Kill the Messenger

Author: Robert Kelly 

Publisher: Black Sparrow Press (1979)

Robert Kelly was born in Brooklyn on September 24, 1935. He attended CUNY and Columbia University, and since 1961 has taught at Bard College. He has authored more than 60 published volumes of fiction, poetry, and prose-poems. His 1967 debut novel The Scorpions first brought him a cult readership. In 1980 his book Kill The Messenger won the Los Angeles Times Book Award for poetry; and in 1985, A Transparent Tree received the prestigious Academy-Institute Award from the American Institute of Arts and Letters. When speaking about his influences, Kelly said “I want to say the names of the great teachers from whom I learned what I could, and still am learning. Coleridge. Baudelaire. Pound. Apollinaire. Virgil. Aeschylus. Dante. Chaucer. Shakespeare. Dryden. Lorca. Rilke. Hölderlin. Stevens. Stein. Duncan. Olson. Williams. Blackburn. I mention only the dead; the dead are always different, and always changing. I mention them more or less in the order of when they came along in my life to teach me.”