*the art of making verses, see poetry*the theory of the phonetic structure of verse, see meter *the rendition of a prose work into verse, especially of classical works during the Middle Ages, see medieval poetry...
taught by Penelope Laurans which gave him the sense that he had an "ear for verse" but his work was "less than diligent" in his own estimation. He took a year off and worked at Cutler's Record Shop in New Haven
New Haven, Connecticut
New Haven is the second-largest city in Connecticut and the sixth-largest in New England. According to the 2010 Census, New Haven's population increased by 5.0% between 2000 and 2010, a rate higher than that of the State of Connecticut, and higher than that of the state's five largest cities, and...
. After his year off, he studied with poet John Hollander
John Hollander
John Hollander is a Jewish-American poet and literary critic. As of 2007, he is Sterling Professor Emeritus of English at Yale University...
and discovered that it was possible to build a life around the task of writing poetry. Kirchwey described Hollander as a master of both English
British poetry
British poetry is a term rarely used, as almost all poets of the British world are clearly identified with one of the various nations within those areas....
and American poetry and said:
Hollander taught him that poems were more than mere creations but have an inspirational force, and gave Kirchwey greater respect for intellectual and artistic pursuits as well as for Yale university as well.
Kirchwey graduated with a B.A.
Bachelor of Arts
A Bachelor of Arts , from the Latin artium baccalaureus, is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate course or program in either the liberal arts, the sciences, or both...
degree in English literature
English literature
English literature is the literature written in the English language, including literature composed in English by writers not necessarily from England; for example, Robert Burns was Scottish, James Joyce was Irish, Joseph Conrad was Polish, Dylan Thomas was Welsh, Edgar Allan Poe was American, J....
from Yale
Yale College
Yale College was the official name of Yale University from 1718 to 1887. The name now refers to the undergraduate part of the university. Each undergraduate student is assigned to one of 12 residential colleges.-Residential colleges:...
and with an M.A.
Master of Arts (postgraduate)
A Master of Arts from the Latin Magister Artium, is a type of Master's degree awarded by universities in many countries. The M.A. is usually contrasted with the M.S. or M.Sc. degrees...
in English literature
English literature
English literature is the literature written in the English language, including literature composed in English by writers not necessarily from England; for example, Robert Burns was Scottish, James Joyce was Irish, Joseph Conrad was Polish, Dylan Thomas was Welsh, Edgar Allan Poe was American, J....
from Columbia
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
.
Teaching
Between 1979 and 1984, Kirchwey taught English literature and composition at the Andover Summer Session. He also taught at the American School in SwitzerlandThe American School In Switzerland
The American School In Switzerland is a private school that receives elementary, middle, and high school students from many different nations and provides them with a Western-based education. Located in Montagnola, a small town above Lugano, Ticino, Switzerland, it has a current student body of...
in Lugano, and at Elisabeth Irwin High School in New York City.
From 1995-97, Kirchwey drove weekly between New York City and western Massachusetts, where he taught writing at Smith College
Smith College
Smith College is a private, independent women's liberal arts college located in Northampton, Massachusetts. It is the largest member of the Seven Sisters...
. During these drives, he would listen to tapes of epic poetry
Epic poetry
An epic is a lengthy narrative poem, ordinarily concerning a serious subject containing details of heroic deeds and events significant to a culture or nation. Oral poetry may qualify as an epic, and Albert Lord and Milman Parry have argued that classical epics were fundamentally an oral poetic form...
, including a translation of Vergil by Robert Fitzgerald
Robert Fitzgerald
Robert Stuart Fitzgerald was a poet, critic and translator whose renderings of the Greek classics "became standard works for a generation of scholars and students." He was best known as a translator of ancient Greek and Latin...
. During one drive, Kirchwey felt lost in the entangled ramps of what his grandmother had once termed the Hartford spaghetti stretch of Interstate highway 91 -- he described it as "bewildering, tortuous, and layered are the whorls of its entrance and exit ramps". Kirchwey wrote later how that driving experience had reminded him of Vergil's hero Aeneas
Aeneas
Aeneas , in Greco-Roman mythology, was a Trojan hero, the son of the prince Anchises and the goddess Aphrodite. His father was the second cousin of King Priam of Troy, making Aeneas Priam's second cousin, once removed. The journey of Aeneas from Troy , which led to the founding a hamlet south of...
who, after having fled Troy
Troy
Troy was a city, both factual and legendary, located in northwest Anatolia in what is now Turkey, southeast of the Dardanelles and beside Mount Ida...
