Happy Birthday, Robert Kelly!

So yesterday afternoon with Robert Kelly’s 82nd birthday in the back of my mind I happened by chance — was looking for something completely different — to come across the picture below: Robert reading to me from a now unidentifiable ms. in Paris (only one of two occasions on which we met outside the US) in about 85/86 in my “red all over” Paris apartment. An hour later again looking for something else, up popped a poem of RK’s that had been important for me many years ago (& that celebrates Margaret Randall & her magazine El Corno Emplumado ). The poem makes a politically urgent statement totally valid today, several decades later: “All forms of totalitarian slavery commence with the proposition: get out of your body. Whether that is ecstasy, religious abstraction, psychotic fugue, social consciousness, group-loyalty, whether the threat is Marxist or Theocratic or Fascist, the threat is the same. Men, alienated from their bodies, wandering howling through through the abstract spaces of a pretended race….” So, here are both, pix & poem, to celebrate Robert:

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