Description
Poetry. "Call and response. The breathing body of poetry from the beginning. The psalms of David, the wave of them, rise and fall of plainchant, verse and response. The constantly shifting pause between the half-lines of Old English poetry and the poems of the Edda, the half-lines of the Kalevala swayed out four-handed on the saga bench. So I thought towards the two-line stanza as experiments in duration, in complex syntactic and melodic demands. The melody of the first line necessitates the melody of the next. Shape shaping shape. Formally, the poem engages with one constraint: each line wants to be semantically intact—ideally, any line could stand alone, be my Last Words, my epitaph. Yet it also must link syntactically or narratively with the line that follows. And each stanza must stand in like relation with the stanzas before and after. This requirement extends to line structure something that I have worked with for years (usually furtively): hypersyntax, where phrases link with what comes before or after, or plausibly stand alone. UNCERTAINTIES tries to use these strategies in mental strife, to solicit the dissolving of certainties in between the inbreath and the outbreath, where nothing is fixed, and freedom begins"—Robert Kelly.
Author Bio
Robert Kelly was born in Brooklyn in 1935, father an accountant who sang, mother taught grammar school. Where else could he go but poetry? He went to a Jesuit school then CCNY and Columbia, classics, linguistics. Came to actual poetry through Coleridge, Pound, Yeats, Rilke, Duncan, New York in the 50s sustained him with joyous comrades, Blackburn, Antin, Rothenberg. After working as a translator (German, technical) for a few years, he was invited to teach for a year at Wagner College, then for the rest of his academic life, sixty-one years at Bard College, where he was blessed with incredibly creative students who allowed him to urge them towards poetry. If he could list their names, it might be a truer index of his work. In any case, he has written close to a hundred books of poetry, fiction, essays, even a play or two, and has started several little magazines (Chelsea Review, Trobar, Matter). In the past decade the main work was the five volumes of poetry he called The Island Cycle (Fire Exit (Commonwealth Books, Black Widow, 2009), UNCERTAINTIES (Stationhill Press, 2011), The Hexagon (Commonwealth Books, Black Widow, 2016), HEART THREAD (Lunar Chandelier Collective, 2016), Calls (Lunar Chandelier Collective, 2018)), and in this past year a long poem The Cup, and Shadow Talk, a score of fairy tales.
Kelly lives in the Hudson Valley with his wife, Charlotte Mandell, translator of Proust, Enard, Littell, Nancy, Blanchot and so many more, and editor of Metambesen, a pioneering venture publishing books and chapbooks of poetry online.
Author City: Annandale on Hudson, NY USA