The Loom by Robert Kelly

First published: 1975

Type of poem: Poetic sequence

The Poem

The Loom is a long poem of more than four hundred pages by one of America’s most prolific and versatile poets. It takes up a thorny issue of contemporary poetry, the divided self, which is presented in many forms as the speaker ventures over the earth in search of a way to dissolve his own internal oppositions to become whole and imaginative in a new life. Robert Kelly’s voluminous output as a writer is characterized by a lush and vivid imagination and a supple writing style that is clear, crisp, flexible in its command of a wide variety of experiences and topics, ranging from love stories to allegories, fables, romantic adventures, comic absurdity, myth, and occult lore. Hardly anyone compares with him for breadth of interest or facility with language or volubility. His canon comprises over fifty volumes of fiction and poetry, and his output even includes a series of short-story collections that have commanded high praise from critics.

The Loom is an early work that establishes some of the major themes of his subsequent poetry, in particular the complex relation between the sexes, which represents for Kelly not only the dynamics of love, but the terms of conflict between soul and self, ego and world. The Loom is an exploration of the identity of man and woman, self and soul, as these terms undergo a transformation through a loosely jointed quest narrative.

The poem, divided into thirty-six segments of narrative and commentary, is written in a fluid discourse of short lines, on a border between dramatic monologue and private revery. One is never quite sure where one mode of delivery ends and the other begins. The language is sinuous and moves effortlessly between direct address and dreamy introspection as one is drawn into the life of an intelligent, humorously candid man who shares his efforts to satisfy his sexual and emotional cravings.

The loom of the title is the imagination itself, which weaves into the design of its story the various myths by which a man slowly transforms himself from embattled opposites to serene lover of several women, each of whom represents an aspect of soul, his own and the world’s. Though the quest has a long history in poetry, Kelly’s version of it is modern and original. He begins the narrative by seating himself before a table, as medieval bards would do before reciting a long heroic epic. The reader learns immediately that there are “two rhythms” to harmonize, two realms of awareness to bring into phase, which Kelly identifies as “City & Language,” “place & talk,” or world and self. The table is parsed into its psychological root as tabula, the blank slate of mind on which experience makes its marks. It is also the table of seances, where spirits are summoned and made to talk across the border of death and sleep. Finally, the table is an altar where one partakes of communion with a holy spirit, and shares the ritual with others, his readers.

Kelly appropriates many of the conventions of epic narrative, including invocations to the muse and a ritual descent into the underworld of memory, from which heroes have traditionally set forth on their mythic voyages. Having deployed this classic machinery for his own narrative, one learns the essential purpose of the tale (the argument), that the sexes have been falsely polarized and separated from one another, and that wholeness resides in transposing sexual differences back into one human sensibility. Only then can “we move/ naked at last/ beyond the garments/ male & female one/ & none.”

Each of the thirty-six sections of The Loom features a woman as the object of the quest. Her presence in the poem is a focal point of each tale or meditation; she figures as the lover, as goddess, muse, or as a dimension of the narrator’s own self which he cannot bring into phase with the rest of his awareness. Woman here is both real and figurative, an actual woman, such as the wife he addresses as Helen, and the echo of mythic females whose historic or psychological significance reverberates behind the name of Helen. Sometimes, as in the case of Isabella, who appears twice in the sequence, in sections 3 and 16, she is like an Ariadne figure who helps Theseus, her lover, find his way out of the labyrinth at Minos. Lady Isabella is also a guide of sorts, a counselor to the ironic narrator as he plunges into the early stages of his journey toward rebirth.

The journey starts the moment the narrator is seated at his table and settled into his memory trance. Readers find him on the deck of an ocean liner, speaking to Lady Isabella, who is traveling with her father back to the island of Mallorca from Naples. Lady Isabella’s father is founder of the Cabeza Foundation, an institute that studies the relation between the mind and the brain (cabeza is Spanish for head.) Readers see her through the ironic perspective of the narrator, who makes everything she says seem absurd, especially when she informs him that the motto of the institute is “To free the mind/ from the circuitry/ of the brain.”

