The Logic of the World: An Interview with Robert Kelly
by Lynn Behrendt

Robert Kelly has lived in the Hudson Valley and taught at Bard College for nearly 50 years. He has had over 60 books published. The most recent, The Logic of the World, consists of 30 short fictions that have been said to “defy the conventionally plotted short story.” Yet the stories are all remarkably easy to ingest, funny, and unsettling. Below are some questions I posed to Kelly about the book.

LB: In the story called “The Wandering Jew” there is a haunting statement: “We shiver in endlessness, and an act has no end.” Can you talk about how you became a Buddhist and what effect this has had on your writing.

RK: That’s one of my favorite stories. An act continues to have consequence endlessly. That’s what I was stunned by when I began to study Buddhist thought and practice. Remember René Daumal’s Mount Analogue, where dislodging a single pebble alters the destiny of the island. Size is not an issue. Deed and intent are. Awarenesses like those made me more conscious of just why poems and other “small forms” can have such intense effect and such pervasive aftermaths. Beyond the moral issues, there is a strict equivalence in writing itself: the law of the first line (the first line that comes to mind)—from it everything follows. That’s true for me in poetry, but also in my fiction. Things begin by themselves and we attend them as they go on. The writer and the reader move like some bizarre Hansel and Gretel through the wood of the work as it comes into being. It’s always twilight till you’re there.

There’s a way too where Buddhist practice has tried to make me more compassionate as a writer. Compassion, I feel, has to extend not just to actual people, but to the characters you’re composing in your fiction.

LB: How has living in the Hudson Valley impacted you as a poet, and/or your writing?

RK: I don’t know about the whole valley, but the stretch of it I know best—say from Crum Elbow Creek up past Tivoli Bays, the whole eastern shore from the river itself up into the Taghkanics—has more energy than almost any place I’ve visited on earth. I feel it as a steady, dependable upwelling, that is ready to meet you and sustain you in your work—all you have to do is have a work. I’ve lived here long enough to see great changes in the social order, the death of old-time farming and the coming of the hobby farmer, the passing of the old gentry and the gentrifications of new money, all that, and it hasn’t changed that telluric energy one bit. As they say, let yourself align with it, and get to work. Your work.

LB: You coined the term “sudden fiction” several years ago. Since that time, we’ve seen this trend has become even more prominent. Can you speak to this notion of brevity or length?

RK: Sudden fiction. In my first answer I spoke of the immateriality of size, and the immense size of effect.So sudden fiction happens quickly, and swings a very long tail. Sudden fiction meant for me something that uses the conventions of prose fiction with the mindset of poetry. Not prose poem, as the French invented it and we have done so much with. But fiction, story, turned with the rapt condensation of a poem. Sudden fiction has been there—rare moments of it—for a long time. Those abrupt and awe-struck chapters in Melville’s Billy Budd, that amazing story by Georg Heym from a hundred years ago, “The Autopsy,” the dozens of parables and “fragments” by Kafka—those are some of the jewel-like ancestors of what we try to do.

LB: At least one of the stories in The Logic of the World started as a dream. Do dreams play a significant role in your writing?

RK: As you reminded me, several actually began in dream—as some of my poems do. When I say begin in dream, I mean that in my actual sleep I hear words spoken, sometimes in my own voice, and if I’m honest enough I wake up and write them down, and go from there. I don’t usually “have a dream” and then later work it into a story. One story in The Logic of the World is a strange case:it’s not from a dream, it is the dream itself. That is, the whole text (short as it is, “The Bridge Near Zamorek”) was dreamt as such, every word, and I was able to wake up and scribble it down. I mean I didn’t see the events in the dream, I heard the words only.I didn’t visualize the events till I had written the words down. As you know, I have been promoting the publication of (actual) dreams for years now, and in your own wonderful, ground-breaking blog, the Annandale Dream Gazette online, there is a proper forum for dream per se, and what dream, as social utterance, may say to the community. Fundamental to this is the honest distinctions between sleep-dreams and day-dreams and texts-that-are-made-up dreams. Only the sleep-dream serves the community.

Robert Kelly will read from The Logic of the World at Oblong Books/Rhinebeck on Friday, July 23 at 7:30 pm. The book can be purchased at local stores or at the McPherson & Co. website.