Known for having an avalanching and original style, James Merrill best sums it up in his foreword to
The Evolution of the Flightless Bird:
"The poetic wheels just spin and spin, getting nowhere fast. But Kenney--it's what one likes best about him--nearly always has an end in view, a story to tell."
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The Evolution of the Flightless Bird, Yale University Press, 1984
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Orrery, Atheneum, 1985
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The Invention of the Zero, Knopf (New York), 1993
The Evolution of the Flightless Bird
Noted for winning the Series of Younger Poets competition in 1983,
The Evolution of the Flightless Bird is the first of three books that Kenney has written so far in his life. James Merrill provides the foreword to the book, praising its daring stylistic approach. Containing three sections of poetry ('The Hours of the Day,' 'First Poems,' and 'Heroes'), the book is made up of "not well-wrought urns so much as complex molecules programmed to coalesce into larger structures" (Merrill, Foreword). But what makes this book stand out is not that it consists of multiple sonnets, but that the delivery is so original and so far-fetched that its publication sparked much discussion about Kenney's style. A book with images varying from sea to battle scenes,
The Evolution of the Flightless Bird marks the beginning of Kenney's career as a poet.
Orrery
Metaphorically centered around the title1,
Orrery is a single story told from the inclusion of well over 70 poems written in different styles and divided into three main sections: 'Hours' (time), 'Apples' (memory), and 'Physics.' A prelude of sorts to
The Invention of the Zero,
Orrery poses the belief that the world is now being mechanically driven, but it presents the view in a different fashion. The book centers around a long poem based on his experience at an apple cider farm in Vermont; 'Apples.' To Kenney, the cider mill represents "a relic of that pre-electrical world...A comprehensible world, in many ways...None of it seems to have left this farm, at any rate--...crippled dance steps, disassembled stories, half-hummed tunes, all common property--disintegration projects...with the confusion of common sense, as it sometimes seems, from the decay of the clockwork universe" (
Orrery ix, Kenney). It is that "pre-electrical world" that Kenney is seeking. Somewhere along the way, in the midst of a technologically advancing contemporary life, the unification of nature and time disintegrated to bits and pieces, remnants of a former mosaic, of a former sensibility.
Written from a personal perspective of life on a farm, this in itself completely differentiates the varying approaches used in
The Invention of The Zero and
Orrery in tackling the subject of technological advance. Rather than possessing the mechanical, abstract, and computerized images of
The Invention of The Zero,
Orrery contains images of time, seasons, and nature. "The two books rescue each other.
The Invention of the Zero answers
Orrery, [
The Invention of The Zero] is darker."
1: a construction built to represent the motion of the universe.
The Invention of the Zero
Taking Kenney ten years to write,
The Invention of the Zero features six long poems: A 'Colloquy of Ancient Men,' 'The Invention of the Zero,' 'The Encantadas,' 'Typhoon,' 'Lucifer,' and 'Epilog: Read Only Memory.' All tell one story, however. Though four are set in World War II, all examine the history of the universe and its evolution from the Big Bang to the invention of computers to the development of the atomic bomb. Free verse and with extravagant style,
The Invention of the Zero provokes questions about invention and whether or not technology has actually helped humanity or just furthered the disparity between science and different aspects of faith.
In writing
The Invention of the Zero, Kenney says that he "was on the edge of [his] powers imaginatively. The material would grow and retract on a daily basis, and it was definitely an experiment, and emotionally draining." Though the Lannan Literary Award is accredited in acknowledging all of Kenney's books, the publication of
The Invention of the Zero is what really won it for him.