CLASSIFICATION
Swallow ID:
1255
Partner Institution:
Concordia University
Source Collection Label:
SGWU Reading Series-Concordia University Department of English fonds
Series:
The Poetry Series
Sub Series:
SGWU Reading Series-Concordia University Department of English fonds
ITEM DESCRIPTION
Title:
Robert Kelly at Sir George Williams University, The Poetry Series, 4 November 1966
Title Source:
Cataloguer
Title Note:
"Robert Kelly at Sir George Williams University, Montreal 4 November, 1966" handwriitten on the back of the tape's box. Date and name also written on spine of the box and stickers on the reel. Additional Info: I086-11-027 and RT 503
Language:
English
Production Context:
Documentary recording
Genre:
Reading: Poetry
Identifiers:
[]
Rights
CREATORS
Name:
Kelly, Robert,
Dates:
1935-
Notes:
Prolific American poet, Robert Kelly, was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1935. He attended both Columbia University and the City College of New York. He took positions as a translator, later becoming a lecturer and writer-in-residence at several universities, including the California Institute of Technology, Bard College and Tufts University. In 1957, he co-founded and edited the Chelsea Review (now Chelsea) until 1960, after which he co-edited Trobar magazine until 1965. Kelly was involved in the creation of The Blue Yak poetry co-operative in New York City. His first published collection of poems was Armed Descent in 1961 (Hawk’s Well Press), followed by seven other collections including Lunes/Sightings with Jerome Rothenberg in 1964 (Hawk’s Well Press), and Weeks in 1966 (El Corno Emplumado). He began editing Matter magazine in 1963, and has had affiliations with several other magazines like Caterpilar, Los, Alcheringa: Ethnopoetics and Fulcrum. Publishing over forty books of poetry, prose, essays and plays, Kelly’s most notable books include The Scorpions (Doubleday, 1967), Finding the Measure (Black Sparrow Press, 1968), California Journal (Big Venus/Asphodel, 1969), Mill of Particulars (1973), The Loom (1975), The Convections (1978), Kill the Messenger (1979), Spiritual Exercises (1981) and Not This Island Music (1987) all published by Black Sparrow Press. Robert Kelly has been the Asher B. Edelman Professor of Literature at Bard College from 1986 onwards; he was the co-director of The Writing Program and the founding member of the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College. He has won many awards and honors, including a Doctor of Letters from State University of New York in 1994, the Award for Distinction from the National Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1986 and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in 1976.
CONTRIBUTORS
MATERIAL DESCRIPTION
Recording Type:
Analogue
AV Type:
Audio
Material Designation:
Reel to Reel
Physical Composition:
Magnetic Tape
Storage Capacity:
00:30:00
Extent:
1/4 inch
Playing Speed:
3 3/4 ips
Track Configuration:
2 track
Playback Mode:
Mono
Generations:
Duplicate
Tape Brand:
Kodak
Sound Quality:
Good
DIGITAL FILE DESCRIPTION
File Path:
files.spokenweb.ca>concordia>sgw>audio>all_mp3
Duration:
00:24:57
Size:
59.9 MB
Content:
Robert Kelly
00:00:00
...Read a couple of poems from a book that came out last year that's very hard to find, it's called Lectiones. These are poems that I offered in the book, very humbly, as poems that I think needed the instrumentation of the human voice, my voice, someone's voice to present them. I don't think they hold on paper. To some extent all of the poems that I've written, all of the poems anyone writes are scores for an eventual ideal performance in someone's mind's ear. More particularly in my poetry any kind of deviation from the margin represents a pitch variation, space left out indicates silence, in an obvious way, I don't know how better to do it, you know Yeats
played around with the notion of notation for songs, then he realized the words have to do with, I understand, two of the words must do it, but there are ways of setting them down. This is a poem called "Dates of the Calendar".
Robert Kelly
00:01:11
Reads "Dates of the Calendar" [from Lectiones].
