Robert Kelly, one of America ’s most distinguished poets, will read his work at Warwick ’s College of Poetry on April 10 at 4:00 p.m. The College is located at 7 West Street , Warwick , New York . Admission is $10 for the general public but is included with tuition for guest poets enrolled in this term’s workshops. Light refreshments will be served. Please enter by the side door.
Kelly’s most recent volume is Fire Exit which William Seaton praised in Chronogram, saying “attentive and off-hand graceful, the language is redemptive.” Since his first volume Armed Descent in 1961, Kelly has been one of the most productive of American writers, publishing over fifty books of poetry as well as fictions, essays, and other prose works. A volume of selected work called Red Actions: Selected Poems 1960-1993 was published in 1995. He has been influential as well as an anthologist, particularly for A Controversy of Poets.
Kelly has received many honors and awards, including a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, the Los Angeles Times First Annual Book Award, and an Award for Distinction from the National Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
He is sometimes identified as a “deep image” poet. When Kelly first used the term in his essay "Notes on the Poetry of Deep Image" in his magazine Trobar, he was referring to the Spanish canto jondo (deep song), the work of Lorca, and the earlier Symbolists. In later work, the poet’s notion of the vernacular’s "vulgar eloquence" was expanded and fortified by the influence of poets Robert Duncan and Charles Olson. As Kelly once stated in an interview, "When I began to know their work, and explore their solutions, real and imaginary, to the isolation of the ego in a world of music, I began to speak less of deep image." To him “what we hear in poetry is groans from the battlefield where time struggles against space.” Many readers would agree with Guy Davenport who commented, “his poems are mysteries to be pondered, something to dream on rather than to puzzle out.”
He currently 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. He has taught as visiting writer or on temporary appointments at such institutions as Yale, USC, and SUNY/Buffalo.
The College of Poetry is a program of the Northeast Poetry Center . For further information call (845) 294-8085 or write seaton@frontiernet.net.
