Robert Kelly

Super duper lengthy interview w/ him here (only about halfway through it myself), but man does goodness await you.

Tip of the iceberg--

I’m not very interested in my childhood as a religion or a government--for me, my childhood is a kind of weird foreign country I spend an hour or two in, then hurry home to now, remembering some strange cheese I once tasted, or the sharp taste of sour rye.

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A city is such a beautiful place to be alone.

One thing I beg with all my heart that all parents would learn: leave the child alone. The child needs hours every day alone with his body, his sense of order, rhythm, movement, time.

Don’t imprison the child in programmed activity. Organized play is not play at all. Leave the kid alone. Don’t make him be present in every family moment. It’s not television, you’re not A Family. The child is a person. Leave the child to know his own time. There is nothing in the world more precious than time of your own.

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I found slowly but certainly through poetry that poetry was the altar to which names are brought, where they give the most light, isolated as they are in the silence around each word in a poem. God, poems should be printed one word on a page, and then we’d really begin to understand them.

And then, in another way, all the spaces should fall away and we read all the syllables as one continuous breath of one single word. A poem is a single word, naming a sensual unknown.