Heart Thread - Softcover

Kelly, Robert

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0997371501 ISBN 13: 9780997371505

Publisher: Lunar Chandelier Collective, 2016

Synopsis

Poetry. Through the tumult of our names, months, seasons, runs the line of the heart. The cordial, the central, the nerve that springs us into thinking, moving, speaking. Body, Speech, Mind—what else have we? The heart is the thread that links them together, the theme that runs through all the voices and variations of our fugue, our flight, our flight from Eden, from dependency, from servitude, towards freedom of mind and action. Towards being.

I learned the name of the poem slowly, after hearing at Bard a performance of Lou Harrison's choral setting of the heart sutra, the radical Buddhist text that speaks to the primacy of mind. It made me think of the way Buddhists point to the heart to mean the mind. Sutra means thread, and that was my instruction, suddenly focused as I listened one afternoon to George Quasha's Axial Music ensemble in Barrytown, and I knew the name of the thread that held me, that I held.

About this title

About the Author

Poet and fiction writer, Robert Kelly was born in 1935 in Brooklyn, and educated at CCNY and Columbia, where he studied medieval literature and linguistics. His first book, Armed Descent, was published in 1961; since then he has published over sixty more, most recently the poetry collection Opening the Seals, UNCERTAINTIES (Station Hill Press of Barrytown, 2011), the novel The Book from the Sky, the long poem Fire Exit, and his fifth collection of short stories, The Logic of the World. He has been especially interested in collaborations with artists (The Garden of Distances, Shame) and other poets (Mont Blanc, Unquell the Dawn Now). He was a founder of Chelse and Trobar, and an editor of Caterpillar, Alcheringa, and Conjunctions. He is the Asher B. Edelman Professor of Literature at Bard College, where he started the writing program in the Milton Avery Graduate School. He co-directs the Program in Written Arts. He lives in the Hudson Valley with his wife, the translator Charlotte Mandell.

Edition details

• Publisher: Lunar Chandelier Collective
• Publication date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0997371501
• ISBN 13: 9780997371505
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 172