Robert Kelly Quotes

RK: The point of my childhood seemed to have been learning to thrive in isolation. Or to find richness and peculiarity and pleasure in that isolation. I’m not very interested in my childhood as a religion or a government – for me, my childhood is a kind of weird foreign country I spend an hour or two in, then hurry home to now, remembering some strange cheese I once tasted, or the sharp taste of sour rye.

R.K.: All the other weeks I got to be alone. A city is such a beautiful place to be alone.

One thing I beg with all my heart that all parents would learn: leave the child alone. The child needs hours every day alone with his body, his sense of order, rhythm, movement, time.

Don’t imprison the child in programmed activity. Organized play is not play at all. Leave the kid alone. Don’t make him be present in every family moment. It’s not television, you’re not A Family. The child is a person. Leave the child to know his own time. There is nothing in the world more precious than time of your own.

My greatest blessing was hours every day alone; both parents worked, and the hours after release from the hated schoolroom were my time.

Walking the streets, looking at people, finding the libraries, reading, playing ball – the kind of solitude I needed, I think everyone needs to be able to process what they see and hear, and bring it into alignment with what they feel.

Walking around is a way of getting to know your own body. And what you’re walking around in and through is language.

I was walking through the names of things.

My eyesight was poor in those days; I squinted fearfully, and only color made sense. Color and touch – what else do I trust even now?

Names. What I saw I wanted to name, to know the names of. Things got realer for me when I knew their names.

I can remember some of those words that came to transform things – names transform things into themselves. Oak-tag. Pine grove. Hoarfrost. Snow.

RK: Poetry led me a strange dance. Maybe it is a boyish thing – now that you ask me, it suddenly reminds me that my approach to poetry was like my (or most boys’) approach to girls; for years girls are alien and incomprehensible and boring, mostly boring, but boring in an annoying way (which should give a boy a hint that there’s more here than meets the eye – but boys seldom take hints). Then something happens, and girls become the most interesting energies on the planet – yet of course the more profoundly you approach and revere them, the more they remain alien and incomprehensible: but those are profound qualities now, intensities of order that revise the boy’s own easy order, transform his scattered excitements into some single ardor.

R.K.: So that’s what poetry could be. All the pleasures I had from reading, fantasizing, learning, music: all in this one strange thing, this alien, incomprehensible, but immensely sensual event.

So it wasn’t actually words themselves that led me there. But the haunted reality of words, the way things became more real for me, more passionate, when I could name them, that same reality hovered in poetry all of a sudden, the named unnamable. So poetry had to be temporary, provisional, expedient, flawed, hopeful, boastful, repentant, had to try to win the truth of the words that come to mind, and do so in one solitary engagement with as much music as your breath could hold.

To try and answer the question directly: I found slowly but certainly through poetry that poetry was the altar to which names are brought, where they give the most light, isolated as they are in the silence around each word in a poem. God, poems should be printed one word on a page, and then we’d really begin to understand them.

And then, in another way, all the spaces should fall away and we read all the syllables as one continuous breath of one single word. A poem is a single word, naming a sensual unknown.

RK: Truly, schools are no worse places for learning that than anywhere else. At least they give people a chance to hold off entering the labor-world, last touches of that moneyless quandary called childhood. I don’t know. Schools. I hated school when I was a child, as I’ve said. I wonder if my students are as appallingly bored in my classes now as I was then. I hope not, but how could they not be?

Maybe the chance is this: school is different now: We have reformed education in the light of the entertainment industry. Our scheduling, marketing and packaging of information and skill have turned classes into ‘programs’ with the same neat weekly or daily recurrence of a tv show. And classes are appreciated as such, boring or fascinating as may be, because they’re not being compared to freedom or following the mind’s time’s way, but just compared to other ‘programs,’ other courses. People compare books, or compare films. But only to other books, other films. No one thinks of comparing a film to no-film. How is reading this book better than not reading anything at all? Reflections like these, along with the sense of paying-for-the-passage-of-time, are what make me think of education and entertainment as part of the same huge industry – an industry for which we need a new name (like Mr Eisenhower’s famous warning about the ‘military-industrial complex,’ we need a caution about an Entertainment-Education-Religion Complex ). When you examine the norms by which teachers are rated by their students, many of the questions boil down to: do you enjoy the passage of time? does the class make you feel good? does the teacher give you the sense of being an expert? does he radiate care for you and attention to your needs? I don’t think these are the marks of a good teacher an Athenian would look for.