during its nighttime destruction by the Greek army, returned to the burning city to search for his missing wife Creusa
Creusa
In Greek mythology, four people had the name Creusa ; the name simply means "princess".-Naiad:According to Pindar's 9th Pythian Ode, Creusa was a naiad and daughter of Gaia who bore Hypseus, King of the Lapiths to the river god Peneus. Hypseus had one daughter, Cyrene. When a lion attacked her...
but who became lost temporarily. Creusa's ghost appears to Aeneas to tell him that her death had been fated and that there's nothing he can do about it and that he must continue with his life. Kirchwey wrote how his experience in Hartford was similar to that of Aeneas in Troy:
Kirchwey taught at Smith
Smith College
Smith College is a private, independent women's liberal arts college located in Northampton, Massachusetts. It is the largest member of the Seven Sisters...
, Yale
Yale University
Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...
, Wesleyan
Wesleyan University
Wesleyan University is a private liberal arts college founded in 1831 and located in Middletown, Connecticut. According to the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Wesleyan is the only Baccalaureate College in the nation that emphasizes undergraduate instruction in the arts and...
, and in the M.F.A.
Master of Fine Arts
A Master of Fine Arts is a graduate degree typically requiring 2–3 years of postgraduate study beyond the bachelor's degree , although the term of study will vary by country or by university. The MFA is usually awarded in visual arts, creative writing, filmmaking, dance, or theatre/performing arts...
program at Columbia
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
. He has taught at Bryn Mawr
Bryn Mawr College
Bryn Mawr College is a women's liberal arts college located in Bryn Mawr, a community in Lower Merion Township, Pennsylvania, ten miles west of Philadelphia. The name "Bryn Mawr" means "big hill" in Welsh....
since 2000 where he is an associate professor and director of the creative writing program, although .from 2010–2013 he is on leave from Bryn Mawr College. He teaches creative writing
Creative writing
Creative writing is considered to be any writing, fiction, poetry, or non-fiction, that goes outside the bounds of normal professional, journalistic, academic, and technical forms of literature. Works which fall into this category include novels, epics, short stories, and poems...
courses in poetry
Poetry
Poetry is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning...
and memoir
Memoir
A memoir , is a literary genre, forming a subclass of autobiography – although the terms 'memoir' and 'autobiography' are almost interchangeable. Memoir is autobiographical writing, but not all autobiographical writing follows the criteria for memoir set out below...
and literature courses in Classical Myth
Classical mythology
Classical mythology or Greco-Roman mythology is the cultural reception of myths from the ancient Greeks and Romans. Along with philosophy and political thought, mythology represents one of the major survivals of classical antiquity throughout later Western culture.Classical mythology has provided...
and its contemporary updates, modernist poetry
Modernist poetry
Modernist poetry refers to poetry written between 1890 and 1950 in the tradition of modernist literature in the English language, but the dates of the term depend upon a number of factors, including the nation of origin, the particular school in question, and the biases of the critic setting the...
, and contemporary American poetry. He received Bryn Mawr's Rosalyn R. Schwartz Teaching Award in 2003.
According to one account, Bryn Mawr in the 1990s began a project to raise the national stature of its writing program as well as "its profile in the arts" according to provost Ralph Kuncl, and Kirchwey was hired in 2000 as part of this effort. College president Nancy Vickers
Nancy J. Vickers
Nancy J. Vickers was the seventh president of Bryn Mawr College in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, a position she held from 1997 until 2008. During her tenure, she was referred to as 'Nancy J.' by the students there. She announced her intention to step down as president of the college in June 2008...
applauded Kirchwey's efforts to bring talented writers to lecture on the campus. Kirchwey said:
Kirchwey helped bring numerous writers to campus including Nobel laureates Derek Walcott
Derek Walcott
Derek Alton Walcott, OBE OCC is a Saint Lucian poet, playwright, writer and visual artist who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992 and the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2011 for White Egrets. His works include the Homeric epic Omeros...
, Nadine Gordimer
Nadine Gordimer
Nadine Gordimer is a South African writer and political activist. She was awarded the 1991 Nobel Prize in Literature when she was recognised as a woman "who through her magnificent epic writing has – in the words of Alfred Nobel – been of very great benefit to humanity".Her writing has long dealt...
, and Nigeria's
Nigeria
Nigeria , officially the Federal Republic of Nigeria, is a federal constitutional republic comprising 36 states and its Federal Capital Territory, Abuja. The country is located in West Africa and shares land borders with the Republic of Benin in the west, Chad and Cameroon in the east, and Niger in...
