Logic of the World:
The Poetics of Robert Kelly

A Day of Talks in NYC Celebrating
Robert Kelly's 75th Birthday
and his 50 Years at Bard

Talks by

Elizabeth Robinson

Vyt Bakaitis

Michael Ives

Mary Caponegro

Thomas Meyer

Kristin Prevallet

Roger van Voorhees

John Yau

Carey Harrison

David Levi Strauss

Charles Stein

Carolee Schneemann

George Quasha and his "Desire" video

Peter Lamborn Wilson

Phong Bui

Nicole Peyrafitte

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Thanks to George Quasha (who recorded it all),
to the organizers & presenters
& to rk-ology.com,
where all of these are housed

Today, in New York City

Bard Celebrates Robert Kelly

Tonight @ 7 PM, Olin Hall

Honoring Robert Kelly

+

May 7 in NYC
The Logic of the World
The Poetics of Robert Kelly
with
Vyt Bakaitis, Phong Bui, Mary Caponegro,
Carey Harrison, Pierre Joris, Jonas Mekas,
Tom Meyer, Nicole Peyrafitte, Kristen Prevallet,
Elizabeth Robinson, George Quasha, Robert Kelly,
Carolee Schneeman, Charles Stein, David Levi-Strauss,
Peter Lamborn Wilson, John Yau,
Roger Van Voorhees, Michael Ives & more

A reading by Kelly in 6 videos

I, II, III, IV, V, VI

Krishna had made a pun at her book club and nobody had gotten the joke. It had been something that substituted yam for Ya as in Ya-Ya Sisterhood. She recounted her problem – “they must have thought I was so stupid” – over the dinner table and both of the boys started coming up with other funny, or at least ostensibly funny, combinations involving the word the yam. It was all quite silly & I’m sure it was one of those “you had to be there” moments that bond families while helping to create the sort of private language all families have – for example, the way my family (and that of my brother) have used boppo for years to mean “potholder,” because it’s the private term we grew up with, my grandparents having adopted it when my mother, then just a toddler, settled on boppo to refer to same. My mother’s grandkids now number in double digits and if these kids end up having families that adopt that term, and their kids do likewise, then a couple of generations out we might find it starting to emerge into something akin to general usage. But right now, anyway, yam is the charged term in our house. Any ordinary question that can be responded to, however improbably, with something containing yam is fair game.

So when, looking later this same week through the one hundred or books that have arrived in the mail this past month, I noted a book whose back cover reads

YAM
YAD

I had to show it to Krishna. The words are the title reversed from the front cover (as tho you were reading the cover “from behind”), the book being May Day by Robert Kelly, fresh out from Parsifal Editions. Then Krishna asked to see the book, noting that the design was beautiful (which it certainly is), and read a poem aloud to Jesse & me. Then she read a second one. Then a third. “He’s really good,” she noted, to which I immediately agreed. Krishna grew up, more or less, reading the Allen anthology (one reason why we have three separate copies of it around the house), knew who Charles Olson was the day I met her &, as it turned out, had actually attended the very first poetry reading I’d ever curated some four years before we “officially” met, a benefit with Robert Creeley, Joanne Kyger & Ed Dorn for the prison movement group with which I was working. It totally stands to reason that Robert Kelly is going to be her kind of poet. Mine too.

Kelly is one of the younger New Americans or post-New Americans (take your pick) who stands as a bridge betwixt that aesthetic and langpo. It’s not an accident that Kelly, in fact, had the very first poem in the first issue of This, the magazine edited by Barrett Watten and, for the first couple of issues, Robert Grenier. In more respects than one might imagine, Kelly has a lot of similarities with Clark Coolidge. Both write enormous amounts – Kelly’s Wikipedia site notes that he’s published “more than fifty” books of poetry & prose, and the note itself hasn’t been updated in eight years – and it would seem that each poet must easily produce more than one book of new work every year. Both also have a range around which almost all of their mature writing seems to operate, tho they are somewhat different from one another as to what that range might be. And both give an awful lot of authority to the role of the ear in the poem.

Right now, if May Day and the recent Shame, his collaborative prose work with Birgit Kempker, are any indication, Kelly is in an especially productive period of his writing, at the top of his form. Here’s an untitled poem from May Day:

We say he went to heaven
or heaven happened to him
right here, like Foucauld
in Africa, blood over white

sometimes the comedy
comes first, Marx’s
patterned lute that sang
the looms of Lombardy

all work and no stained glass
the gods exist to take
this pain away, gold filigreed
their skins of lapis blue

Marx’s lute in Mao’s fingers
no one understands
power is the choosing not to tell
or not to kill

I am in the sky, it said,
winged, of either sex
as your body may have need
my six wings all hovering

they cover us both
the wrap, finale, apocalypse
of all our skin
unwrapping the mystery

to spill this ordinary thing.