But they are what the social function – not intellectual function—of education as an industry requires today. I’m not even against them. Since the beginning of time, artists (poets, musicians, dramatists, novelists) have been paid for what ultimately is: the shaping of time as it passes. That is what rhythmos is, the shaping of audible or sensible or tactile experience – the word from which rhythm and rhyme both come, the potter’s craft of shaping on the wheel when the clay is time itself.

So arts have been absorbed always by the entertainment industry (of any era recent or ancient) – so that until recent history there has never been a point of distinguishing art from entertainment – and I’m not sure there’s any difference now, except in our own artist’s hauteur and self-importance, we’re not mere entertainers.

But of course we all are, just like the athlete, the ballplayer, the professor of biology, the concert pianist, the experimental composer, the pole dancer, the preacher, the bishop, the rapper, the tenor, the actor, the tv news anchor – each is standing before a body politic and shaping their experience of time and mind.

So into education has entered that ancient and honorable craftsman , the histrio, the master clown, the impersonator, the man who speaks through masks, the woman who speaks through the smoke of burning laurel leaves. Art, it all is art.

It is not so much that the arts have entered education (though most American artists, of whatever kind, are directly dependent on universities for their everyday income) as that education has itself become an art form

RK: Not so much responsibility as privilege. People have to find the materials or minds to do work on the world, for the world; the poet has at least the materials right there in the mouth. Words. Language, which is always there and common to all, so the poet is always walking through familiar places, holding familiar objects to display to those around about. Making them unfamiliar, so they can be seen. Language, no matter how arcane we become with it, language keeps us always with other people. Joyce’s polysemous and difficult tongueplay in the late work comes out of his fierce determination to respond to the social fact, we dream in language and wake to speak. Language is always social. Language is the other – the other in our own mouths.

The poet is someone who has nothing to say except what language lets. And ‘let’ is an old, odd word in English, that means both permit (let the children play) and prohibit (let and hindrance). Language lets, poets listen, and that listening is their main responsibility, when coupled with what language lets them, makes them say, keeps them from saying.

Maybe the deepest responsibility of the poet is the simplest: Keep talking.

The enterprise that Shelley spoke of, despite his own voluminous political writing, I think is true because of the adjective. The more unacknowledged we are, the more effective legislators we are. Unacknowledged even by ourselves. Especially by ourselves.

Look, poetry works when it reveals and when it gives pleasure. Those are the two things I know it can do. It can also bore and preach and fulminate and be disagreeable, can murmur confessions best left in the leatherette diary with the little heart-shaped lock, can posture politically and be very, very self-important.

But when the poet is the legislator, the poet is not sounding off. The poet is sounding. Not what I think about the government, but what language lets me speak into the whirlwind around me.

Personally, I don’t think propaganda helps. I think political poetry doesn’t accomplish much; it just makes us feel a little relief, venting. I guess that’s not so bad, sometimes we have to get it off our chests, personally -- but that shouldn’t make us feel we’ve accomplished something when the audience applauds us for agreeing with their beliefs. We haven’t accomplished anything. So I don’t much like poetry that’s just venting, whether it’s venting about your girlfriend or venting about the president. I think poets have a special responsibility in a terrible time which is not discharged by saying How terrible this time!

In a terrible time, under terrible government, I think the poet has to work by subversion. By disconnecting. By making new connections. Jewels are found by digging, by standing still in running water. By armchair psychoanalysis and expropriated museums, by whatever we can learn about what anybody anywhere thinks. By surrealism, Russian Formalism, dreams half-remembered, cheesy interpretations,, pennywhistles, love toys, steamboats, history books, lies, confessions of imaginary sins, multiplication of voices, Pessoa-nations, Poundian clarities and Joycean murk, Chinese whispers, listening and making the best of what you hear. Listening.

Sounds like play, doesn’t it? Sanskrit lila, Tibetan rolpa – the play of mind which is the play of the world.

