A City Full of Voices: Essays on the Work of Robert Kelly

Robert Kelly is one of the major and most prolific American poets of our time. Between 1961 when his first collection, Armed Descent , was published by Hawk’s Well Press, and Seaspel, brought out in 2019 by Lunar Chandelier Collective, Kelly has published some 66+ books of poetry as well as 14 volumes of prose, including novels, short stories, & essays. A City Full of Voices is the companion volume to the 2014 A Voice Full of Cities , the Collected Essays of Robert Kelly , also published by Contra Mundum Press. This book gathers a wide range of commentaries — from single-phrase response to full-blown essay, personal meditation & various forms of book reviews — on Kelly’s monumental oeuvre. It covers early reception by a previous generation of poets — such as Charles Olson and Robert Creeley — welcoming Kelly among their company, mid-career assessments via an array of compañeros & compañeras for whom Kelly’s work has been sustenance and inspiration over many decades, and goes all the way to critical investigations by those younger readers & students of the work coming to Robert Kelly’s poetry today. Eminent voices among the contributors include Guy Davenport & Stan Brakhage, Paul Blackburn & Diane Wakoski, Jerome Rothenberg & Clayton Eshleman, George Quasha & Charles Stein, P. Adams Sitney & Sharon Mesmer, John Yau & Jennifer Moxley, Jed Rasula & Mary Caponegro, among many others. Robert Kelly’s own voice can also be heard in a series of “”Threads”” (in which various interview excerpts directly, or indirectly, speak to the sections or “”books”” they precede or follow) that link both in form & content back to the previous volume, and in three landmark interviews with Kelly in full, that also mark three different moments in time: 1963, 1974, & 2007. Both volumes together thus offer the reader not only a “”collected”” & “”critical”” essays, but also a “” Selected Interviews .”” It may seem surprising — & in fact it is — that an oeuvre of such distinction, complexity, and depth has had to wait until the poet’s 84 year to be fêted with a volume of essays. But here it is: A City Full of Voices, the first substantive multi-voiced gathering of writings about one of the absolutely opulent, lavish, generous & bountiful life-works by one of the great contemporary American poets. —- ISBN: 9781940625348