20 Questions for Robert Kelly | American Poetry Review,...
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The poem is the shaping of time, it is shaping by language (words plus silence plus intonation) our experience of time. So the poem is a score, a language mise-en-page for the reader as performer. The reader as performer. A peak shared by unlikely mountaineers: O'Hara, Blackburn, Mac Low-all demanded an alert performing of the page from the reader, otherwise nothing would make sense. That score idea has diminished in recent years-you need it for O'Hara, but not for Ashbery. You need it for Blackburn but not for Creeley, who has a different sense of compelling music. Or maybe just a simpler music, more simply scored.
But innovation is such a slippery word, a promo word, shiny, easy packaging kind of word. Every time two words rub up against each other in a proposition, or in a public space (which is always what language is) where propositions arise, imply, kiss, depart, then that's new. Innovation is what we do all the time.
~Robert Kelly
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