ROBERT KELLY Engages by Writing Prefaces to the
following:
INVISIBLE MARCHES by Tamas Panitz
Hexateuch
by Joel Newberger
BRONZE
by Billie Chernicoff
(All published by Lunar Chandelier,
2018)
Preface to INVISIBLE MARCHES by Tamas Panitz
Marches are borderlands, danger terrains, full of beasts
or enemies or disappointed friends seeking exile. Marches are long lines, footsore soldiers
stepping briskly with their minds on something else, thirty miles a day through
the borderlands into conflict zones.
Marches are times of years when once upon a time snow was rare and lions
slept and the Passover lamb nibbled dandelions, clover, newborn grasses.
In his lucid and articulate dreams, the poet talks us
almost safely, slowly through the never-relenting parades, lingers in the
groves, chatting up the spirits that appear.
Cities are full of spirits, cities in the borderlands especially, not
just Detroit or El Paso—Catskill and Boston are by the borderlands too. Because
the border is always close. We feel all
night the wind coming across the border, blasting us with terrors and sexual
imagery. We live by the border, every
dawn a glorious danger we belong to.
But we seldom get to
see the border so clearly until now, the invisible made visible, palpable,
in Tamas Panitz’s structured odes—the hidden world suddenly sung into
sight.
***
Preface to Hexateuch
by Joel Newberger
FOREWORD:
TO THE DEVOUT
READER
If I were to speak about this I would begin by noticing
the reverences, sheer reverence, implicit in Newberger’s imaginative disclosure
of the multitudinous meanings of the Five Books so rightly called of Moses. But you’re not here, I’m all alone
with his texts, the generative excitement of them. We Greeks find ourselves suddenly at
home in his desert world, our Kore, our dear girl Persephone, is one
aristophanic half of his Korach,
likewise a visitor to the underworld, likewise a challenger of top-to-bottom
authority. Newberger wanders the Pentateuch, trying to estrange it from the
common and all too trivial readings it suffers from unthinking priestcraft,
Hebrew and Christian.
His texts are exciting, rowdy, bawdy, solemn, full of
wordplay across the languages at stake, play, not game. This is sacred ludens, playing with
the divine names, the human urges, the eternal necessities. Playing with names is the most
dangerous play of all, as any theologian can tell you—call one up and ask, if
you don’t believe me.
But I forget you’re not here. You’re on the other side of
the mirror, reading this. I have to report that I read these texts at times
with almost fear, so much is at stake in them, how close to blasphemy he has to
come to shake the characters back into life, the lives they share with one
another, when they all change their names and sing.
But I read them with awe too, holy awe, at how much this
mere man has done to bring the texts to life, unlocking their stories, breaking
through the frontiers between Egypt and Palestine, blaspheming the blasphemers
who denied Abraham and Melchizedek, and foisted an upstart Egyptian princeling
on a godly people. But I
digress.
This is a book of recovery, adventure, shock, high
comedy, tenderness. The Bible will never seem the same, thank God. And one privilege of his Hexateuch is that it does a good job of
contributing to the vital revolution in religious studies leading to a fresh
and altogether anti-patriarchal awareness of Judaism and Christianity as one
religion, not two, so long as we can recover Wisdom lost in the desert (see
Margaret Barker’s work) and understand how they are linked by a shared eschaton
(as in the work of Emma O’Donnell). I’ve
tried to butt in with my scribbles on what I call the Backwards Bible, the Achorei,
but my guesses don’t come close
to the power, strangeness and curious beauty of Newberger’s luminous heresies.
***
Preface to Bronze
by Billie Chernicoff
Bronze is fused from copper and tin. Venus mostly,
and some Jupiter thrown in—a lot of her and not much of him, big ovum, little
spermatozoon. Boy and girl. From the beginning of our world, the world of fire,
artists have been melting Venus and Jupiter together to make objects of that
tangible divinity we call art. Statues and swords, ithyphallic grotesques and
simple wine cups, perhaps even more dangerous for their exuberantly welcoming
capacity.
The poet reads things.
And she knows them all, this poet of our precise and
beautiful ordinary language. She handles them, fondles them even, with her
eyes, eyes that traverse the salients and re-entrants of bronze artifacts with
the fluid grace of a gymnast.
That’s what pleases me most in this wonderful poem,
or book of poems, this living museum of human responses to human work—the quiet
alertness of her breath, the way the lines let us travel with her perceptions,
breathing for us almost, showing us how to see. Old bronze seen new. No hint of
antiquarian scholarship here—the years fall away, leaving only the moss-green
patina, time’s only gift, green, color of Venus.
*****
Robert Kelly teaches in the Written Arts Program at
Bard College, and has written many books. Recent publications
include A Voice Full of Cities (collected essays), Heart
Thread and Calls (fourth and fifth in the Island
Cycle of long poems) and The Caprices, new from Lunar
Chandelier Collective.