Wole Soyinka
Wole Soyinka
Akinwande Oluwole "Wole" Soyinka is a Nigerian writer, poet and playwright. He was awarded the 1986 Nobel Prize in Literature, where he was recognised as a man "who in a wide cultural perspective and with poetic overtones fashions the drama of existence", and became the first African in Africa and...
, as well as writers such as Peter Cameron
Peter Cameron
Peter Cameron may refer to:* Dr Peter Cameron , Church of Scotland minister convicted of heresy by the Presbyterian Church of Australia* Peter Cameron , American novelist...
, Sandra Cisneros
Sandra Cisneros
Sandra Cisneros is an American writer best known for her acclaimed first novel The House on Mango Street and her subsequent short story collection Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories...
, novelist E. L. Doctorow
E. L. Doctorow
Edgar Lawrence Doctorow is an American author.- Biography :Edgar Lawrence Doctorow was born in the Bronx, New York City, the son of second-generation Americans of Russian Jewish descent...
, Umberto Eco
Umberto Eco
Umberto Eco Knight Grand Cross is an Italian semiotician, essayist, philosopher, literary critic, and novelist, best known for his novel The Name of the Rose , an intellectual mystery combining semiotics in fiction, biblical analysis, medieval studies and literary theory...
, Jessica Hagedorn
Jessica Hagedorn
Jessica Tarahata Hagedorn is a Filipino-American playwright, writer, poet, storyteller, musician, and multimedia performance artist.-Biography:...
, Maxine Hong Kingston
Maxine Hong Kingston
Maxine Hong Kingston is a Chinese American author and Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, where she graduated with a BA in English in 1962. Kingston has written three novels and several works of non-fiction about the experiences of Chinese immigrants living in the United...
, James Lasdun
James Lasdun
James Lasdun is an English author, poet and academic. Lasdun was one of the judges for the 2008 Griffin Poetry Prize.-Career:...
, Peter Matthiessen
Peter Matthiessen
Peter Matthiessen is a two-time National Book Award-winning American novelist and non-fiction writer, as well as an environmental activist...
, novelist Ian McEwan
Ian McEwan
Ian Russell McEwan CBE, FRSA, FRSL is a British novelist and screenwriter, and one of Britain's most highly regarded writers. In 2008, The Times named him among their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945"....
, Sigrid Nunez
Sigrid Nunez
-Biography:Sigrid Nunez is the daughter of a Chinese-Panamanian father and a German mother. She was born and raised in New York City. She received her BA from Barnard College and her MFA from Columbia University. After finishing school she worked for a time as an editorial assistant at The New York...
, Susan-Lori Parks, Robert Pinsky
Robert Pinsky
Robert Pinsky is an American poet, essayist, literary critic, and translator. From 1997 to 2000, he served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. Pinsky is the author of nineteen books, most of which are collections of his own poetry...
, Zadie Smith
Zadie Smith
Zadie Smith is a British novelist. To date she has written three novels. In 2003, she was included on Granta's list of 20 best young authors...
, Mark Strand
Mark Strand
Mark Strand is an American poet, essayist, and translator. He was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1990. Since 2005, he has been a professor of English at Columbia University.- Biography :...
, playwright August Wilson
August Wilson
August Wilson was an American playwright whose work included a series of ten plays, The Pittsburgh Cycle, for which he received two Pulitzer Prizes for Drama...
, and others. Actors Claire Bloom
Claire Bloom
Claire Bloom is an English film and stage actress.-Early life:Bloom was born in the North London suburb of Finchley, the daughter of Elizabeth and Edward Max Blume, who worked in sales...
and John Neville did a stage reading of Milton's
John Milton
John Milton was an English poet, polemicist, a scholarly man of letters, and a civil servant for the Commonwealth of England under Oliver Cromwell...
Samson Agonistes
Samson Agonistes
Samson Agonistes is a tragic closet drama by John Milton. It appeared with the publication of Milton's Paradise Regain'd in 1671, as the title page of that volume states: "Paradise Regained / A Poem / In IV Books / To Which Is Added / Samson Agonistes"...
. A Bryn Mawr publication described Kirchwey's efforts as successful, and wrote that he diversified and expanded the creative writing program to make it a "premier stop" for writers in the Philadelphia
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Philadelphia is the largest city in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the county seat of Philadelphia County, with which it is coterminous. The city is located in the Northeastern United States along the Delaware and Schuylkill rivers. It is the fifth-most-populous city in the United States,...
region.
In 2010, Kirchwey was named the Andrew Heiskell Arts Director at the American Academy in Rome
American Academy in Rome
The American Academy in Rome is a research and arts institution located on the Gianicolo in Rome.- History :In 1893, a group of American architects, painters and sculptors met regularly while planning the fine arts section of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition...
