Breaking Boundaries in the Aviary

The introduction to Karla Kelsey's KNOWLEDGE, FORMS, THE AVIARY provides a great outline for how to read Kelsey's poetry. "A flock of knowledges beating wings against (only) apparent confines, as the mind beholds and captures knowledges in turn, various in form, able to be fleetingly caged but not possessed." This quote evokes to me an image of a caged bird longing to be set free to grace the world. Knowledge is symbolized by birds throughout the book. A great example of this comes from "Aperture Three" on page 24: "I must ask you why/this should be spoken in terms/of possession: the I go or I went of the face/the call of a bird, of grace". One of the key messages I picked up on in the book was that of breaking boundaries. Images like the sky and the ocean juxtaposed with some form of restraints served the purpose of illustrating the quote from the intro above. One example of this is in "Aperture Three" on page 22-23, "Described/as the ocean wailing and I felt/like crystal/and iron/in the air." While the ocean and sky are seemingly infinite things, they are broken up in this quote by iron, and are crystalized. This quote is followed by the bird quote above, and these quotes together serve to symbolize the "caged but not possessed" nature of knowledge. The word "Aperture" itself refers to an opening in which light travels through, focusing the rays. A beam of light extends infinitely, and "light" also calls to mind "enlightenment". Another telling quote for me was the following: "along the edges/of the window, river, winnow quiver/embedded in/the book of knowledge/yet gone along the siding."

Going back to the bird reference, Kelsey refers to birds again and again in the Containment and Fracture section of her book. The bird reference takes us, the readers, to various places including virally-infected lungs (bird-flu?), an endless sunset, with many other sky references. I really liked this section because of the consistency the bird reference gave me.

This theme that I've just mentioned is further supported by the fact that Kelsey uses many intellectual references. Plato and Socrates are mentioned in the introduction, and there are scientific references sprinkled throughout, such as the splitting of atoms and elements and minerals, and I also wondered where the italic lines were coming from.

The final important thing to talk about was Kelsey's formatting. Forche says in the introduction, "The genius of this work is in its formal embodiment of epistemology: the layerings and repetitions, asterisks and spacings, and the ways in which the language of the senses remains in such flux that no recurring image returns as it was." Aperture One is all in stanzas, broken up by asterisks down the middle. Aperture Two is cool in that the formatting almost becomes an illustration. It starts the same as Ap. One, but goes on to have the words swirl across the page, then moving to the direct center of the page. The Containment and Fracture section is in prose, and Impression, Flux, Contiguity utilizes the stanza, however this time absent of asterisks. I think that the illustrative stanzas in Aperture Two kind of create a flow in how the reader reads the poem. The words that swirl across the page are read more flowingly, while the lines that go straight down the page much more choppy, with much less flow from line to line. The sections like this reminded me of a cerebral brainstorm, moving from image to image. The change-up of styles also certainly kept me interested.

While there was certainly a lot of things going on in this book, the prominent theme for me was the symbolizing knowledge and its