Parceled,
not parceled, ever the light.
Trismegistus to
Tat: our bones
will
want velvet,
line decays, root
your gods
in
flesh & stock your flesh in
flame
(Giordano
given over
–ubi peccavit–
he sinned in fire
tongue word-thorn
into fire,
&
the beam of light
that is
defining measure
–metre, the palladium
yardstick only a
curio
or
orifice of
measure a
controlled radiance,
ångstrom
an infinity ‘longer than point–
Punctum
in Nihilo
from which
It
pours.
Sentences by nature false,
‘opinions’ momentaneous murmurings
corpse-fat soft,
saponification
of the great poets
when it
is
Delight forgot–
Addio alla madre
I
take
this
serious knife
where Death is
&
makes
all sharp again
wretch
of dull edge
his knife I
fight
bites
mine.
of damascene sever in air
: this silken
kerchief
divides the steel.
This passage, the first two
out of eight pages, opens Robert Kelly’s Songs
I-XXX (Pym-Randall Press, 1968). Typing these lines again after all these
years – one of the real benefits of doing this blog* – I feel as riveted by
them as when I first confronted this work over thirty years ago. There is in
these lines of verse something I feel is almost entirely missing from most of
today’s poetry – the measure of the line heard & understood as a mode of
music. Melopoiea as Pound once called
it. This use of sound is something that poets once took for granted as an
option – there are moments in The Cantos when
it is all that exists beyond the crackpot economics & dubious readings of
American presidential history. Yet, somehow, after Robert Duncan, a master at
this mode, you find Robert Kelly, with his exquisite conception of measure, and
Kenneth Irby, with an ultimate ear for vowels, then silence. Or not silence,
exactly, but rather a shift in the manner music.
It was Olson of course,
along with Creeley, who heard that other possibility in Pound’s line & even
more clearly in that of Williams, the intricate prosody of the spoken, the
huffing of the line as breath – very nearly a poetics of asthma in Olson’s
case, the way so many of his poems start out with a long line only to find
themselves narrowing as the words rush, repeatedly interrupted by the need to
mark line’s limit, to a literally breathless conclusion.
Thus, in the 1950s and ‘60s,
American poetry found itself with not one, but three different tendencies with
regards to the proactive use of sound in poetry:
§
the complicated
rhythms of the spoken (Olson, Creeley,
§
a poetics
predicated on measure (Duncan, Kelly, some of Irby)
§
a regularized
metrics derived from the old formalism (Berryman, Lowell)
Of course, the great
majority of poets fell into a category that could be triangulated between “a
little of this & a little of that,” those who didn’t really care &
those who were genuinely tone-deaf to their own writing.
Songs I-XXX
was the third book published by Kelly in a two year period of 1967-68 that to
this day remains not just a great burst of poetic productivity – Kelly has been
the Energizer Bunny of poetic production his entire life – but also a defining
moment for a particular mode of poetics, one that was grounded in sound &
turned toward alternative sacred texts as a primary concern.
It’s worth noting Kelly’s
trajectory in that decade – it gives some sense of how greatly the scene was
changing, as well as how greatly it has changed in the 30-odd years since. Beginning
to publish around 1960, Kelly within five years had brought out five books with
small press publishers, been the focus of an issue of Cid Corman’s
Origin, and co-edited with Paris
Leary, A Controversy of Poets,
published as a Doubleday Anchor paperback original. While Leary’s contributions
have largely been forgotten outside of a few obvious “Big Names” such as Robert
Lowell or the fans of Gray Burr & Melvin Walker La Follette,
Kelly’s contributors expanded the roster of the Allen anthology, bringing Louis
Zukofsky, Jackson Mac Low, Jerry Rothenberg, Gerrit
Lansing & Ted Enslin to a considerably broader audience than they’d
previously experienced.*** & by virtue of coming five years later than the
Allen, several of Kelly’s selections, such as of “Billy the Kid” for Jack
Spicer and the complete “Biotherm” by Frank O’Hara –
literally in 5½ point type – were notably stronger than those included in the
Allen.
So the three books that
appeared more or less immediately on the heels of Controversy, Axon Dendron Tree (Salitter Press, 1967), Finding the Measure (Black Sparrow,
1968) & Songs I-XXX (Pym-Randall,
1968) effectively served to solidify Kelly’s position as a major American poet,
one of the first, along with Ted Berrigan to achieve this level of recognition
within the post-avant tradition who had not been a part of the Allen anthology.
* There is
nothing that compares to having the words of a poem you are thinking about
emerge from your own fingertips atop a keyboard, no matter than Robert Kelly may
have originally drafted these in pen or that, in the late 1960s, he was almost
certainly working with a manual typewriter, not a PC.
** Whose
sense of the uses of transcription to spatially approximate aspects of speech
is perhaps the most detailed of all.
*** I’ve
noted before that when Richard Moore’s USA Poetry PBS television series first
introduced me to the work of Zukofsky in 1966, the only volume that held any of
his poetry at Cody’s in