, which is an independent privately–funded institution which encourages scholarly and artistic projects associated with the culture of Rome
Rome
Rome is the capital of Italy and the country's largest and most populated city and comune, with over 2.7 million residents in . The city is located in the central-western portion of the Italian Peninsula, on the Tiber River within the Lazio region of Italy.Rome's history spans two and a half...
. Its mission is to "to foster the pursuit of advanced research and independent study in the fine arts and humanities," according to a statement on its website. He plans to serve there until returning to Bryn Mawr for the fall 2013 semester. A Bryn Mawr publication described Kirchwey's role in Italy
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
as "shaping and articulating the Academy’s broad vision for the arts" in terms of guiding programs.
Writing
Kirchwey has written poetry consistently during his career and by 2010 had published five books of poetry. He was influenced by the civilizations of classical RomeAncient Rome
Ancient Rome was a thriving civilization that grew on the Italian Peninsula as early as the 8th century BC. Located along the Mediterranean Sea and centered on the city of Rome, it expanded to one of the largest empires in the ancient world....
and Greece
Ancient Greece
Ancient Greece is a civilization belonging to a period of Greek history that lasted from the Archaic period of the 8th to 6th centuries BC to the end of antiquity. Immediately following this period was the beginning of the Early Middle Ages and the Byzantine era. Included in Ancient Greece is the...
and has a European orientation
Europe
Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...
in some of his poems as well as a religious sensibility
Religion
Religion is a collection of cultural systems, belief systems, and worldviews that establishes symbols that relate humanity to spirituality and, sometimes, to moral values. Many religions have narratives, symbols, traditions and sacred histories that are intended to give meaning to life or to...
. For example, his poem entitled "Mutabor" meaning change had references to the Hindu
Hindu
Hindu refers to an identity associated with the philosophical, religious and cultural systems that are indigenous to the Indian subcontinent. As used in the Constitution of India, the word "Hindu" is also attributed to all persons professing any Indian religion...
god Parvati
Parvati
Parvati is a Hindu goddess. Parvati is Shakti, the wife of Shiva and the gentle aspect of Mahadevi, the Great Goddess...
and Shiva
Shiva
Shiva is a major Hindu deity, and is the destroyer god or transformer among the Trimurti, the Hindu Trinity of the primary aspects of the divine. God Shiva is a yogi who has notice of everything that happens in the world and is the main aspect of life. Yet one with great power lives a life of a...
and a section of the poem, which appeared in the online publication Poetry Daily
Poetry (magazine)
Poetry , published in Chicago, Illinois since 1912, is one of the leading monthly poetry journals in the English-speaking world. Published by the Poetry Foundation and currently edited by Christian Wiman, the magazine has a circulation of 30,000 and prints 300 poems per year out of approximately...
, described a boy and a girl in a gorge. Kirchwey based the poem on his memory as a youth of a cold stream called the Petite Gyronne near a bridge which ran in a secret gorge between the village of Chesières and the ski resort of Villars in the Alps mountains in the French–speaking part of Switzerland
Switzerland
Switzerland name of one of the Swiss cantons. ; ; ; or ), in its full name the Swiss Confederation , is a federal republic consisting of 26 cantons, with Bern as the seat of the federal authorities. The country is situated in Western Europe,Or Central Europe depending on the definition....
. He wrote there was a place near the gorge where it had been said that "the bravest of the boys would walk the entire length of the narrow bridge-railing, a hundred feet or more above the stream bed, even (once) blindfolded." In Kirchwey's poem, the boy and the girl are lovers
Love
Love is an emotion of strong affection and personal attachment. In philosophical context, love is a virtue representing all of human kindness, compassion, and affection. Love is central to many religions, as in the Christian phrase, "God is love" or Agape in the Canonical gospels...
in a hollow near a heap of melting snow in May who "faced with the water's endlessness" and the "untranslatable grief of the bird's paraphrase" became wise in their lovemaking: "they were never wiser than in that knowledge," he wrote in the poem. In addition, events in his life, such as the death of his mother, have influenced his poetry.
Kirchwey spent from September 1994 to July 1995 at the Academy in Rome as part of the Rome Prize, and described the experience as having "completely shaped" his third book of poems.
In 1998, Kirchwey's The Engrafted Word was published by Holt in hardcover and paperback versions. It revealed Kirchwey's wide inquiry into disparate areas including obstetrics
Obstetrics
Obstetrics is the medical specialty dealing with the care of all women's reproductive tracts and their children during pregnancy , childbirth and the postnatal period...
