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AFTER KENYON, poetry by Jeanne Griggs
Publication Date: October 15, 2025
Paperback, 70 pages
ISBN: 978-1-966677-21-5
The sly word play in the title of Jeanne Griggs’ poetry collection After Kenyon is that while this volume indeed follows her retirement after long years at Kenyon College, reflecting on her time there and revisiting people and places familiar to all Kenyons, it also contains a number of “after” poems inspired or suggested by other poets. As she explains, “Identifying a previous poem that a new poem is ‘after’ indicates an attempt to recall some part of the feeling that the previous poem conveys and build on it. Writing an ‘after’ poem is an attempt to arouse the memory of that previous poem in order to reveal another perspective on it or even to twist and turn it into something quite different. An ‘after’ poem is not an imitation but a transformation; it is a continuing conversation about an idea or image or form of some previous poem.” Some poets echoed here had specific connections to Kenyon, such as James Wright, Robert Lowell, and John Crowe Ransom, while others seemed to permeate the air on campus. Her poems may follow on works and experiences that preceded them, but they lead the reader into new discoveries on a campus of the mind.
Praise for Jeanne Griggs & After Kenyon
These poems are subtle, self-effacing, then surprising, even shocking, as if a profile you’d been contemplating suddenly turns and looks at you. After Kenyon is a deep and detailed meditation on the long impact of place, taking as its exemplar the campus of Kenyon College. Claiming for each building and path a character with uses and names that change over time, Jeanne Griggs offers us the reward of her seasons and years of close observation and felt experience. “We walk with our heads down / in the footprints of others, / icy gravel shifting / with each step, gray // as tree trunks in old snow, the stone of the buildings, / the low sky of every day.” But the book is also a collection of love letters – with all the complex shades of feeling that implies – to literature itself, an implied anthology of poems that these poems – really a single, unified work – converse with as inspiration and ancestry. Most of all, this is a moving elegy for a way of life in service to writing and writers, “thinking about how to hold / the attention of young people,” “everyone attentive / to their needs and my job to be / attentive to everyone else’s, / providing training and pads of paper”. “We could get close to our heroes / in Weaver Cottage, just inches away / from a famous poet or novelist…” Griggs speaks for the irreplaceable lovers of language who stand and wait “in the little kitchen, / off to the side, where the after-reading hors d’oeuvres / were warming”. By its closing lines, After Kenyon has revealed itself as a masterful testament to the writers’ creed that only through particulars can we glimpse universals.
—Anthony Clarvoe, playwright, author of The Living & The Art of Sacrifice
Readers familiar with college campuses will recognize the buildings in After Kenyon: a library, student commons and classrooms, a bookstore, theater, chapel, and a few quirky houses that serve as community and literary spaces. But we don’t need to know Kenyon to enter these poems. Several “after” poems read as intimate conversations between Griggs and other writers—living and dead, local and not local—whose words now live in Kenyon’s identity as a literary place where the old and the new collide and cohabitate. What thrives and survives, what becomes worn and painted over, rekeyed, forgotten, or refurbished depends on who inhabits the campus. Nostalgic, playful, and resigned to change, these poems document a shifting physical and literary landscape witnessed in all its complexity.
—Diane LeBlanc, Director of the Writing Program at St. Olaf College, author of The Feast Delayed
How does memory dwell in a place after we depart? With remarkable attention, Jeanne Griggs writes with wonder in this tender tribute to a place enlarged by its history. After Kenyon offers a literary map, marked by a college’s iconic buildings and imbued by the fertile memories that arise from “the edge of our imaginations.” From the classrooms in the Gund Gallery and Ascension Hall to Chalmers Library and the athletic tracks at the Lowry Center, each architectural landmark is transformed into something deeply nuanced and curiously human. After Kenyon guides readers on a walk down the middle of our memories and invites us to notice what comes after their transformation.
