The Traffic of Words

Résumé du livre

The poet Paul Blackburn once arrived at a metaphor for Robert Kelly's image-making capacities: "Images crowd him as though he were St. Francis and the images birds." Kelly's poetic output is voluminous, a restless charting of new territory. His work arises from Charles Olson's mythopoetic experiments--particularly his early work that has a density of historical and particularly mythical references--as well as from the linguistic subtleties and musical forms of Louis Zukofsky and Robert Duncan's rich medieval tapestries. Kelly's early work was rooted in alchemy and the polymorphous perversity of Love's Body, and his poems could be fragmentary and explosive, richly musical (such as The Loom, his splendid epic), full of linguistic slippage and surrealist fancy, or elusive as the Zen philosophy he finally embraced. Kelly's work has always been protean. His appetite for contradiction can be monstrous. He responds to historical and aesthetic currents with a striking immediacy and a ceaseless delight in subverting those very sources of inspiration. As Guy Davenport argued, Kelly has "the Chinese sense of bringing diverse things together in a stark symbol, and is happiest when he himself can't quite see the meaning of the sign he's made." Therefore, any work of criticism must labor to identify his allusions and echoes but also speculate on those elusive meanings. This work examines Kelly's early work, with its flamboyant alchemy, theosophy, and cinematic textures--up until his deconstruction of Shelley's Mont Blanc in 1994. The study outlines his poetics of alchemy and of history, while clearly demarcating those areas of ambiguity and tension that continue to animate his writings.