, physics
Physics
Physics is a natural science that involves the study of matter and its motion through spacetime, along with related concepts such as energy and force. More broadly, it is the general analysis of nature, conducted in order to understand how the universe behaves.Physics is one of the oldest academic...
, superstition
Superstition
Superstition is a belief in supernatural causality: that one event leads to the cause of another without any process in the physical world linking the two events....
, mythology
Mythology
The term mythology can refer either to the study of myths, or to a body or collection of myths. As examples, comparative mythology is the study of connections between myths from different cultures, whereas Greek mythology is the body of myths from ancient Greece...
, biology
Biology
Biology is a natural science concerned with the study of life and living organisms, including their structure, function, growth, origin, evolution, distribution, and taxonomy. Biology is a vast subject containing many subdivisions, topics, and disciplines...
, religion
Religion
Religion is a collection of cultural systems, belief systems, and worldviews that establishes symbols that relate humanity to spirituality and, sometimes, to moral values. Many religions have narratives, symbols, traditions and sacred histories that are intended to give meaning to life or to...
, chemistry
Chemistry
Chemistry is the science of matter, especially its chemical reactions, but also its composition, structure and properties. Chemistry is concerned with atoms and their interactions with other atoms, and particularly with the properties of chemical bonds....
, and Roman history. He engrafted technical words upon each other, sometimes words which seemed initially to have little in common with each other, and magically engrafts the "past with the present", according to one reviewer.
In 2002, At the Palace of Jove: Poems was published by Marian Wood Books/Putnam's. The book had classical references and was described by Publishers Weekly
Publishers Weekly
Publishers Weekly, aka PW, is an American weekly trade news magazine targeted at publishers, librarians, booksellers and literary agents...
as an exploration of how the past
Past
Most generally, the past is a term used to indicate the totality of events which occurred before a given point in time. The past is contrasted with and defined by the present and the future. The concept of the past is derived from the linear fashion in which human observers experience time, and is...
impacts the present
Present
Present is a time that is neither past nor future.Present may also refer to:- Time and timing :* Present tense, the grammatical tense of a verb* Before Present, radiocarbon dates relative to AD 1950* Presenting, a medical term* Presenteeism...
. The magazine felt that Kirchwey's poems entitled Elegies weren't strictly about mourning
Mourning
Mourning is, in the simplest sense, synonymous with grief over the death of someone. The word is also used to describe a cultural complex of behaviours in which the bereaved participate or are expected to participate...
but rather were "quiet inquiries into what the mind does to compensate for spiritual silence."
In 2007, Kirchwey published The Happiness of this World which included poems such as "Reading Akhmatova" in which a child's speech therapy is contrasted with a Russian
Russia
Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...
poet's experience and in which Kirchwey wrote phrases such as the widening diction of experience. The book included a prose memoir
Memoir
A memoir , is a literary genre, forming a subclass of autobiography – although the terms 'memoir' and 'autobiography' are almost interchangeable. Memoir is autobiographical writing, but not all autobiographical writing follows the criteria for memoir set out below...
entitled A Yatra for Yama which described a journey Kirchwey made through Asia
Asia
Asia is the world's largest and most populous continent, located primarily in the eastern and northern hemispheres. It covers 8.7% of the Earth's total surface area and with approximately 3.879 billion people, it hosts 60% of the world's current human population...
which related to a family story in which a namesake uncle died in a World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
plane crash during the battle for Saipan
Saipan
Saipan is the largest island of the United States Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands , a chain of 15 tropical islands belonging to the Marianas archipelago in the western Pacific Ocean with a total area of . The 2000 census population was 62,392...
. A yatra is a journey.
Kirchwey's poems have appeared in AGNI, Grand Street, The Kenyon Review, The Nation
The Nation
The Nation is the oldest continuously published weekly magazine in the United States. The periodical, devoted to politics and culture, is self-described as "the flagship of the left." Founded on July 6, 1865, It is published by The Nation Company, L.P., at 33 Irving Place, New York City.The Nation...
, The New Criterion
The New Criterion
The New Criterion is a New York-based monthly literary magazine and journal of artistic and cultural criticism, edited by Hilton Kramer and Roger Kimball. It has sections for criticism of poetry, theater, art, music, the media, and books...
, The New Republic
The New Republic
The magazine has also published two articles concerning income inequality, largely criticizing conservative economists for their attempts to deny the existence or negative effect increasing income inequality is having on the United States...
, Salmagundi
Salmagundi
Salmagundi is a salad dish, originating in the early 17th century in England, comprising cooked meats, seafood, vegetables, fruit, leaves, nuts and flowers and dressed with oil, vinegar and spices. There is some debate over the meaning and origin of the word...