—Orchid Tierney, William P. Rice Associate Professor of Literature at Kenyon College, author of looking at the Tiny: Mad lichen on the surfaces of reading
About the Author
Jeanne Griggs is a reader, writer, traveler, and violinist. She directed the writing center at Kenyon College from 1991-2022. Her presentations include “A Survey of Reanimation, Resurrection, and Necromancy in Fiction since Frankenstein” for ICFA, her reviews include Stephen Dunn’s The Not Yet Fallen World for Heavy Feather Review, and her first volume of poetry, published by Broadstone Books in 2021, is entitled Postcard Poems. Her poems have appeared in the Mid-Atlantic Review, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, The Inquisitive Eater, One Art: A Journal of Poetry, Thimble Literary Review, Calliope, and Autumn Sky Poetry Daily. Jeanne reviews poetry and fiction at https://necromancyneverpays.wordpress.com/
Publication Date: October 15, 2025
Paperback, 70 pages
ISBN: 978-1-966677-21-5
The sly word play in the title of Jeanne Griggs’ poetry collection After Kenyon is that while this volume indeed follows her retirement after long years at Kenyon College, reflecting on her time there and revisiting people and places familiar to all Kenyons, it also contains a number of “after” poems inspired or suggested by other poets. As she explains, “Identifying a previous poem that a new poem is ‘after’ indicates an attempt to recall some part of the feeling that the previous poem conveys and build on it. Writing an ‘after’ poem is an attempt to arouse the memory of that previous poem in order to reveal another perspective on it or even to twist and turn it into something quite different. An ‘after’ poem is not an imitation but a transformation; it is a continuing conversation about an idea or image or form of some previous poem.” Some poets echoed here had specific connections to Kenyon, such as James Wright, Robert Lowell, and John Crowe Ransom, while others seemed to permeate the air on campus. Her poems may follow on works and experiences that preceded them, but they lead the reader into new discoveries on a campus of the mind.
Praise for Jeanne Griggs & After Kenyon
These poems are subtle, self-effacing, then surprising, even shocking, as if a profile you’d been contemplating suddenly turns and looks at you. After Kenyon is a deep and detailed meditation on the long impact of place, taking as its exemplar the campus of Kenyon College. Claiming for each building and path a character with uses and names that change over time, Jeanne Griggs offers us the reward of her seasons and years of close observation and felt experience. “We walk with our heads down / in the footprints of others, / icy gravel shifting / with each step, gray // as tree trunks in old snow, the stone of the buildings, / the low sky of every day.” But the book is also a collection of love letters – with all the complex shades of feeling that implies – to literature itself, an implied anthology of poems that these poems – really a single, unified work – converse with as inspiration and ancestry. Most of all, this is a moving elegy for a way of life in service to writing and writers, “thinking about how to hold / the attention of young people,” “everyone attentive / to their needs and my job to be / attentive to everyone else’s, / providing training and pads of paper”. “We could get close to our heroes / in Weaver Cottage, just inches away / from a famous poet or novelist…” Griggs speaks for the irreplaceable lovers of language who stand and wait “in the little kitchen, / off to the side, where the after-reading hors d’oeuvres / were warming”. By its closing lines, After Kenyon has revealed itself as a masterful testament to the writers’ creed that only through particulars can we glimpse universals.
—Anthony Clarvoe, playwright, author of The Living & The Art of Sacrifice
Readers familiar with college campuses will recognize the buildings in After Kenyon: a library, student commons and classrooms, a bookstore, theater, chapel, and a few quirky houses that serve as community and literary spaces. But we don’t need to know Kenyon to enter these poems. Several “after” poems read as intimate conversations between Griggs and other writers—living and dead, local and not local—whose words now live in Kenyon’s identity as a literary place where the old and the new collide and cohabitate. What thrives and survives, what becomes worn and painted over, rekeyed, forgotten, or refurbished depends on who inhabits the campus. Nostalgic, playful, and resigned to change, these poems document a shifting physical and literary landscape witnessed in all its complexity.
—Diane LeBlanc, Director of the Writing Program at St. Olaf College, author of The Feast Delayed
How does memory dwell in a place after we depart? With remarkable attention, Jeanne Griggs writes with wonder in this tender tribute to a place enlarged by its history. After Kenyon offers a literary map, marked by a college’s iconic buildings and imbued by the fertile memories that arise from “the edge of our imaginations.” From the classrooms in the Gund Gallery and Ascension Hall to Chalmers Library and the athletic tracks at the Lowry Center, each architectural landmark is transformed into something deeply nuanced and curiously human. After Kenyon guides readers on a walk down the middle of our memories and invites us to notice what comes after their transformation.
—Orchid Tierney, William P. Rice Associate Professor of Literature at Kenyon College, author of looking at the Tiny: Mad lichen on the surfaces of reading
About the Author
Jeanne Griggs is a reader, writer, traveler, and violinist. She directed the writing center at Kenyon College from 1991-2022. Her presentations include “A Survey of Reanimation, Resurrection, and Necromancy in Fiction since Frankenstein” for ICFA, her reviews include Stephen Dunn’s The Not Yet Fallen World for Heavy Feather Review, and her first volume of poetry, published by Broadstone Books in 2021, is entitled Postcard Poems. Her poems have appeared in the Mid-Atlantic Review, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, The Inquisitive Eater, One Art: A Journal of Poetry, Thimble Literary Review, Calliope, and Autumn Sky Poetry Daily. Jeanne reviews poetry and fiction at https://necromancyneverpays.wordpress.com/