The Mediterranean, where the ship sails, is the locus of ancient mythology, and Homer’s Odyssey (c. 800 b.c.e.) is the principal narrative from which Western journey and quest literature springs. The ocean liner fades into another, smaller, ship where the narrator meets Odysseus, who prefers his Roman name, Ulysses, and who introduces him to a new lover, Korinna. The narrator’s brief relation with Korinna parallels the episode in the Odyssey where Odysseus falls in love with Calypso and lives with her on an island for ten years. Korinna is “much earlier than Odysseus,” she tells the narrator, and she confides that she is one of the “blonde witches” of the Dordogne, the cave region of western France. “I had an odd feeling/ I wanted to worship her,” he says, as he perceives in her the powers of a goddess. She, too, is a counselor and repeats the message of Lady Isabella that the “mind belongs to itself,” and not merely to the logic of one’s senses, the world of the brain.

Other episodes take a reader to California, to the mountains where he meets a young woman whose loyalty to an older man, a kind of Sisyphus who spends his life trying to climb a mountain, prevents her from becoming the narrator’s lover. Her restraint is also a lesson in reserve, the soul’s continence. The most striking of these early adventures occurs in section 11, where a hired hand on a ranch leads the cattle out into a field, slaughters a bullock, and throws a spell over the bewildered rancher and his family. The narrator behaves with godlike austerity as he makes his sacrifice. Already he is partly transformed into a mythological figure, a Dionysus.

Section 16 returns to the ship carrying Lady Isabella to Mallorca, where the narrator is her aggressive lover. At the point of seduction, however, they quarrel and he swims back to Los Angeles and returns home. In section 21, he is the “lame God,” the figure of Pan or Eros, whose realm is a fertile garden, the pagan world of love and innocence. In other episodes, he meets Isis, the Egyptian goddess and sister/lover of Osiris whom she has restored to life. The narrator has traveled through his cultural memory to relive the experience of many heroes, and has undergone harrowing ordeals, such as his kidnapping and torture recorded in section 23, where he is buried and figuratively reborn. Finally, he returns home as Adam, first man, the link between the “creature world” of apes and the human world of anxiety and death. His skull looks back at him as the reminder of his mortality, but his mind has leaped free, as Lady Isabella said it should. The rains pour down into the desert as the sign of his renewal.

Forms and Devices

Although it is a complex work involving many references and allusions, the technical devices in The Loom are relatively simple. To allow for a quick flow of discourse in the poem, the lines are kept short and are enjambed in a loose, conversational rhythm of varying meters. Stanzas are irregular and can run for several pages. There is no set length of line but, on average, the lines do not exceed eight or nine syllables and are rarely fewer than two or three syllables. Sometimes a paragraph of prose will intervene. Kelly occasionally indents a line to mark a shift in tone or to separate units of thought or action in a stanza. These indentations vary and, perhaps, suggest the length of certain pauses in the flow of narrative. Otherwise, the poem is a graceful discourse, textured by occasional passages of verse from Greek, Spanish, and Provençal poetry and by the sheer exuberance of figures and place-names sprinkled throughout.

The discourse itself is a playful mixture of literal reminiscence, humorous commentary, hyperbole, and allegorical episodes. Literal and figurative events merge subtly in the language as the story unfolds; the characters are drawn realistically only to be elevated in the next phrase to their allegorical identities as gods, psychological functions, or as elements of human sensibility. Often the same figures are demoted back to their literal selves once more, as with Lady Isabella, Helen, and the protagonist himself.

The role of metaphor and symbol in the text is like the Double Axe of section 4, which has “Two blades, separate, wielded by one haft.” They signal the double lives of events and objects in the narrator’s memories, and thus bridge the separate worlds of fact and ideas, sense and imagination. Metaphors abound in the discourse as the vehicle of ambiguous reality, the double nature of things as phenomena in the sphere of mortality and death, and as ideas that live forever in the mind. Hence, gardens, flowers, women, adventures are all metaphorical in their capacity to mirror both sides of human existence.