I don’t think you need to know the difference between Charles de Foucauld and Michel Foucault to read this poem (tho it probably helps not to presume one is the other). Rather, the poem reminds me of how, when, in the introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Marx wrote that religion “is the opium of the people,” he clearly intended the term opium to be understood medicinally and not in terms of opium dens or recreational drug use: “the gods exist to take / this pain away.” But Marx’s “lute” – his celebration of the actual labor of peasants – becomes something quite different in the brutal & stupid re-education programs that characterized life under the Gang of Four in the PRC. Yet what amounted to a kind of class genocide in the China of the 1960s was experienced very differently by the French mystic when he came to live among the poorest peasants of North Africa. As Foucauld had written when he served as the custodian in the convent of the Poor Clares of Nazareth earlier in his career,

I have now the unutterable, the inexpressibly profound happiness of raking manure.

Kelly has never wavered in his career in knowing which side of this argument he preferred. At the same time, he’s not pinning his soul on a single narrative that would transform spirituality into institutional religion:

I am in the sky, it said,
winged, of either sex
as your body may have need

I can imagine an interesting test for an undergraduate literature course that had, as one question, a requirement to identify and discuss “the ordinary thing” of this poem’s final line. I would add a further question: is a “wrong” answer possible?

Very much like Coolidge, Kelly, even tho he writes poems – there are a few booklength projects, like Shame or Axon Dendron Tree, in his oeuvre, but even they seem to stop at the last page – actually falls on the poetry side of what I think of as the poem vs. poetry divide. It’s as if the poems channel into some wavelength of which they are representative strands. At one point, reading this book, I began a wonderful piece entitled “The Politics of You” and, when it came time to turn the page, turned two by accident, so that I found myself reading the end of “Twelfth Night,” and it made – aesthetically at least – excellent sense. Here is the collaged text:

I meant a politics unwinding
the machinery, the bluegreen
feeling that just happens
when a thing is finished
even if it’s not finished well
or something’s put away
into its place and the mind is clear
for a minute or two, losing
your colonies after a war
no more Togo no more Kamerun
I mean where are my legs
to stand, why is the earth
denied to those it bore?
A Latin question, the kind
old poems ask and colleges
yawn over for a thousand years,
don’t get me wrong I’m asking
for you to be beside me
to live in touch as some men live in hope,
a cathedral is never finished
always a ruin, the great abbey
open to the instruction of the wind,
a roofless love, the woman I forgot
some called her turquoise
because her eyes were ocean
in that sallow place, cubicula
locanda saw Apollinaire
rooms for rent in Latin
for the students, nobody knows
how Flemish I really am
but those who have felt
my dame mustache sur la nuque
and breathed in my fantasizing breath,
Christ stumbling into Brussels
in Ensor’s painting, and I am all
the other faces, mask under mask
until the simplest touches
you and goes to heaven, how easy
such a politics could be if we had a little
bungalow right near the beach
and money is only good in drugstores
on toothpaste and Vaseline and soap
and we eat whatever the fishermen catch
and they catch whatever we throw away,
this is the art history museum please
you follow the footsteps of the visitors
and see what they see, what they look at
longest must be the best, write it down
as your dissertation, who are you
to go against the current of the world?
I was a salmon once and look at me now
with a twisted jaw and full of lust
and the only way for me to move is up,
if you love me there is plenty to eat
shadows and the warm tabernacles
and even among the avalanches
the rhythm of all things is our salvation,
we ride our world between our legs,
people fear me often when we meet
because some text is crumbling
from my mouth, reservoir and baptistery
and gentle old stone basin in a cloister
all the ruses of water, o mirror
of your stillness, hazardous face –
when the wind blows I see
what I will look like when I’m old
but I could be your beast until the end,
I saw my death year cut in plain marble
of somewhere else, some other god
crept onto the altar last night,
there is always another color hidden
inside what we see, like a girl with
an amber lozenge in her mouth
you’ll never know the taste of
till you kiss her but she runs away.

Support me by the fabric
I mean the factory of dream
by which we are clothed
and dare to walk along the road
from this town to another
without apology for our feebleness
nakedness, only two legs,
only two hands, how will I ever.

And that is the little glory of us
we have to invent calculus every day
and learn a new language
that calls itself Greek again
but this Plato is not like I remember
and his Socrates is nailed to a barn door
and his Alcibiades is a girl in the woods
running naked as a fox for a forgetting.

