Raisons d'être of Resistance
Reasons to Resist by Robert Kelly.
Lunar Chandelier Collective Press, 100 pp. $12.
Oh my, after the for your meek mind at times tiresome strictures and wise yearnings and epiphanies of Calls to suddenly, joyously, chance upon Reasons to Resist which suddenly strikes you as Kelly’s most amazing single piece since that other mittelatem Ariadne. Now he writes nothing but love poems to the sublime, it seems. Them being the same as the woman he loves. And to think now, it strangely forcing itself upon me, to think of these two now in mind strangely coupled grand late periods: that of Kelly and Eshleman — and I think here first and foremost of Kelly’s Reason to Resist (to my senses, the first full blast grand occasion of this poet reopening in this our 21st century). This has been dreamt of by Olson, Duncan, and couldn’t play with time, so Reasons and then late Eshleman open workings, and I mean things like Jointure or, for that matter, most stuff in Penetralia, much in Pollen Aria. Though Kelly is of course an alchemic zen sage, an amorous mandarin?, he now never ever ceases being a star-struck lover of language (of, mind, then?!) mind being his Verona and he language’s Romeo; while Eshleman has grown even stiffer and heavier, remaining an undecided, questing and questionous sufferer of the rotten Denmark.
I speak here as you can hear in full blood in blue language because these two now fully arise in front of me as true masters. ¡hombre, Yoru, duendisito, Ish. . .
I study these two now as I would study Alchemical treatises, Qabbalistic scribble or unreadable magickings of Renaissance. Their apprentices go forage, go bow
Dig this, if anything, be sand, man! :
Attributed to Peter van der Doort, The Alchemist's Laboratory from Heinrich Khunrath, Amphiteatrum sapientiae aeternae, ca. 1590-1605. Engraving. Met.
Caesar does not come so easy
to our small polities.
(and oil me not, I am all
grease, all spanked with
you o so fierce, lover
in my veins, o
langue –
If Eshleman the hard fact man (Olsonian, somewhat, in that sense? No, no need) the archeologist, the ‘istorian, the literalist has been caving, becoming cave, devenir grotte, grotesquing his fierce mind-body; Kelly the metaphorist, the cunning spinner, the Navajo snake, the chewer of words and that too into hearing, as if, alone — he, so often delighted, awe-struck with world and delighting minder of innate sensualities, yes, and I mean minder, sensing mind, not one’s, the mind, caress that me — Kelly, I say, has been islanding, becoming island, all sea, breeze, epos now, all crossroads, it bringing the news, that is poetry. Devenir île — maybe one book of his could have a title like that, no? And now, reading Reasons to Resist (another essay would necessitate to peek inside the high archeries of that title, its pierresque ambiguities) now it suddenly hits me that he is now
Unpublished drawing by Franz Kafka. Vitalis Verlag.
Past-ecology, he whom I suspect to quietly be the
most radical thinker practitioner of our Caesar-
less days . Do I hear
21 21 21 (It is upsetting that my Americans
didn't seem to befriend Scott Walker who
to me even before I’d have intimations
of Olson and Duncan before most things
I now know no . Scott was there
Like my virgil, or why virgil, his innate
name (niemandsickness) being Engel, re
member, and he shed that, of
course (Walserian gesture) and became
a plain thing, a walker, passant, another mystery
American in Europa.
Paul Gauguin, Where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we going?, 1897. Oil on canvas. Wikimedia.