Robert Kelly
00:03:03
I'd like really, since I've read now tiny fragments, scatter of history, I'd like now for my good to read poems that are very recent, so everything that I read from here on after will be from the summer or after, this past summer. i.e. things that are still urgent with me that I have to deal with, as to say them or give. “King of Death”.
Robert Kelly
00:03:49
Reads "King of Death".
Robert Kelly
00:04:38
Reads unnamed poem.
Robert Kelly
00:05:47
That's a very difficult poem for me. It's meant to sound difficult. I mean it's not meant to flow and it's filled with rhyme and I think rhyme is the torment. The real reason that rhyme was invented must have been pain, the pain of psychosis, the pain of madness, of hoping by that fictive and easy device to cling to a measure of order, because you can get cling, cling, ring, ring, ring the way the tantric hindus make their gestures of introjection, intro- substance via mantrum, rhyme noises, [unintelligible], they say. Fellini
makes fun of it in that 8 ½
, the girl in the old Hindu...But I think rhyme is madness and rhyme is pain, and maybe poets will no longer have to be madmen now that we have come to abandon rhyme. Don't you think that free-verse poets are less mad then rhyming poets? [Audience laughter]. They need order somewhere else, they can't keep it there. Alright. I mean A.A. Milne
was probably the craziest man in the world. [Audience laughter]. This is a hard poem in a number of ways, the music of it interests me very much, it's a variety, it all fits on one page somehow but it's a long poem. It's based on the word ‘Gala’, the old Greek word for 'milk' from which we get obviously galactose and galactose but also galaxy from milky way, gala way.
Robert Kelly
00:08:01
Reads unnamed poem.
Robert Kelly
00:08:11
Let me try that again.
Robert Kelly
00:08:013
Reads unnamed poem [restarts].
Robert Kelly
00:11:43
This is, strange that I should say it, but this is the time of the world, you know, it is now upon us, when women can acquire souls. The whole of our culture is based on the soullessness of women, the woman gets soul from man, from children, from mother, but now perhaps woman is a separate entity, can be a separate entity, even if it means separate from me, but that is a large concern of mine. That's obvious from the poem, why do I have to say this. It comes of teaching and schools [audience laughter], that sort of thing, no one can understand a thing, nobody can understand anything, I can say it and say it again. Here's a poem, last spring, "Memorial Day". I looked out and saw the students of the college, oh, scattered on the lawn having a wiener roast or something.
Robert Kelly
00:13:13
Reads "Memorial Day".
Robert Kelly
00:16:19
Reads unnamed poem.
Robert Kelly
00:17:22
I'd like to move back in time a little bit and read you a few sections from this very long poem called "Weeks", which is perhaps even going to be out even this month, sometime soon, I've just finished the proofs of it a week or so ago. Let me read you the first one, at any rate, this is not a narrative poem, but it is a continuity of poems, there are 150 sections, some of them are quite short and some of them are fairly long. So there is not what we are trying to call a formal similarity between the sections, there is a continuity of sound and of concern and that's enough.
Robert Kelly
00:18:35
Reads “Weeks: 1” published later in Weeks.
Robert Kelly
00:19:05
It's deliberately a--what poems do at their beginnings is to set measures of music, to set new measures, not to declare more than the sound of themselves, I think that's important and a long poem might take a section or two or three or ten, in this case I think the first ten sections do no more than to set the measure of the poem. But I don't want to read them all. God, I don't want to read all 150 of them. I tried that once, not publicly, but I couldn't do it, even privately, even with coffee and the ability to s-m-o-k-e, can't do that here…[Audience laughter]. There is much said in this world about city, I mean I see all around me here the evidence of a monumental concern with city, and we're taught to think about Socrates
and polis and all of that--polis, city, the community of men, and we haven't said all that has to be said about it. In the last 100--the last 50 sections of "Weeks" I get very involved with that. I get very involved with the fact that we do build cities as we build rooms with no place to sit down, with no air, and so on and so forth, and the simplest way we can find that objectionable is simple: Animals, but in a different sense we have allowed that sense of community to destroy something that's closer to the bone, that possibility of a man's doing, and this is what experimental art is always about isn't it? A man doing his own work, that's the hardest experiment of all to do and to maintain, to continue doing your work and not somebody else's. So this is 107, it's about 'polis', the Greek word for 'city' if I am not pronouncing it clearly.
