A sustained long sequence poem by award winning poet Robert Kelly. Widely anthologized and published, Robert Kelly, whose writing of poety now spans some fifty years, spent three years working and re-working this poem, which will rightly be called one of the major works in his long and prolific career.
If the Pentagon is war, then the hexagon —inner chamber of the hive — is peace. In abstract painting, only the mark is real; resemblances are trivial or unwelcome. The Hexagon is the middle term of the five long poems of this last decade of my writing [Fire Exit, Uncertainties, The Hexagon, Heart Thread, Calls] and it is the most abstract of all my works. Each line is self-contained, inhabiting six-line stanzas, subject like any mark to contingency and proximity. Each line full of particulate matter, neither insists on nor resists connection, accepts the silence at the end of every line of poetry as its meaningful goal.
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.
OPENING THE SEALS represents poet Robert Kelly s workings, starting in 2000, with the radical suggestions by the historical linguist Patrick C. Ryan towards the reconstitution of what he calls Proto-Language a linguistic substrate, ca. 100,000 BC, to all extant human languages the real Nostratic before Nostratic, our language. Ryan argues for a set of meaning-bearing monosyllabic sounds, that work like roots or racemes or perhaps leitmotifs in subsequent languages. In Kelly s poems, each section begins with one of the Meaning-Bearing Monosyllables, and meditates as well as I can contrive on the sound and its range of meanings. And let me say that it is the range of meanings that Ryan finds subtended or implied by the syllable that first caught my attention and excited me: not so much, then, the sense of the sound as a root, but the sound as a complex aural seal, which has to be opened to find all the meanings it proposes and thus connects…. As if the secret affinities of all things and processes in the world were already encoded in these beast sounds our sweet mouths still fashion.
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