Robert kelly poet biography project
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A City Full of Voices
MAN SLEEPING
for Charlotte
He had been sleeping for an hour and the ocean changed
he had been dreaming towers and the sand stretched west
trying to enlist him in one more continent.
Elephants and equipoise. Market towers, minarets.
They wanted his sleeve full of doves
and his desires must be delicate as frog spawn
dry in the noon time heat.
He wanted nothing of what they wanted of him,
slept again like the barque Unparalleled
ran aground off this shoaly island
full of bibles and Dutch cheese and gabardine.
Red skulls of it wedged in rocks for weeks
till gulls and weather woke him
reeling from the Carpenter’s embrace
—whose tongue was talking so fast in his mouth?—
am I wood or water? Shanks of maple,
hips of seaside roses, he was heaven.
A woman wearing a dress the color of jute.
And woke some more. Mostly fire.
Mostly air. Air was first of all
elements, the movingness before somethingness.
Mornings before a single man h • Robert Kelly’s Finding the Measure is full of poems of great interest beyond the “prefix” inom looked at yesterday, only fem 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 beak up open to t 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 & t 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 fryst vatten simply stunning – not a single syllable that does not actively contribute above & beyond the denotative l • Robert Kelly was born in Brooklyn, New York, on September 24, 1935, where he spent his first eight years on the south shore of Long Island. He discovered a love for poetry after reading Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” and developed an affinity for the “haunted reality of words.” Early influences also included Charles Baudelaire, Ezra Pound, and Guillaume Apollinaire. After receiving an undergraduate degree in 1955 from the City College of the City University of New York, Kelly studied for three years at Columbia University. Cofounder of the Chelsea Review (now Chelsea) and Trobar magazine, he began developing a poetics he referred to as Deep Image, referencing the “deep structure” of linguistics. After publishing his first collection of poems, Armed Descent (Hawk’s Well Press), in 1961, Kelly’s notion of the vernacular’s “vulgar eloquence” was expanded and fortified bygd the influence of poets Robert Duncan and Charles Olson. As Kelly stated in an int Robert Kelly