Robert Kelly

Robert Kelly is often considered the founder of the Deep Image movement. He was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1935 and attended the City College of the City University of New York and Columbia University before starting to work as editor for the literary magazines Trobar and Chelsea Review. Although his work has mostly been associated with the tradition of Pound, Olson and Williams, he himself feels his influences are much broader, including

“Coleridge. Baudelaire. Pound. Apollinaire. Virgil. Aeschylus. Dante. Chaucer. Shakespeare. Dryden. Lorca. Rilke. Hölderlin. Stevens. Stein. Duncan. Olson. Williams. Blackburn.” 

The Poetry Foundation says of Kelly’s work:

“[His] free-verse poetry, both spare in language and wide-ranging in its attention, is often engaged with the intimacy of audience: the connection forged between individuals looking outward together.”

In addition to his more than fifty volumes of poetry, Kelly has also written several volumes of short fiction, essays, and manifestos. He has received an Award for Distinction from the National Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Kelly still serves as Asher B. Edelman Professor of Literature and Co-Director of the Program in Written Arts at Bard College, where he has taught since 1961.


Links:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/robert-kelly
http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/robert-kelly
http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/kelly/



My below poem took its starting point from a line in Kelly’s “A Woman with Flaxen Hair in Norfolk Heard”.

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Removal

planning to move into the country
it isn’t the city anywhere else
leaving behind
( alphabetical order )
a) ngelic vitamin water
b) read of superior quality priced like insensitivity
c) hronic repeat
d) ry guilt easily resolved in three measures
e) lephant rooms: various locations available now for viewing
f) oxtons, foxes, faeces (E5 domesticated)
g) rowth always vertical always going non-monetary for you of course
h) ome
i) onic order
j) azz nights of wuthering rain mirrored in wet cobble stone
k) indness in limits in limited air fluctuation below
l) ove by the riverbank flashlights
m) inted tears
n) ational import
o) ysters sealed in plastic sleeves hermetic
p) rinces/princess
q) ueens
r) idicule lifestyle
s) leepless airport flight corridor flights
t) ailored women
u) topian gossip
v) erse ventricular
w) hitmanian bridges at odd intervals non-musical still busking
x) ray populous press
y) ardstick hipster anguish
z) ephyr summer tunes on your smartphone on that night when we climbed to the roof