Robert Kelly
00:21:15
Reads “Weeks: 107” published later in Weeks.
Robert Kelly
00:22:47
And that's followed by 108, which is more specific and is about the murder of a great man
.
Robert Kelly
00:22:57
Reads “Weeks: 108” published later in Weeks.
END
00:24:57
Notes:
Robert Kelly reads from Lectiones (Duende Press, 1965) and Weeks (El Corno Emplumado, 1966) as well as poems from unknown sources.
00:00- Robert Kelly introduces reading [INDEX: Lectiones, Reading poetry: techniques, Yeats: spacing and notations of poems]
01:11- Reads “Dates of the Calendar”
03:03- Introduces “King of Death”
03:49- Reads “King of Death”
04:38- Reads first line “The sun didn’t know a thing...”
05:47- Introduces first line “Galas, star, all the things I meant...” [INDEX: Rhyme, mantrums, Fellini, Poet A.A. Milne, ‘gala’: Greek for ‘milk’, constellations]
08:01- Reads first line “Galas, star, all the things I meant...”
11:43- Introduces “Memorial Day” [INDEX: Teaching]
13:13- Reads “Memorial Day”
16:19- Reads first line “This who I have chosen...”
17:22- Introduces “Weeks” (Series of 150 poems) [INDEX: Weeks (1966) Formal similarities vs. continuity of sound as ways of connecting poems]
18:35- Reads “Weeks: 1”
19:05- Introduces “Weeks: 107” [INDEX: Greek word ‘polis’]
21:15- Reads “Weeks: 107”
22:47- Introduces “Weeks: 108” [INDEX: Malcolm X]
22:57- Reads “Weeks: 108”
24:57.12- END OF RECORDING
Howard Fink List of Poems:
4/11/66
one 5” reel @ 3 3/4 mono lasting 1/2 hr
1. From book Lectiones, “Dates of the Calendar”
2. “King of Death”
3. first line “The sun didn’t know...”
4. first line “Galas, star...”
5. “Memorial Day”
6. first line “This, who I have chosen...”
7. “Weeks” (selected sections)
Content Type:
Sound Recording
Featured:
Yes
File Path:
My Drive>Sir George Williams TIme-Stamped Transcripts>Spokenweb Tape Case Photos taken by Drew Bernet
Title:
Robert Kelly Tape Box - Back
Credit:
Drew Bernet
Content Type:
Photograph
File Path:
My Drive>Sir George Williams TIme-Stamped Transcripts>Spokenweb Tape Case Photos taken by Drew Bernet
Title:
Robert Kelly Tape Box - Front
Credit:
Drew Bernet
Content Type:
Photograph
File Path:
My Drive>Sir George Williams TIme-Stamped Transcripts>Spokenweb Tape Case Photos taken by Drew Bernet
Title:
Robert Kelly Tape Box - Spine
Credit:
Drew Bernet
Content Type:
Photograph
File Path:
My Drive>Sir George Williams TIme-Stamped Transcripts>Spokenweb Tape Case Photos taken by Drew Bernet
Title:
Robert Kelly Tape Box - Reel
Credit:
Drew Bernet
Content Type:
Photograph
Dates
Date:
1966 11 4
Type:
Performance Date
Source:
Accompanying Material
Notes:
Date written on the tape box and on a sticker on the tape reel
LOCATION
Address:
1455, Boul de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Venue:
Hall Building Art Gallery
Latitude:
45.4972758
Longitude:
-73.57893043
Notes:
Location specified in printed announcement "Georgantics" by Bob Simco (Supplemental material)
CONTENT
Contents:
robert_kelly_i086-11-027.mp3
Robert Kelly
00:00:00
...Read a couple of poems from a book that came out last year that's very hard to find, it's called Lectiones. These are poems that I offered in the book, very humbly, as poems that I think needed the instrumentation of the human voice, my voice, someone's voice to present them. I don't think they hold on paper. To some extent all of the poems that I've written, all of the poems anyone writes are scores for an eventual ideal performance in someone's mind's ear. More particularly in my poetry any kind of deviation from the margin represents a pitch variation, space left out indicates silence, in an obvious way, I don't know how better to do it, you know Yeats
played around with the notion of notation for songs, then he realized the words have to do with, I understand, two of the words must do it, but there are ways of setting them down. This is a poem called "Dates of the Calendar".
