The Time of Voice

The Time of Voice: Poems 1994-1996 (1998), a collection of poetry by Robert Kelly, the award-winning poet laureate of Duchess County, New York, gathers 90 poems written during that two-year span.

This collection marks only a small part of Kelly’s prolific output—he has published more than 50 books of poetry during his career, beginning with experimental works in the 1960s and continuing through the present day. Kelly’s poetry is cerebral and deeply connected to the long tradition of verse in which he glories, drawing his influences from the ranks of universally acknowledged masters: “I want to say the names of the great teachers from whom I learned what I could, and still am learning. Coleridge. Baudelaire. Pound. Apollinaire. Virgil. Aeschylus. Dante. Chaucer. Shakespeare. Dryden. Lorca. Rilke. Hölderlin. Stevens. Stein. Duncan. Olson. Williams. Blackburn. I mention only the dead, the dead are always different, and always changing. I mention them more or less in the order of when they came along in my life to teach me.”

At the same time, The Time of Voice features some of Kelly’s most accessible and lyrical poetry, focused on the emotional resonances occasioned by everyday objects, memories, observations, habits, and people. Kelly still relies on ambiguous and multi-faceted imagery, symbolism, and intellectual bravado, but in these works, these tools are in service to forging a more heartfelt connection with his reader. As Kelly describes his writing technique: “Writing is the generosity of writing down whatever comes into your mind, in sequence, as true as you can, The diligence of working with that, in all the ways you can, to make it speak, to make it say more than you know…The patience to know that what the writing is saying is more important, always, than what you want to say…The moral discipline not to use the words to sell yourself or your ideas. The concentration to stay with the work under hand, stay inside it, thinking only with it and not beside it, letting all thinking and feeling come to focus in it, as it. The wisdom to know when you’re done. When it’s done.”



Many of the collection’s poems play with the genre of the ode, addressed to prosaic and typically unsung devices like “The Doorknob,” which in Kelly’s poem reflects a moment of indecision—indecision caused by emotional withdrawal and unwillingness to engage what’s on the other side of the door.

Other poems memorialize travel’s inspiring sights, like “Peter Saeredam’s Great Church in Haarlem” and its more commonplace observations, like “Amsterdam Window,” both obviously triggered by a trip to the Netherlands. The first poem is an awestruck contemplation of a place the speaker was already prepared to be wowed by, but which proves even more impressive on firsthand contact. The second ponders the universality of experiences—every city has people in pain, every cat enjoys sitting in the warm sunbeam that comes through a window:

I saw a rose on a table, red cat on a windowsill,
mango in a basket, a million people woke
and went to work, a street sullied with sunlight.



Several poems are deeply personal, eulogistically evoking an experience shared with a now dead relative. In “For My Uncle Barney, the Rosicrucian,” grief and mourning cause the speaker to tease apart and examine in minute detail a childhood memory of a beloved uncle, drawing symbolic meaning from each tiny fragment:

Dear uncle you are mostly home
movies walking shyly smiling
with the light you left me
when you died into my mind I was nine

I have looked for you ever since every
day I find the trace of you the track
of your dear feet sometimes naked



Conversely, other elegies in the collection are for more public figures, typically Kelly’s fellow poets. “For Wallace Stevens” is an experimentally formatted attempt to explain that poet’s great appeal, while “In Memory of James Merrill” juxtaposes the confusing delight of a film by Jacques Tati—a film the reader realizes at the end of the poem that the speaker has turned to in order to dull the news of Merrill’s death.

Reviews of the collection dwell on the longevity of Kelly’s career and his contributions to the art form he has practiced. The Bloomsbury Review calls him “a true and original voice in American poetry…one of the few prolific writers whose every book is a welcome revelation.” Moreover, the New York Press declares, “Robert Kelly knows that poetry is a struggle of the language to be more than itself, to mean more than language can normally say. Prose is logic; poetry is, at least partly, a shamanism. Kelly gets at the sense that there is something larger behind the everyday.”