, The New York Review of Books
The New York Review of Books
The New York Review of Books is a fortnightly magazine with articles on literature, culture and current affairs. Published in New York City, it takes as its point of departure that the discussion of important books is itself an indispensable literary activity...
, The New Yorker
The New Yorker
The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...
, Parnassus, Partisan Review
Partisan Review
Partisan Review was an American political and literary quarterly published from 1934 to 2003, though it suspended publication between October 1936 and December 1937.-Overview:...
, Poetry (Chicago), Slate
Slate (magazine)
Slate is a US-based English language online current affairs and culture magazine created in 1996 by former New Republic editor Michael Kinsley, initially under the ownership of Microsoft as part of MSN. On 21 December 2004 it was purchased by the Washington Post Company...
, The Southwest Review, American Scholar
The American Scholar (magazine)
The American Scholar is the literary quarterly of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, founded in 1932. The magazine has won fourteen National Magazine Awards from the American Society of Magazine Editors from 1999 to present, including awards for General Excellence...
, Sewanee Review
Sewanee Review
The Sewanee Review is a literary journal established in 1892 and the oldest continuously published periodical of its kind in the United States. It incorporates original fiction and poetry, as well as essays, reviews, and literary criticism...
, Arion
Arion
Arion was a kitharode in ancient Greece, a Dionysiac poet credited with inventing the dithyramb: "As a literary composition for chorus dithyramb was the creation of Arion of Corinth," The islanders of Lesbos claimed him as their native son, but Arion found a patron in Periander, tyrant of Corinth...
, Tin House, The Yale Review
The Yale Review
The Yale Review is the self-proclaimed oldest literary quarterly in the United States. It is published by Yale University.It was founded originally in 1819 as The Christian Spectator. At its origin it was published to support Evangelicalism, but over time began to publish more on history and...
and elsewhere.
While known best for his poetry, Kirchwey also wrote the play Airdales & Cipher, which was presented as a public reading at several venues, including the Appalachian Summer Festival in Boone, North Carolina
Boone, North Carolina
Boone is a town located in the Blue Ridge Mountains of western North Carolina, United States. Boone's population was reported as 17,122, as of 2010...
as well as the 92nd Street Y. The play was based on a work by Greek playwright Euripides
Euripides
Euripides was one of the three great tragedians of classical Athens, the other two being Aeschylus and Sophocles. Some ancient scholars attributed ninety-five plays to him but according to the Suda it was ninety-two at most...
entitled Alcestis and won the Paris Review Prize in 1997 in the category of poetic drama. He has also read aloud the works of other writers such as Eudora Welty
Eudora Welty
Eudora Alice Welty was an American author of short stories and novels about the American South. Her novel The Optimist's Daughter won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973. Welty was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, among numerous awards. She was the first living author to have her works published...
.
In 2010, Kirchwey has finished a sixth volume of poems tentatively titled Mount Lebanon, and there are plans for this book to be published by Marian Wood Books–Putnam's
G. P. Putnam's Sons
G. P. Putnam's Sons was a major United States book publisher based in New York City, New York. Since 1996, it has been an imprint of the Penguin Group.-History:...
in the spring of 2011. In addition, he is working on a translation
Translation
Translation is the communication of the meaning of a source-language text by means of an equivalent target-language text. Whereas interpreting undoubtedly antedates writing, translation began only after the appearance of written literature; there exist partial translations of the Sumerian Epic of...
of Paul Verlaine's
Paul Verlaine
Paul-Marie Verlaine was a French poet associated with the Symbolist movement. He is considered one of the greatest representatives of the fin de siècle in international and French poetry.-Early life:...
first book of poems which will be called Poems Under Saturn, and Kirchwey's translation is slated to be published by Princeton University Press
Princeton University Press
-Further reading:* "". Artforum International, 2005.-External links:* * * * *...
in the spring of 2011.
