by
Pierre Joris
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Robert Kelly was born in Brooklyn on 24 September 1935. Barely in his teens, he attended CCNY, from which he graduated in 1955, & then enrolled in the Columbia University Graduate School to pursue work in medieval literature, working with Roger Loomis on material that has kept him fascinated ever since (the Grail narratives) & studying 17th-century literature with Marjorie Nicholson & Pierre Garai. It is during those formative years–from the early Fifties Wanderjahre, as he has called them, of discovering Manhattan & beyond, to the Studienjahre of the end of the decade–that he meets a range of young poets who were to constitute the communitas of mind & work for decades to come: David Antin, who introduced him to Jerome & Diane Rothenberg; George Economou (with whom he started the magazine Chelsea Review) & Rochelle Owens; Diane Wakoski, Ursule Molinaro, and Armand Schwerner, among many others; and especially Gerrit Lansing & Paul Blackburn. It is also then that he makes contact with the older poets whose personal occasions & poetics were to remain exemplary for him: Louis & Celia Zukofsky, Robert Duncan &, in 1962, Charles Olson. In 1958 the call for poetry had come in the form of a sudden, true spiritual awakening. Here is how he describes that moment:
As he has commented elsewhere: "That October commitment is the story. To write every day was the method. To attend to what is said. To listen. To prepare myself for writing by learning everything I could, by hanging out in languages and enduring overdetermined desires, by tolerating my own inclinations as if they had the physical accuracy of gravity. To listen, and say what I heard." As the title of his first book (published in 1961 by Jerome Rothenberg’s Hawk Well Press) suggests, this commitment was to be an "Armed Descent"–a title drawn from a reflection by Paul Valéry: "Who would descend into the self must go armed to the teeth." Later glossed by Kelly thus: "To go down into the self, armed with everything I have of flesh or dream or information. Armed, but not armored. To go down into the self, not especially my self but the sense of, steady beating pulsing beautiful soon lost forever physiology of the, self." These are also the times of the elaboration with Jerome Rothenberg & others of "Deep Image," considered as a possible communal & public proposition for a new poetics. Though never entertained as a Breton-like manifesto toward the formation of an official group or school such as the Surrealists, "Deep Image" did draw on the Surrealists’ attempts to ground a poetics in a practice investing & investigating the shifting subconscious topographies & boundaries of mind/psyche (with Federico Garcia Lorca’s concept of duende more central than, say, Breton’s automatic writing techniques) to supplement & deepen the advances of their American elders, from Pound & Williams to Olson. Since 1961 Robert Kelly has been teaching at Bard College, where he is now Asher B. Edelman Professor of Languages and Literature & where for a number of years he also codirected the Avery Graduate School of the Arts. Annandale has certainly proved a most fertile ground for Kelly’s work: in the year he moved up into the mid-Hudson valley (or to 2092nd street, if you extend the grid of Manhattan as RK once did) he wrote, as Patrick Meanor has noted, more than he did in the 10 previous years. This immense productivity has continued throughout his career, so that it is no exaggeration to suggest that he is America’s most prolific poet: to date he has published over 50 collections of poetry, as well as a novel & four collections of prose fictions. Among the latter I would like to mention his first collection of stories, A Transparent Tree (1985), which was published to wide critical acclaim & occasioned an Academy Institute Award from the American Academy & Institute of Arts & Letters. I also know of a two-thousand-page-long unpublished novel called Parsifal that returns to one of his oldest concerns, the Grail legend, which I dearly hope to be able to read some day. But Robert Kelly is, above all, a poet, & certainly one of the very best America has produced in the second part of this just-past century. The range of his offerings, from freshly minted trobar clus & contemporized sonnet forms, to long epic narratives & non-narratives–I’m thinking here of three major achievements, the long out-of-print Axon Dendron Tree, the series gathered as The Common Shore, & the magical journey known as The Loom–via every possible inventio, both in length & genre & mode, is literally breathtaking. Just as breathtaking, even if the breath is shorter, or follows a different music, are such volumes as Finding the Measure, or Songs I-XXX, or Not This Island Music, or The Flowers of Unceasing Coincidence, or his writing-through of Shelley’s poem Mont Blanc, or the recent volume The Time of Voice. One of his collections I return to often is the 1971 volume Flesh Dream Book, the title of which gives what I think even today are the major concerns: "The flesh of sensory experience, dream & vision, & the holy book of tradition & learning, shared through time." As Kelly says concerning that title: "Perhaps at least it sets the priorities straight." This steadfastness of concerns has taken on myriad shapes over & in time, & could prove baffling, given the massiveness of the work, for a new reader. Happily, we also have the volume Red Actions, a 400+ page volume of selected poems stretching from 1960 to 1994–the perfect way in, or the perfect overview of this gargantuan production. One of the successes of Red Actions is how the book makes the reader aware of these formal experiments, from the sharp image-based 13-syllable (a five-three-five pattern) Lunes to the highly complex informational mappings of later poems such as (to mention but one among many) "Man Sleeping." Or the different shape & feel of those poems generated–or generating themselves–from what elsewhere he has called a "ta’wil of the first line." Take for example a poem arising from its title, the Tibetan character (the last of that alphabet) pronounced [AH], as against, say, "Sentence," his experiment with polysyntax, "the permission to take any or every word or phrase as linkable with what comes before, or with what comes after, or as capable of bearing meaning while standing alone." Kelly–obviously too busy finding the poem of each day or the fiction of each night–has spent comparatively little time on writing & publishing essays on poetics, or to use current grad school jargon, on theorizing his practice. We have two (out of print) gatherings–In Time from the late Sixties, & "On Discourse" from the same period, plus a number of pieces scattered in small magazines. But in those we do find a clear indication of what Kelly thinks of as the poet’s job, of his vision of the modern poet as a man–like Pound, Goethe, Coleridge–to whom all data whatsoever are of use, because "they do not have hobbies they eat everything." . . . the fact that there can be (& at historical times has been, now is) a scientist of holistic understanding, a scholar, a scientist of the whole the Poet– be aware that from inside comes the poet, scientist of totality, specifically, to whom all data whatsoever are of use, world-scholar Notice how this quote, like all those essays, has a shape that resembles that of open field poetry. Notice also that many, if not most of the poems, & certainly a number of the poems in any given volume, include what Allen Fisher & I in the early Seventies began talking of as "process-showing," i.e., a more or less obvious stating of the rules or methods of the poetic composition in that composition itself. I think the reasons for these tactics are clear in Kelly’s case. The synthesizing essay or theoretical condensations of (thematic or formal) concerns, just as the pointed poet’s "manifesto," are all in essence reductive, even essentializing–& this would go counter to the grain of the sheer variety of poetic practices in an oeuvre such as Kelly’s. Proposed by the poet himself, it could even foreclose tomorrow’s poem–the poetics of which may go counter to the ones manifested or theorized in yesterday’s meta-discourse. So that every poem needs its own poetics, inscribed as one more or less visible discursive strain in & of its own textum, or weave. Let me end by quoting from a poem, "Ode to Language," that addresses the matter the poet has at hand to work out both poem & poetics, namely language itself, of which the poet asks: Break me. Come to me with burrs in your fur, tell me where everything has ever been. Growl at me if I sleep, wake me with your dependable craziness. Birds plummet and you fetch them wet from your mouth. Women weep in San Francisco. Only you are ever different. |
