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
14th 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.
RON SILLIMAN has written and edited 40 books, and had his poetry and criticism translated into 16 languages. Silliman was a 2012 Kelly Writers House Fellow, the 2010 recipient of the Levinson Prize from the Poetry Foundation, a 2003 Literary Fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts, a 2002 Fellow of the Pennsylvania Arts Council, and a 1998 Pew Fellow in the Arts. Silliman has a plaque in the walk dedicated to poetry in his home town of Berkeley and a sculpture in the Transit Center of Bury, Lancaster, a part of the Irwell Sculpture Trail. He lives in Chester County, Pennsylvania and teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.
