Worlds Without End

The Sudden Fictions of Robert Kelly

by Nina Shengold and photographs by Jennifer May, June 28, 2010

Kelly has a velvety baritone voice, expressive hands, and piercing blue eyes, framed by jutting cheekbones and a dense growth of bristling white eyebrow. There are two fountain pens in his shirt pocket. Around his neck is a maroon blessing cord with a circular conch-shell bead, formerly part of a prayer wheel cylinder. “When they get worn down, they’re removed,” he explains. “They’re thought to contain all the recitations from the prayer wheel. It was a gift from Lama Norlha Rinpoche, abbot of the Kagyu Thubten Choling monastery in Wappingers Falls. When he gives it to you, you don’t take it off.”

Outside Kelly’s office at Bard College, a late-summer thunderstorm rumbles. As wind lashes trees and rain pounds the pavement outside, the poet’s book-filled lair seems a true sanctuary. Behind his head, a computer monitor displays an animated screensaver of a night sky, so that Kelly appears to be at the helm of a fast-moving spaceship, burrowing through constellations.

It’s an apt backdrop for his recent novel, The Book from the Sky (North Atlantic, 2008), a nonpareil melding of visionary poetics and vintage space fantasy. In the opening pages, 12-year-old Billy is abducted by aliens who create a changeling double, replacing his organs with a clock, an old postcard, and a tobacco pouch, with two gray squirrels where his lungs used to be. Years later, he will be sent back to earth as charismatic spiritual leader Brother William (“I used to be a little boy, like you, and now I’m a religion.”) Ultimately, he and his earthly doppelganger are joined by a murderous act; it’s a Cain and Abel story in which Cain is Abel.

It’s also a feast of language from an effusive polymath—language, in fact, is one of its central concerns. When Billy wonders how he can understand his captors’ speech, he’s told, “Our language knows how to fit inside your language. Our sentences are like water, they find the spaces left in your ideas.”

Kelly’s The Logic of the World and Other Fictions, just released by Kingston-based publisher McPherson & Company, delves deeper into the open spaces within ideas. Its 30 pieces range from “sudden fictions” of a page or two to stories more conventional in length, though not necessarily in structure. In the title story, a young Parsival engages in a Socratic dialogue with a preternaturally wise dragon, which may or may not exist solely within the knight’s mind. Trigonometry, or the Autopsychography of My Life, consists of 44 cryptic chapter headings, prefaced by a wickedly funny authorial note (“The reader is urged to regard with welcoming alertness any image, of whatever sort, that may happen to arise in mind as the following chapter headings are read.”) A Simple Room unfurls an exhaustively detailed description of the objects in the largest room of an alpine chalet; in a playful homage, its title and opening reference Flaubert’s A Simple Heart, which was translated by Kelly’s wife, NEA Award-winner Charlotte Mandell, in 2004. Many of the fictions in The Logic of the World are not so much narratives as sly provocations. “They ask for activity. The reader is invited to do,” affirms Kelly. “They open a door to the reader and draw the reader in.”

The book is divided into five numbered sections, suggesting the movements of a musical suite. Is there an organizing principle? “Poets have no principles. You should know that by now,” Kelly quips, explaining that “each of the five sections leads up to something. Or down to something.” Or, in the Mobius strip of Kelly’s imagination, possibly both at once.

“One thing that struck me is that there are more stories in this volume that emanate from dreams,” says publisher Bruce McPherson. “The essence of dreaming is the startling juxtaposition of different images—images that startle, and yet demand that sense be made of them. Robert is a genius at bringing to prose those kinds of dislocations, and making them very powerful and very enjoyable.”

The two men share a long history. Kelly contributed a blurb to McPherson’s first publication, Jaimy Gordon’s novel Shamp of the City-Solo, in 1974. They reconnected through mutual friend George Quasha when McPherson moved to the Hudson Valley a few years later. McPherson went on to publish eight volumes of Kelly’s fictions, poems, and limited-edition collaborations with German visual and verbal artists Brigitte Mahlknecht, Schuldt, and Birgit Kempker. “He can do anything,” the publisher says, citing Kelly’s affinity for reimagining biblical stories, quest legends, ghost stories, and science fiction. “He’s one of the best-read people I’ve ever met.”

