Robert Kelly self-published Axon Dendron Tree in 1967 as Salitter / 2, distributed variously through his other small press journal, Matter, as well as the legendary Asphodel Bookshop of Cleveland, Ohio. The stapled 8½ by 14 publication appears to have been mimeographed, a process that would have limited distribution to the approximately 150 copies that could reliably be run off each paper master. The process also partly explains why the 80 page publication was printed only on one side of each page, rendering the volume as thick as a typical 160-page book. The other part of that explanation lies in the stapling – the book is so thick that extra-length staples have been driven in both front & back, but in no instance make it through the entire volume – I have to squeeze them by hand back into place whenever I read from this volume. This is one fragile book. The title – centered on a strip of white paper, 11 inches high but only 2 inches wide – is glued along the left side of the cover’s brown construction paper. The brush strokes of the glue have long since stained through on my copy.* Because of its size, this volume has spent 35 years sitting atop my book cases, never filed within one.

This is an awfully fragile, fugitive publication to argue as one of the defining poetic texts of the 1960s, but it certainly is/was such an event for my 1960s. In fact, it may have proven more so for me than for Kelly, who accords Tree just one six-page excerpt in his selected poems, Red Actions (Black Sparrow, 1995). The differences between the 1967 edition and his 1995 description of it are worth considering.

A note to the reader at the top of the dedication page reads as follows:

Axon Dendron Tree grew out of my reading of that issue of Poetry [October, 1965] wholly & with immense rightness given over to one section of Louis Zukofsky’s A (sic). This poem began swiftly in response & dictated in the first few dozen lines its own formal procedure. To the extent that I had any intention, it was to honor Zukofsky by letting his measure foster a like but different measure in my utterance. The concerns of this poem are its own, and have no bearing on Zukofsky’s there or elsewhere, apart from a few teasing relations.

Kelly discusses Axon Dendron Tree’s formal procedures in the notes at the back of Red Actions:

Axon Dendron Tree. A long poem organized on a numeric structure. Each section consists of 111 unnumbered stanzas; the first section’s stanzas are nine lines each, the second section’s of eight, and so on, diminishing to the last section, 111 one-line stanzas. In my own sense of my work, this is my first real achievement using any sort of compositional grid or organizational principal other than the Local Music, which has always been the self-arising guide of the poem.

The 999 line structure described here is certainly elegant. However, the opening section of Axon Dendron Tree is composed of stanzas of eight lines each, not nine. At least as published in 1967, the poem has 888 lines. Tree begins with, of all things, an image of golf:

Tee

off

& be

on grass

this is

start

of eighty

leven

pages

in the book

each

makes

a form

I counted

7 then

8 came

or hard

to render

stanzas

like boxes

each one

a line

of Wace

his Engels

while Laзamon

his Brut

took

the augury

of heard

—sruti—

beginnings

frutti

Lazamon – there are multiple ways to spell that name & Kelly picks one of the more difficult to cast into HTML – translated Wace’s own French translation of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Latin history of Britain, Brut, into alliterative verse around 1190. Henry Wace, however, was a mostly 19^th century religious scholar who focused on early Christianity, a topic that also concerned Karl Marx’s collaborator. So Kelly is almost instantly playing with several layers of connotation at once, the discussion of form cast into many directions from which the poet might then proceed. & does.

It’s interesting to contrast Kelly’s programmatic conception of form with that of his model.  Zukofsky’s “A” – 14, Beginning An, starts with four stanzas, even more extreme in their verticalism than Kelly’s:

An

orange

our

sun

fire

pulp

whets

us

(everyday)

for

us

eat

it

its

fire’s

unconsumed

we’ll

not

fire

there

rocketed

that

poor

fools

be

sure

moon

loon

bless

light

he

pees

pea

blossom

sun’s

peer.

First of

eleven songs

beginning An

in the

middle of

solar winds

Beginning with the above italics, Zukofsky proceeds with 169 tercets, all but one line containing two words, then with 247 tercets with three words – save for two “ringers,” one a four-line stanza with one word per line, the other just two stanzas further on, a couplet, one of whose lines has just two words – before dropping back first to a tercet of two-word lines, and then two concluding stanzas of one-word lines.

Zukofsky’s formal focus is very much on the line, Kelly’s on the stanza – it’s almost as if two men looked at one phenomenon with just slightly different lenses. Zukofsky’s conception of form generates the line, perhaps, but Kelly’s sense generates the poem. It’s a critical, even decisive, difference. In Red Actions, Kelly again acknowledges Zukofsky’s relation to the Axon Dendron Tree:

The whole poem is dedicated to Louis Zukofsky, in thanks for his creative kindness, as a poet to us all, and as a man to me when I was beginning. He is one of the Four Masters (with Olson, Duncan, Blackburn) who boxed my ears.

One name Kelly doesn’t mention here is that of Jackson Mac Low, whose work he certainly knew, having published several pieces in A Controversy of Poets, but whom I suspect Kelly must have seen more as a peer, given how late Mac Low got started publishing.** Mac Low’s sense of program as the motive principle behind a text was already quite developed by the mid-1960s. Axon Dendron Tree, however, may be the first such attempt to “just write poetry” by such method without constraint as to how the vocabulary might look or sound. Where Mac Low was consciously striking the ego’s presence in his work, Kelly gives it pretty much free rein. In this sense, Axon Dendron Tree is closer to two other programmatic texts that were composed in the late 1960s, Ted Berrigan’s Sonnets and Kenneth Koch’s When the Sun Tries to Go On.

Axon Dendron Tree thus represents a signal moment in the history of the American poem, the point when true formal procedure “comes inside.” The poem itself is raucous & witty, perhaps the high point of the Projectivist tradition, which is so often accused of being ponderous, as just fun. Kelly of course is moving quite far from some of his masters – Olson & Blackburn – in utilizing measure rather than speech as his modeling principle for language, but that is precisely what he takes from Zukofsky & Duncan. That push-pull aspect of the Projectivist  tendency, which has never been fully explored critically, is nowhere more clear than in Kelly, and almost never to greater purpose than in this poem.

When I would begin Ketjak seven years after the publication of this book, Axon Dendron Tree was one of the works that gave my own project its sense of permission & possibility. Would that every poet had the opportunity to read Robert Kelly’s long, thin book.

* www.abebooks.com actually lists seven copies available through used & rare book dealers, ranging in price from $30 to $275 (for a copy signed to Joel Oppenheimer).

** At 48, Mac Low had published just four books.