Robert Kelly
00:01:11
Reads "Dates of the Calendar" [from Lectiones].
Robert Kelly
00:03:03
I'd like really, since I've read now tiny fragments, scatter of history, I'd like now for my good to read poems that are very recent, so everything that I read from here on after will be from the summer or after, this past summer. i.e. things that are still urgent with me that I have to deal with, as to say them or give. “King of Death”.
Robert Kelly
00:03:49
Reads "King of Death".
Robert Kelly
00:04:38
Reads unnamed poem.
Robert Kelly
00:05:47
That's a very difficult poem for me. It's meant to sound difficult. I mean it's not meant to flow and it's filled with rhyme and I think rhyme is the torment. The real reason that rhyme was invented must have been pain, the pain of psychosis, the pain of madness, of hoping by that fictive and easy device to cling to a measure of order, because you can get cling, cling, ring, ring, ring the way the tantric hindus make their gestures of introjection, intro- substance via mantrum, rhyme noises, [unintelligible], they say. Fellini
makes fun of it in that 8 ½
, the girl in the old Hindu...But I think rhyme is madness and rhyme is pain, and maybe poets will no longer have to be madmen now that we have come to abandon rhyme. Don't you think that free-verse poets are less mad then rhyming poets? [Audience laughter]. They need order somewhere else, they can't keep it there. Alright. I mean A.A. Milne
was probably the craziest man in the world. [Audience laughter]. This is a hard poem in a number of ways, the music of it interests me very much, it's a variety, it all fits on one page somehow but it's a long poem. It's based on the word ‘Gala’, the old Greek word for 'milk' from which we get obviously galactose and galactose but also galaxy from milky way, gala way.
Robert Kelly
00:08:01
Reads unnamed poem.
Robert Kelly
00:08:11
Let me try that again.
Robert Kelly
00:08:013
Reads unnamed poem [restarts].
Robert Kelly
00:11:43
This is, strange that I should say it, but this is the time of the world, you know, it is now upon us, when women can acquire souls. The whole of our culture is based on the soullessness of women, the woman gets soul from man, from children, from mother, but now perhaps woman is a separate entity, can be a separate entity, even if it means separate from me, but that is a large concern of mine. That's obvious from the poem, why do I have to say this. It comes of teaching and schools [audience laughter], that sort of thing, no one can understand a thing, nobody can understand anything, I can say it and say it again. Here's a poem, last spring, "Memorial Day". I looked out and saw the students of the college, oh, scattered on the lawn having a wiener roast or something.
Robert Kelly
00:13:13
Reads "Memorial Day".
Robert Kelly
00:16:19
Reads unnamed poem.
Robert Kelly
00:17:22
I'd like to move back in time a little bit and read you a few sections from this very long poem called "Weeks", which is perhaps even going to be out even this month, sometime soon, I've just finished the proofs of it a week or so ago. Let me read you the first one, at any rate, this is not a narrative poem, but it is a continuity of poems, there are 150 sections, some of them are quite short and some of them are fairly long. So there is not what we are trying to call a formal similarity between the sections, there is a continuity of sound and of concern and that's enough.