If you don’t have the book to check against, I don’t think a reader can honestly tell where one poem ends & the other picks up. Obviously, such a reading is a form of violence to Kelly’s poetry – Forgive me, Robert! – but I think the result, this Levitican text, demonstrates several things about Kelly’s work. One is that it often moves laterally, bringing in many different topics, tales, even languages, while it also continually returns to certain themes & elements again & again – the Latin of Apollinaire & the Greek of Plato & Alcibiades come from two different poems, yet I at least find this mélange of my own misreading to be quite powerful & moving. As poetry, it works completely. Now both of the two source poems here are considerably tighter – closer to poems than poetry, at least in relative terms – than this text would make it appear. But the underlying values of each are, I think, those of poetry more than of poems – they have more in common with Charles Olson or Louis Zukofsky or Pound’s Cantos than they do the fixed positions & formal containments one finds, say, in the work of virtually any School of Quietude poet, and which can be found as well in the writings of such post-avants as Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jonathan Williams, Frank O’Hara (Biotherm would be an exception), Jack Spicer or Denise Levertov. Kelly in this sense is decidedly a writer of poetry, even when it shows up, as here, in what clearly are poems.

What this means is that you can pick up Kelly at almost any point – just open a book and start reading anywhere – and you will almost always get a good result. Another is that Kelly could, if he wanted, take on a project of some heft – say, equivalent to Ashbery’s Flow Chart, which certainly is more words even if not more pages than Axon Dendron Tree – and it would be totally readable, cover to cover, perhaps more so than Ashbery’s poem, which often feels at odds with its own scale (unlike Three Poems).

But also like Coolidge, I think Kelly’s decision to write poetry within poems, resulting in many mostly small books, makes it easy, too easy perhaps, to undervalue his accomplishments as a writer. The number of poets of the generation immediately older than mine (who came into their own as poets during the 1960s) who are still writing and publishing new work has dwindled noticeably in recent years – the New Americans are down to a handful – and the number of such poets who are, right now, at the very top of their game as writers may even be a list of just one. We’re fortunate that one is Robert Kelly.

Robert Kelly’s Finding the Measure is full of poems of great interest beyond the “prefix” I looked at yesterday, only five of which (out of 43) make their way into Kelly’s selected Red Actions. While the “prefix” is included, among my favorite of the excluded works is “On a Picture of a Black Bird Given to Me by Arthur Tress,” as close to an objective poem as Measure contains. It opens:

Raven        in Chiapas

beak up open to

flat white Mexican light

against which an arch is breaking its back to join the broken sky

barbs of its feathers hang down, it cries out

for a world full of carrion

but its claws

hold firm & flat

the top of the ruined sill

The poem demonstrates conclusively Kelly’s ability to be far more than a poet of pure statement. The prosody of that first stanza is simply stunning – not a single syllable that does not actively contribute above & beyond the denotative level of the words or their connotative resonances.

Another wonderful poem can be found on the facing page, “To the Memory of Giordano Bruno,” a poem in two columns, the right one of which has it is lines, words & letters printed in reverse, so that one need read it in a mirror. A third excluded poem that certainly had its impact on the young Ron Silliman as reader is “First in an Alphabet of Sacred Animals,” a meditation on murder that begins

The ANT for all his history is a stranger

& his message is the gospel of an alien order

& his & his & his

works are furious in the crust of the earth

his house & his bread

(We must start with him because he is other,

he comes from a nowhere underneath us

& returns again & does not know us)

this is the easiest animal to kill.

Today I did not kill an ant

                                             a great big black one

& it became necessary to think

of the price of an ant’s death:

                                                      nothing we do

is without consequence)

                                            & in the taking of an ant’s life

is the taking of life

But the ant is not an albatross & dies easy

& soon his carcass is gone, who knows where they go

the bodies of insects we kill,

                                                   when we take life

                                                    what do we give?

-What is the price

of killing an ant

-What intricate microscopic karma do we fulfill

in crushing him

-What cosmic debt does he repay under my foot

-Will we notice the pain

with which we must one day surely atone for his death

-Or are there beings (& are there beings)

who step on us lightly as we tread ants?

that is the hideous question someone is always asking

Egypt after Egypt

& onward for another page before concluding with a section in prose. Kelly’s thesis here, as elsewhere, is compelled not to argue for the ant simply for its sake, but to connect it up, here to Egypt & thus to that larger system within the word “Sacred” in the title.

Also excluded from Red Actions is the twelve-part “Zodiac Cycle,” a series that is accorded pride of place in Measure, with each section – individual poems really – illustrated with its astrological symbol printed large in deep blue ink.

