6.28.2023

OH

The flat black snake coiled
in our yard—
a long strip of bark

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CRAFT NOTE: This little poem is a lune, the so-called American haiku. In its classic form—invented by the poet Robert Kelly, who was reacting against the restrictions of the Japanese haiku as it’s often written in English—the lune has three lines and a total of thirteen syllables (5/3/5), so it’s even shorter than the conventional English-language “Japanese” haiku (5/7/5).¹ My first encounter with Kelly’s work came when I was a teenager and discovered A Controversy of Poets, the anthology, revolutionary in its time, that Kelly co-edited with Paris Leary. What a relief from “Thanatopsis” and “Tintern Abbey” and “Ode to the West Wind”! (Eventually, though, I did learn to appreciate those works.) Kelly was already a notable poet when that anthology appeared, and I continued to follow his publications, with particular excitement about Doctor of Silence, his 1988 collection of what we now call flash fiction, or flash. Speaking of which, flash forward a few years to when I was an editor at Stanford University Press and worked with the fabulous Charlotte Mandell on her translations of writings by the French authors Maurice Blanchot and Antoine de Baecque. One morning, needing to talk with her about some detail in one of those texts, I called her at her home in upstate New York. She wasn’t in, said the courtly man who answered the phone, and he offered to take a message. The man was her husband, Robert Kelly. From that time on, until I left Stanford and moved to Maury Island and we fell out of touch, I had two lovely phone pals and email correspondents in the Hudson Valley. I wish I still had Robert’s last email, wishing me the best of luck in finding “comfortable and capacious quarters” on the island.

1. A contemporary master of this form is the American poet Joseph Massey, who recently published Breath Work, a collection of sixty lunes.