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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Robert Kelly
Robert Kelly
Born in Brooklyn in 1935, Robert Kelly is the author of more than fifty collections of poems, including Red Actions: Selected Poems 1960-1993 and Kill the Messenger Who Brings Bad News, which received the Los Angeles Times First Annual Book Award in 1980...
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FURTHER READING
Ars Poetica
Epistles, Book II, Ars Poetica
by Horace
A Book Of Music
by Jack Spicer
A True Poem
by Lloyd Schwartz
All Their Stanzas Look Alike
by Thomas Sayers Ellis
Always on the Train
by Ruth Stone
And It Came to Pass
by C. D. Wright
Ars Poetica
by Archibald MacLeish
Ars Poetica
by Eleanor Wilner
Ars Poetica (cocoons)
by Dana Levin
Art Class
by James Galvin
Arthur's Anthology of English Poetry
by Laurence Lerner
Because You Asked about the Line Between Prose and Poetry
by Howard Nemerov
Briefly It Enters, and Briefly Speaks
by Jane Kenyon
Broadway
by Mark Doty
Diving into the Wreck
by Adrienne Rich
Endnote
by Hayden Carruth
Envoi
by William Meredith
Ground Swell
by Mark Jarman
Instructions to Be Left Behind
by Marvin Bell
Introduction to Poetry
by Billy Collins
O Black and Unknown Bards
by James Weldon Johnson
On the Subject of Poetry
by W. S. Merwin
Poet's Work
by Lorine Niedecker
Poetry
by Marianne Moore
Some Part of the Lyric
by Gregory Orr
Speech Alone
by Jean Follain
Strawberry on the Drawbridge
by Matthea Harvey
Take the I Out
by Sharon Olds
The Allure of Forms
by Coral Bracho
The Bargain
by Cyrus Cassells
The Bear
by Galway Kinnell
The Poem as Mask
by Muriel Rukeyser
The Poems I Have Not Written
by John Brehm
The Snow and the Plum — II
by Lu Mei-P'o
The Uses of Poetry
by William Carlos Williams
What He Thought
by Heather McHugh
Workshop
by Billy Collins
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Prefix: Finding the measure  
by Robert Kelly
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Finding the measure is finding the mantram,
is finding the moon, as index of measure,
is finding the moon's source;

                                         if that source
is Sun, finding the measure is finding
the natural articulation of ideas.

                                              The organism
of the macrocosm, the organism of language,
the organism of I combine in ceaseless naturing
to propagate a fourth,
                               the poem,
                                               from their trinity.

Style is death. Finding the measure is finding
a freedom from that death, a way out, a movement
forward.

             Finding the measure is finding the
specific music of the hour,
                                     the synchronous
consequence of the motion of the whole world.



From Red Actions: Selected Poems 1960-1993. Copyright © 1995 by Robert Kelly. Used by permission of the author.


Audio Clip
January 21, 2008
Red Hook, New York
From the Academy Audio Archive
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