92nd Street Y
In 1984, Kirchwey joined the Poetry Center as Assistant to the Director of the Unterberg Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y92nd Street Y
92nd Street Y is a multifaceted cultural institution and community center located on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City, United States, at the corner of E. 92nd Street and Lexington Avenue. Its full name is 92nd Street Young Men's and Young Women's Hebrew Association...
in New York, and became Director in 1987, and he held this post until 2000. He curated
Curator
A curator is a manager or overseer. Traditionally, a curator or keeper of a cultural heritage institution is a content specialist responsible for an institution's collections and involved with the interpretation of heritage material...
the Poetry Center's annual reading series which included writers in all genres
Genre
Genre , Greek: genos, γένος) is the term for any category of literature or other forms of art or culture, e.g. music, and in general, any type of discourse, whether written or spoken, audial or visual, based on some set of stylistic criteria. Genres are formed by conventions that change over time...
such as poetry, fiction, non–fiction, and drama. He staffed and taught a creative writing program for nonmatriculating adults. He also curated a series of lectures by literary biographers called " Biographers and Brunch" . He instituted programs which explored connections between literature and other art forms such as music
Music
Music is an art form whose medium is sound and silence. Its common elements are pitch , rhythm , dynamics, and the sonic qualities of timbre and texture...
and visual arts
Visual arts
The visual arts are art forms that create works which are primarily visual in nature, such as ceramics, drawing, painting, sculpture, printmaking, design, crafts, and often modern visual arts and architecture...
. He was described as focusing on verse drama and presented plays by Nobel laureates Seamus Heaney
Seamus Heaney
Seamus Heaney is an Irish poet, writer and lecturer. He lives in Dublin. Heaney has received the Nobel Prize in Literature , the Golden Wreath of Poetry , T. S. Eliot Prize and two Whitbread prizes...
and Derek Walcott
Derek Walcott
Derek Alton Walcott, OBE OCC is a Saint Lucian poet, playwright, writer and visual artist who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992 and the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2011 for White Egrets. His works include the Homeric epic Omeros...
, as well as ones by Rita Dove
Rita Dove
Rita Frances Dove is an American poet and author. From 1993-1995 she served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, a position now popularly known as "U.S. Poet Laureate"...
. In addition, there were programs for high school students from New York City. The center won grants from the Lila Wallace–Reader's Digest Fund which helped make possible a national stage tour of Robert Pinsky's translation of Dante's Inferno
Dante's Inferno
Dante's Inferno is the first part of Dante Alighieri's epic poem Divine Comedy.Dante's Inferno may also refer to:* Dante's Inferno , a silent film about a slum landlord sent to hell...
. There was a thirteen-part radio
Radio
Radio is the transmission of signals through free space by modulation of electromagnetic waves with frequencies below those of visible light. Electromagnetic radiation travels by means of oscillating electromagnetic fields that pass through the air and the vacuum of space...
series entitled The Poet's Voice broadcast on WNYC radio and later on National Public Radio. The annual budget for the poetry center grew by a quarter of a million dollars, according to an account from the 92nd Street Y.
As director, Kirchwey encouraged New Yorkers to experience live readings by authors, since the format permits a "certain volatility" and spontaneity, in his view; readers benefit from hearing the author speak aloud, in person, and don't hear the usual "pre-packaged video and radio." Kirchwey said that in some situations, authors who had been prepared to read a certain passage had changed their minds at the last instant upon seeing an audience, and read something else; in this sense, the medium is more dynamic than broadcast media such as television
Television
Television is a telecommunication medium for transmitting and receiving moving images that can be monochrome or colored, with accompanying sound...
or radio
Radio
Radio is the transmission of signals through free space by modulation of electromagnetic waves with frequencies below those of visible light. Electromagnetic radiation travels by means of oscillating electromagnetic fields that pass through the air and the vacuum of space...
. Kirchwey commented in 1998 that he thought that more people were attending live readings, and that audiences were getting younger on average. Kirchwey introduced writers such as Alice Walker
Alice Walker
Alice Malsenior Walker is an American author, poet, and activist. She has written both fiction and essays about race and gender...
. Kirchwey has read his own poems on occasion. Kirchwey attended events such as one honoring poet Stanley Kunitz
Stanley Kunitz
Stanley Jasspon Kunitz was an American poet. He was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress twice, first in 1974 and then again in 2000.-Biography:...
. Kirchwey formally left the post of director of the 92nd Street Y in June, 2000. Upon his departure in 2000, executive director Sol Adler said:
Reviews of Kirchwey's poetry
A review of The Engrafted Word by writer Mary Jo SalterMary Jo Salter
Mary Jo Salter is an American poet, a coeditor of The Norton Anthology of Poetry and a professor in the Writing Seminars program at Johns Hopkins University.-Life:...
in the New York Times suggested Kirchwey's book of poems was transformative and elegant. Salter applauded Kirchwey's "sensual accuracies" in such poems by commenting on one of Kirchwey's poetic lines. Salter writes: "A sonogram
Sonogram
A sonogram may refer to the following:* A diagnostic medical image created using ultrasound echo equipment, see medical ultrasonography...
––that routine magic whereby a mother's womb turns into a crystal ball––opens Karl Kirchwey's elegant third collection of poems."