Robert Kelly
00:18:35
Reads “Weeks: 1” published later in Weeks.
Robert Kelly
00:19:05
It's deliberately a--what poems do at their beginnings is to set measures of music, to set new measures, not to declare more than the sound of themselves, I think that's important and a long poem might take a section or two or three or ten, in this case I think the first ten sections do no more than to set the measure of the poem. But I don't want to read them all. God, I don't want to read all 150 of them. I tried that once, not publicly, but I couldn't do it, even privately, even with coffee and the ability to s-m-o-k-e, can't do that here…[Audience laughter]. There is much said in this world about city, I mean I see all around me here the evidence of a monumental concern with city, and we're taught to think about Socrates
and polis and all of that--polis, city, the community of men, and we haven't said all that has to be said about it. In the last 100--the last 50 sections of "Weeks" I get very involved with that. I get very involved with the fact that we do build cities as we build rooms with no place to sit down, with no air, and so on and so forth, and the simplest way we can find that objectionable is simple: Animals, but in a different sense we have allowed that sense of community to destroy something that's closer to the bone, that possibility of a man's doing, and this is what experimental art is always about isn't it? A man doing his own work, that's the hardest experiment of all to do and to maintain, to continue doing your work and not somebody else's. So this is 107, it's about 'polis', the Greek word for 'city' if I am not pronouncing it clearly.
Robert Kelly
00:21:15
Reads “Weeks: 107” published later in Weeks.
Robert Kelly
00:22:47
And that's followed by 108, which is more specific and is about the murder of a great man
.
Robert Kelly
00:22:57
Reads “Weeks: 108” published later in Weeks.
END
00:24:57
Notes:
Robert Kelly reads from Lectiones (Duende Press, 1965) and Weeks (El Corno Emplumado, 1966) as well as poems from unknown sources.
NOTES
Type:
General
Note:
Year-Specific Information:
Kelly was working as a visiting professor of Modern Poetry at Tufts University in 1966, and was working on several collections of poetry, such as Devotions (Salitter Books), Twenty Poems (Asphodel), Axon Dendron Tree (Asphodel), Crooked Bridge Love Society (Salitter Books), A Joining: A Sequence for H.D. (Black Sparrow Press), and Alpha (J.Fisher) which all came out in 1967, as well as his first work of fiction, The Scorpions (Doubleday, 1967).
Type:
General
Note:
Local Connections:
Kelly’s direct connection to Sir George Williams University is unknown, however as an important and prolific American poet and professor, he was no doubt known to Canadian writers and professors.
Type:
Cataloguer
Note:
Original transcript, research, introduction and edits by Celyn Harding-Jones
Additional research and edits by Ali Barillaro
Type:
Preservation
Note:
Reel-to-reel tape>CD>digital file
RELATED WORKS
Citation:
Gray, Robert. "Kelly, Robert". The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry in English. Ian Hamilton (ed). Oxford University Press, 1996.
Citation:
Kelly, Robert. Lectiones. New Mexico: Duende Press, 1965.
Citation:
Kelly, Robert. Weeks. Mexico: El Corno Emplumado, 1966.
Citation:
Kelly, Robert. “Curriculum Vitae”. Bard College Website. November 11, 2009.
Citation:
Simco, Bob. “Georgiantics”. The Georgian. Montreal: Sir George Williams University, 4 November 1966.
Citation:
Thoms, Kathleen. “The Electronic Poetry of Robert Kelly”. OP-ED. Montreal: Sir George Williams University, 11 November 1966.
Citation:
“Poetry Readings”. OP-ED. Montreal: Sir George Williams University, 6 October 1967, page 6.
Citation:
“Kelly, Robert, 1935-”. Literature Online Biography. Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey, 2000.