Under Words
By Robert Kelly
1983
First Published
3.95
Average Rating
163
Number of Pages
Robert Kelly "Under words. I was wondering what lay beneath them, the things I said and meant and used, some of, only some of, to build poems. For years their surface had been enough, and then that history (half-fanciful, half-documented) we call etymology. But I wanted a spiritual etymology, to lead the word back – but not now to some Indo-European root, but to its root in my experience, mind in action, tree in the world. Words are narratives intact in themselves, and all the narrations and sequences here (more story-prone than before in my work) unpack the primal narrative each word tacitly persists in laying before me. This book’s title is indebted to Starobinski’s account of Saussure’s long subtle studies of anagrams in Lucretius and Virgil, Les Mots sous Let Mots. And to the excited turn in my life when I chose, for reasons only my poems talk about, to enter, 1980 and thereafter, my personal underworld, and report the word I heard there."
Avg Rating
3.95
Number of Ratings
20
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