Salter suggested that the repeated syllables with the uck sound evoked the sound of the experience of a sonogram, including the discomfort. She described Kirchwey's poetry as being "steeped in allusions to classical mythology
Classical mythology
Classical mythology or Greco-Roman mythology is the cultural reception of myths from the ancient Greeks and Romans. Along with philosophy and political thought, mythology represents one of the major survivals of classical antiquity throughout later Western culture.Classical mythology has provided...
, history
History
History is the discovery, collection, organization, and presentation of information about past events. History can also mean the period of time after writing was invented. Scholars who write about history are called historians...
, literature
Literature
Literature is the art of written works, and is not bound to published sources...
. For example, she notes how Kirchwey transforms the word sinuses into Siracusa's. She describes Kirchwey's breaking up of the word hemoglobin into he–moglobin because the writer is talking about the birth of a baby boy, and Salter discusses the rhyming patterns. She notes how Kirchwey spent a year in Italy
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
; many of the poems in this book are set there. She finds in his writing a quality of "tenderness", and sees a poet who "can't shake his shockability".
Salter compared Kirchwey to poet Marianne Moore
Marianne Moore
Marianne Moore was an American Modernist poet and writer noted for her irony and wit.- Life :Moore was born in Kirkwood, Missouri, in the manse of the Presbyterian church where her maternal grandfather, John Riddle Warner, served as pastor. She was the daughter of mechanical engineer and inventor...
in terms of how the "alliterative, assonant words hang heavy as lemons from their commas" and in terms of stylistic approaches such as breaking words at the ends of lines and having a fairly "loose treatment of meter." The Engrafted Word was listed as a "notable book" of 1998 by The New York Times.
Book reviewing by Kirchwey
Kirchwey wrote reviews in the Philadelphia Inquirer, the New York Times Book Review, and he has contributed literary essays to Parnassus: Poetry in Review and other journals.Kirchwey reviewed a poetry book by Derek Walcott
Derek Walcott
Derek Alton Walcott, OBE OCC is a Saint Lucian poet, playwright, writer and visual artist who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992 and the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2011 for White Egrets. His works include the Homeric epic Omeros...
and described the Nobel Prize
Nobel Prize
The Nobel Prizes are annual international awards bestowed by Scandinavian committees in recognition of cultural and scientific advances. The will of the Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, established the prizes in 1895...
winner's latest collection of poems as "intensely personal, revealing a deeper autobiographical intimacy." Kirchwey reviewed poetry of Jeffrey Yang as well, writing that Yang "speaks in tongues as if touched with a Pentecostal flame" and "leads the reader through a net of allusions in poems barnacled with hard words."
Kirchwey reviewed the novel
Novel
A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....
The Dream Life of Sukhanov by Olga Grushin
Olga Grushin
Olga Grushin is an American novelist.Born in Moscow, Russia to the family of Boris Grushin, a prominent Soviet sociologist, , she spent most of her childhood in Prague, Czechoslovakia. She was educated at Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow State University, and Emory University...
in 2006 for the Chicago Tribune
Chicago Tribune
The Chicago Tribune is a major daily newspaper based in Chicago, Illinois, and the flagship publication of the Tribune Company. Formerly self-styled as the "World's Greatest Newspaper" , it remains the most read daily newspaper of the Chicago metropolitan area and the Great Lakes region and is...
. The novel is about an artist–turned–party official working for the communist
Communism
Communism is a social, political and economic ideology that aims at the establishment of a classless, moneyless, revolutionary and stateless socialist society structured upon common ownership of the means of production...
media as an art critic named Sukhanov whose "past catches up with him during the last days of the Soviet Union
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
." Kirchwey wrote:
Awards
- 1997 Paris Review Prize for Poetic Drama for Airdales & Cipher
- Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America), for A Wandering Island
- Ingram Merrill Foundation grant
- 1994 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation grant
- National Endowment for the ArtsNational Endowment for the ArtsThe National Endowment for the Arts is an independent agency of the United States federal government that offers support and funding for projects exhibiting artistic excellence. It was created by an act of the U.S. Congress in 1965 as an independent agency of the federal government. Its current...
- 1994-95 Rome Prize in Literature
Poetry
- "Fireflys", Slate, July 12, 2005
- "The Tragic Sense of Life", Slate, December 9, 1998
- "Three oaks", The New Criterion, November 2006
Anthologies
- The KGB Bar Book of Poems (2000)
- Twentieth Century Latin American Poetry: a Bilingual Anthology (1996)
- Twentieth Century Poems on the Gospels: an Anthology (1996)
- After Ovid: New Metamorphoses (1995)