A closer reading of Red Actions would I suspect show that the elimination of a sequence such as  “Zodiac Cycle” is not accidental. Kelly’s writing offers so very many choices – Finding the Measure, after all, was the 14^th book of poems of Kelly’s published in just nine years; in his spare time, he also edited A Controversy of Poets, wrote a novel, The Scorpions, and published a liturgy – that one could easily publish a half dozen selected editions, each of which presented a very different Kelly. Thus while the Kelly of Red Actions remains a man interested in the alternate wisdom traditions, the mysticism that was front & center in his early books is presented here as incidental.

My own interest in Kelly, as with Duncan, had more to do with measure than mysticism. To this day I have never quite understood why these two phenomena appear to be linked, inextricable. Sound, it has always struck me, is an ideal antidote as an organizing & motive principle for the poem to the shallow surfaces of an unreflective dramatic monologue. Among the many poets that Kelly is & has been, is a superb practitioner of melopoiea.

The poem that follows “First in an Alphabet of Sacred Animals,” “Smith Cove Meditation,” has a title reminiscent of Olson, but the text is closer kin to Gertrude Stein. It begins:

Across the tone there is the one.

Everything is easier if there are women in it

but past the tone    there is the bone,

inside the bone there is the one.

One & bone; one times bone is bone, one bone.

One & bone are tone. Going across

is taking them away

from each other. Orphan bone,

widowed one.    Up on the hill

a widow lives, nurturing the tone.

Her son the bone. From their garden

on an August afternoon

you can see the one out on the water

all the waves & all the town’s streets

all the bright places & far

people, o some of them are gone,

gone to bone & gone to one, fallen

the castle of the bone, fallen the castle

of the enduring tone, the one

is over the harbor.

Every plausible combination of “o” & “n” is brought to bear – one can almost feel the deeper resonance of “afternoon” the way one might individual notes of a carillon. One might here argue that the “tone” of this poem is the selfsame “mantram” Kelly writes of in the “Prefix” to Measure, and while it is a radically different music than the rich alternation of consonant & vowel in the description of the blackbird, what it demonstrates precisely is Kelly’s to the poem of sound.

           

Right around 1970, a number of different events occurred that would transform the role sound played in poetry socially. Olson’s death in January of that year, followed a year later by Blackburn, shut the door on any hard-edged conception of speech as the prosodic determinant of poetic form. Already Creeley had moved toward a more relaxed notion of same in his 1968 volume Pieces, the potentially contradictory influences of Ted Berrigan & Louis Zukofsky combining to soften the tone of its linked sequences. When, in early 1971, Robert Grenier declared “I HATE SPEECH,” in the first issue of This, he was already jousting with an opponent that had largely abandoned the field.

Similarly, Duncan’s decision to not publish another book for 15 years after his 1968 Bending the Bow muted his enormous influence on younger poets. Combined with Olson’s & Blackburn’s absence & Creeley’s shift, Duncan’s step away from the scene transformed the role of sound in the poem – so prominent a feature in poetry for twenty years – into something of a non-issue in the 1970s.

But if This magazine’s first issue proved functionally to be announcement of this shift in poetics, it was Robert Kelly who had the literal first word:

If this were the place to begin

is not,

starts with the disk-sun-boat – a journey

we can share,

                           a precise

boat – Gokstad, not metaphor –

to our own country

                                    following the line

of tensions between the heard & the hard

facts of the world,

                                 perception.  Stanza

of particulars.

                          Lamplight half led

onto my book & half  held back –

afraid of the white page

My confession.  The pale blue asters

with dark hearts

are everywhere these days.

It begins to rain.

It is possible, even probable, that Kelly and the editors of This meant different things by putting this poem first in This 1. As so often in Kelly, the evocation of “particulars” – in this instance the Viking vessel Gokstad – is something unlikely to be shared by many readers, serving less as a point of reference than as a demarcation between those in the know & those outside. It’s in keeping with Kelly’s own long interest in alternative systems of knowledge, and in the poet as shaman or priest. But, with the principle exceptions of Fanny Howe, John Taggart and Nate Mackey, an aspect of poetry that has been far less visible in the three decades since. Thus, when the Apex of the M gang were proposing, nearly ten years ago now, that langpo had short shrifted the Gnostic, they came within a hair’s breadth of identifying what I actually suspect could have started the very revolution in poetics of which they were dreaming, the flip side of the measure/mysticism coin. The poem as sound, as measure & song as much as speech, let alone the narrow gargling of the sound poets.

& if such a poetics is again possible, or even plausible, reading Kelly & these great books is the necessary way back in.

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.

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.