The only thing I really look to a poem for is revelation. I think poetry is a true revelator in this time, especially in this time, when all the different bibles babble so loud you need the desert calm of the feeble poem to hear a new word come to life. What the poem reveals is what the poet didn’t know – that’s the first test. When the poem surprises you by what it’s just made you say, or made your hand write, then we’re on the way.

The poet’s responsibility is revelation. Not just to say what has never been thought. But to say in clear words something that cannot be thought. Let language lead the way. To play while the grown-ups do that frightening compulsive thing they do and they call work. To hope that they will see us playing, and be disturbed or distracted or entranced. And join us.

To change the world one person at a time. The strange fact of the poem in a book: it happens to one person at a time. And it makes us do the happening. Music happens to us, but we have to read the poem. That makes us complicit in its coming-into-presence. And that complicity in turn, makes us co-workers of the utterance. The words become us.

RK:Prose is a subtle form. The musical interruptions that give prose rhythmic shape are less obvious and less regular than those that weave silence into speech in a poem. Anyone who has heard Faulkner reading, or Ed Dorn, or James Agee, or James Joyce, knows something of the incredible variety of prose music. Sometimes I have been allowed to bestir myself in those measures, and make the long summer drone of prose. When I was in college, I started a novel called, almost symptomatically, The Moment of Saying. Man and woman, inability to communicate, even lasting longer than the inability to make contact. To live with someone and still not be able to say it. Say it. I did not know what it was, but I knew it had to be said. The novel went nowhere. Then a few stories now and then. (One called “An Assassination of the Czar” was published in a jazz magazine, I recall it fondly, and the sneaky way it turned itself into a poem at the end. I think. I haven’t seen it in many years.) It wasn’t till the mid-Sixties that I started to write anything seriously in prose –- till then I had almost struggled against it, feeling morally and aesthetically committed to the notion that it (remember it?) had to be said in poetry. Then one day I found myself at a reading proclaiming to my own surprise and with the authority that I seem to take on in front of a crowd, that the next big move in the New American Poetry would be in prose.

RK: Speaking of my own practice, I don’t think any poem or text of mine is ever finished. Usually I write poetry longhand, and soon enough type it up into a file – I keep my work chronologically, it’s all I have in the way of history, so it helps me that way too. When it’s typed and printed out, I’ll read or re-read it. And usually I won’t let it be published for half a year or more, to be sure. To keep hearing it and seeing to it that the text on paper gives the not-me reader a sound like the sound I hear, that is, to get the notation right. To make things clearer, to get some of the yammering Pronoun family out. Those kids drive me crazy.

Even when the poem is printed at last, I think of it as on loan to the book. As long as I can think of something to do to it, I feel free. So when I put together my selected poems ten years or so ago, I felt free to revise poems from thirty years before, sometimes substantially. In the same way, when I give readings, I have gotten to enjoy pouring the poem into the moment – often I don’t even read the whole poem, and take some pleasure in violating, some might say spoiling, the Aristotelian organic whole I had worked so hard to fashion. I don’t know. I do what I want till I die – what else should I do? The poem I write is a poem I inherit from space, and I only give it time as it passes through me – and why should I ever deny it that passage, onward?

RK: In the same way I never plan, I never try to foretell the future. I’m sure I see it, that we all see it, from time to time, with a clarity warped or clouded only by our mindset so fiercely determined on the ‘arrow of time’ running one way only. I’m sure we all see bits and pieces of the future, but know them not for what they are. Yet even knowing this, thinking this, doesn’t make me any more clear-seeing than the next person. And I’m more likely to use the images or glimpses as starting points for poems. Cannibalizing the future. So I may wind up seeing even less than the normal person.



I think there are some things true about poetry right now that are interesting. Poetry now moves powerfully, dangerously, into the bare neurology of our condition.

Contemporary poetry seems to approach that Alzheimer-like condition where only the line you’re in is real. “Language” poetry is the apt music from and for our time, born from and speaking to our challenged neurology. Autism at one end and Alzheimer’s at the other. Ashbery speaks of his lines devouring one another, and when we listen to most contemporaries, at least the more radical workers I’m likely to go hear, each line seems to want to erase the line before it. And I tend to measure the success of a poem by how far it has traveled from its incipit.