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,

                                                   17 February 1600

& 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.  Crystals

                                    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, Blackburn**), which also included a number of relatively casual practitioners, such as Ginsberg, Whalen, Snyder & O’Hara

§         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 Berkeley, then as now the largest bookstore in that town, was A Controversy of Poets.