Under Words

by Robert Kelly

Robert Kelly "Under words. I was wondering what lay beneath them, the things I said and meant and used, some of, only some of, to build poems. For years their surface had been enough, and then that history (half-fanciful, half-documented) we call etymology. But I wanted a spiritual etymology, to lead the word back – but not now to some Indo-European root, but to its root in my experience, mind in action, tree in the world. Words are narratives intact in themselves, and all the narrations and sequences here (more story-prone than before in my work) unpack the primal narrative each word tacitly persists in laying before me. This book’s title is indebted to Starobinski’s account of Saussure’s long subtle studies of anagrams in Lucretius and Virgil, Les Mots sous Let Mots. And to the excited turn in my life when I chose, for reasons only my poems talk about, to enter, 1980 and thereafter, my personal underworld, and report the word I heard there."

Genres: Poetry

162 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1983

About the author

Kelly has published more than fifty books of poetry and prose, including Red Actions: Selected Poems 1960-1993 (1995) and a collection of short fictions, A Transparent Tree (1985). Many were published by the Black Sparrow Press. He also edited the anthology A Controversy of Poets (1965).Kelly was of great help to the Hungryalist group of poets of India during the trial of Malay Roychoudhury,with whom he had correspondence,now archived at Kolkata.

Kelly received the Los Angeles Times First Annual Book Award (1980) for Kill the Messenger Who Brings Bad News and the American Book Award, Before Columbus Foundation (1991) for In Time.

Reviews

[Tommy · Rating 5 out of 5]

not only is he brilliant, he's my uncle.