Although I knew his work slightly from his own A Controversy of Poets, I hadn’t focused on Robert Kelly’s poetry until I got to know some of his former Bard students: David Perry*, John Gorham and Harvey Bialy, and through them Tom Meyer. All spoke glowingly of Kelly as a teacher. But it wasn’t until I got hold of a copy of Finding the Measure (Black Sparrow, 1968) that Kelly’s poetry forced me to pay attention. The volume’s preface – or as Kelly titles it, complete with open-ended parenthesis, “(prefix:” – is one of the knockdown finest statements of a poetics I’ve ever read. Even today, 35 years after it was written, it stands up:

Finding the measure is finding the mantram,

is finding the moon, as index of measure,

is finding the moon’s source;

                                                     if that source

is Sun, finding the measure is finding

the natural articulation of ideas.

                                                            The organism

of the macrocosm, the organism of language,

the organism of I combine in ceaseless naturing

to propagate a fourth,

                                        the poem,

                                                            from their trinity.

Style is death. Find the measure is finding

a freedom from that death, a way out, a movement

forward.

                Finding the measure is finding the

specific music of the hour,

                                                the synchronous

consequences of the motion of the whole world.

Style is death. Derrida would have a field day with that, coming as it does in the work of someone for whom measure – the line & phrase heard as units at once both of music & of meaning – is the compelling issue. What does Kelly mean to make so bald a claim?

The answer of course is to be found first in Kelly’s assertion that there is such a thing as a “natural articulation of ideas,” followed by his trinity of organisms. The idea of “natural articulation,” may follow out of the old Imagist maxim that “a new cadence means a new idea,” but Kelly weds it very much to an organic vision not only of the poem but of all existence.

It’s interesting to map Kelly’s trinity over, say, Jakobson’s six functions of language. As I’ve written here before, I always think of Jakobson’s model as three axes, or as pairs of opposites: addresser, address; contact, code; signifier, signified. Kelly’s trinity does fall neatly into those three pairs, especially if one goes back to Jakobson’s own discussions of the signified as ultimately contextual, much broader than the notion of an object for every noun – Kelly calls it the “organism / of the macrocosm.”

What Kelly describes as three axes “ceaselessly naturing” to pop out a poem rather the way a hen does eggs is the grounds for any articulation, not just verse. Is Kelly arguing after a fashion that it is this particular configuration of these possibilities that lead to the poem? Perhaps, but more important is the way in which this text privileges the “I” with italics only to deny its force one stanza later with “Style is death.” But of course that kind of equation can work both ways: Death is style might be even more accurate. Phrased thus, we can see that Kelly is trying very hard to separate out the “I” of consciousness from a second “I,” the superego really, that would impose its understanding of tradition & history encoded through a process that keeps the word from somehow coming through directly. 

That distinction takes me back to the seemingly self-canceling phrase, “natural articulation.” Such a concept implies a universe in which articulation would be unmediated & inevitable. Not simply that the flower of my sermon should be its own message, but that nature itself is just such an ultimate discourse. But Kelly’s phrase continues: “natural articulation of ideas.” Thus ideas themselves must exist both prior to & outside of any embodiment in words.

If the lion could speak we would have to write it down.** Kelly is aligning the poem here with a discourse that is, literally, inhuman – though not necessarily anti-human. Rather it exists prior to & outside of our merely secular discursive behaviors. The mantram of the first line is, if we follow this logic, a subliminal hum within the universe. The role for poet is not to alter or direct that energy so much as to enable it to come through revealed.

All of which, I would argue, takes us back to the question in this poem of the moon. It is not only that “Finding the measure is finding the mantram,” but that it is also “finding the moon, as index of measure, / is finding the moon’s source.” The question of the moon, its relation to Sun (the absence of article here marking as more than a little like an Egyptian god) & that mysterious idea of “source” traces the other thematic thread that weaves through this text. Read strictly, the entire line of reasoning about the trinity of organisms should apply only if Sun is understood as “source” for the moon. Moon of course being a loaded term for a poet who has already published a volume of short poems called Lunes.

On the one hand, the attributes of the tides & their impact on any number of worldly phenomena is certainly present, but at a level of obviousness that makes it a So What. Ditto the question of gravity from earth to moon or vice versa & of sun to either. At a more significant level, though, I don’t think this image is decidable except insofar as it pins the question of articulation up into a cosmology of effects. The poem resonates exactly as something that cannot be reduced to an argument, a good test of any poem.

* Not the same David Perry who is now active in poetry around New York, whom I think of as the “Adventures in Poetry” David Perry in order to keep them straight in my head.

** As indeed Michael McClure already has.