ABSTRACT
Since 1961 Robert Kelly has published some 50 collections ofpoetry and poetic prose. This prolific output is in itself a notable index of Kelly's poetic project: a "making it new" of words, figures, and visions from seemingly all the world's religious and poetic traditions (in which Catholic, Jewish, and Buddhist notes are perhaps most often struck). Yet Kelly's commitment has also always been to a contemporary avant-garde. Kelly addresses this apparent contradiction between archaic religious traditions and poetic avant-gardism in his important 1988 statement "Spirit! Vanguard Art":
Power of poetry: to employ propositional language not to make assertions, but to make, for a moment, lush gardens where one is free from assertions, exalted in the fragrance of presentness.... Such deconditioned delights, subtle, struggling free from associations yet enduring with pleasure all the temporary ecstasies of them as they slip off, may indeed give the reader of contemporary poetry a taste of such unconditions, dis-situation. And you may wind up trying to live free of the obligation of attending to your own habitual intentions.