Indeed, reviewers have compared Kelly’s work to Borges, Nabokov, and Calvino. In the incantatory sudden fiction The Ritual, he writes, “What pale eyes a father has! How far away they see! How they never face anything that is here. Years ago he had started walking, to get away from that place his father refused to look at, him, there, wherever he was, and reach that place his father was looking at always. Reach that place and do something there.”

Kelly grew up as a bookish misfit in Brooklyn’s Sheepshead Bay. As he describes the view east of Canarsie in the days before JFK Airport, his voice grows rhapsodic. “Miles and miles of marshland, a few shacks built on stilts, fishermen. Open space, a great sky,” he intones. “Marshland pleases me.” Asked why, he lifts both arms, wordlessly drawing a wide circle in the air. “I grew up very nearsighted, and didn’t have glasses until I was 12. I liked the unfocussed impression. The horizon doesn’t require glasses.”

Enamored of words, lists, and names, the young Kelly was happiest during the private hours between school and his parents’ return home from work. At 14, he applied for a library card at the main branch of the New York Public Library. The application form had a blank for “Occupation.” After a brief hesitation, he put down WRITER. Then he set about making it true.

Kelly published his first book of poetry, Armed Descent, in 1961, the same year he started teaching at Bard. “A lot has changed since 1961,” he asserts. “Rhinebeck had no food. If I wanted a loaf of bread or a piece of cheese, I had to go to the Italian market in New Paltz, or up to Hudson. It was all  Wonder Bread.”

There’s a sudden immense bolt of lightning and near-simultaneous thunderclap. Three soaked students charge into the front hall for cover, screeching and giggling. Intrigued, Kelly opens the door to look out at them. He returns to his chair with a satisfied smile.

“Suddenness—it’s all about that,” he says. “A poem is suddenly there, or a story. It occurs to you. That kid outside will remember that lightning bolt for years.” As a teenager, Kelly saw a Sean O’Casey play at the Provincetown Playhouse. He still remembers the sound of feet pounding upstairs as the characters ran from the IRA, the vibration of air and sound all around the theater: “It was an electric moment. We were inside the play.”
Kelly’s poems are full of such sudden, electrical bursts. From “A Lithuanian Elegy”:

You saw a man bleeding on the river bank
We wash and wash and never come clean


We know each other by the way we walk
Red ribbons like strips of meat in the rain.

He observes that “we look at poems in two ways: as a whole shape on paper, in the same way one might encounter a painter’s canvas, and sequentially, while reading from left to right, top to bottom. When we view a whole poem, certain words grab the eye, prompting subliminal connections which may run counter to the poem’s sequential narrative.” He enlarges the poem he’s been revising on his computer and points out some words which link in this way: naked, wicked, legal, debtor’s prison. “You see? It’s a dark undercurrent quite different from the poem as read from beginning to end.” Kelly is working with neurologist Barbara Luka “on what actually happens to us as we read a poem. I’m very interested in peripheral vision.”

“Everything is connected,” he says. “A poem is a painting, or an aria. I like to think of a sonnet as a syllogistic work: there are eight lines in opposition, then you solve it in the next six. It’s a thought experiment.”
A passionate teacher, Kelly treats his writing students “as if they’re already who they’re going to be. I treat them as poets. Well, that’s what we do, isn’t it? If you meet someone and want to go to bed with her, you treat her as if she’s already your lover. Anyway, they are poets. A poet is someone who’s written poems, and if they keep doing it, they’ll be buried under that name with a flag flying.”

Robert Kelly will read from The Logic of the World at Oblong Books, Rhinebeck, on Friday, 7/23, at 7:30pm.