So angel. No: I said, beyond timid polities, beyond the accepted tongue, sanctioned saliva what not and past ecology into angelology. He said this, ever undersaying, soothing, saying true: Earish, he said: Ear is the angel, everything is speaking and that my sole religio. Realigning with the aetheric evercurrent of each single utterous thing . . . There’s a full room next to this full of all the rest, but what rests? I never rest, I have these reasons to resist and then
There’s a full moon tonight
Body to be angeled, Angelus novus it is and that our rubric, our vita nuova, this primal promise, dante is the first verb you study, le verbe n’est-ce pas, the one that was there to begin with. It starts with inflection and does end with the doxa, so what, what did you expect? We started with Miles and am I supposed to be a licensed actor now? To comply? Kelly is to new politics what the Marx brothers are to la grande doctrine marxique. A better bunch of brothers that keep telling and of course you do not listen. You are god now, that’s the hidden face you took for our shoreless days. I lost the body to the angel will be the secret epitaph to our age, signed R.K. not some sellable conquesting like died on Mars. Marsless us, goddess, we are warful, so hungry without sense nor knowledge to delight in that hunger. Resist my love, I so tremble, I so tremble at your floating door.
Album cover of Scott 3 by Scott Walker. Rock & Roll Globe.
Whose? House Goddess, let us call her, the body, that fleshy book, remember?, Maison Dieu. Dig this. Maison Déesse. This is a spooky language he invokes here in the prose sections. Heerie = pixie time. The Queen herself descending unto speech? (Eerie’s here. Her’s here.) Her meaty cloud carrying the speech forward? But no, this is Duende himself, that which Yorunomado promised, all those harrowing rituals that Eshleman painstakingly depicts and Kelly seems to conceal — where to conceal but in plain sight? Hides it into saying itself. Do Eshleman and Kelly read a lot of Michel Leiris? He, I dazzle at suddenly thinking, that tortured, that illuminated Frenchman and not Stevens and not Pound not William Carlos Williams nor Whitman or Dickinson is the essential progenitor of their deep sound, their dark image. In his counter-angelic quest for the deep, the concrete, the blackening, Eshleman is prone to the dark imaginings of decadent cosmologies of somebody like Bataille, maybe Lovecraft! So he searched for his progenitor in the Americas (he so nomadically obsessed with the sense of home) and found Crane only (on this side and then Vallejo, his disembowelment ish).
Remedios Varo, Vuelo Mágico (Zanfonía), 1956. Oil and mother of pearl on masonite. Arthur.
But neither Kelly is all ether and angelic. I suddenly sense that in those secret utterings, in those prose passages in Reasons to Resist that I would insist are the greatest English language occasions of lyrical revelation since Sir Thomas Browne’s best pages, I sense I say that here Kelly reaches what I could only call his pharmakopeia. Nobody’s truly beyond the garden and the apple, so there are the reasons to reckon — ain’t it true that anyone worth attending to at one point or another brings her innate pharmakon: his healer and his poison, your bliss, my perdition.
I can only write in torch songs, no lesser place to truthfully speak from, here.
Tower turning into the sea. Fluid, the essence of so much of what we are. are for speaking.
This is the promise Kelly’s poetry held all along and we expectantly eavesdropped at the unutterable murmurs coming from the next room. Through the door.
your bow, my forage
and then this write everything thing what is it, after all? Live your work. Eat your poetry. Feed on smells and senses. No repose. No pose or poise. No equipoise. No rest. Résistons !
Statue dedicated to the Vodun Gou photographed in the rooms of the Trocadéro Ethnography Museum at the end of the 19th century, Paris. Musée du quai Branly.
Sorry I shout at times, master my whisper. Then come back to me.
But still, what is this frail old body of the visionary poem of my day? Why this occasional no-musick, this selfish as colors prosing? This ‘aphorism or eternity’. Let us have this instant, then. No method. Wethod. We have had so long of history and nothing but liquid things, these poems, his or her, no matter, let us attend to this mystery, you and I, until we reach the westory.
Read Pound, but read Sun Ra just as much, Harry Partch. No end to music, no pedagogy involved in telling.
Where to? (. . . still Rimbaldian, how could I help?!)
A door is the opening
Onto what isn’t there.
Nobody there.
Pick up there, o magnetized poet. //
Frontispiece to Sir Thomas Browne’s The Garden of Cyrus with its “quincunx” pattern. Public Domain Review.
