Robert Kelly writes: "Under words. I was wondering what lay beneath them, the things I said and meant and used, some of, only some of, to build poems. For years their surface had been enough, and then that history (half-fanciful, half-documented) we call etymology. But I wanted a spiritual etymology, to lead the word back – but not now to some Indo-European root, but to its root in my experience, mind in action, tree in the world. Words are narratives intact in themselves, and all the narrations and sequences here (more story-prone than before in my work) unpack the primal narrative each word tacitly persists in laying before me. This book’s title is indebted to Starobinski’s account of Saussure’s long subtle studies of anagrams in Lucretius and Virgil, Les Mots sous Let Mots. And to the excited turn in my life when I chose, for reasons only my poems talk about, to enter, 1980 and thereafter, my personal underworld, and report the word I heard there."
- ISBN10 087685594X
- ISBN13 9780876855942
- Publish Date 5 August 2010
- Publish Status Unknown
- Out of Print 5 February 2021
- Publish Country GB
- Publisher David R. Godine Publisher Inc
- Imprint Black Sparrow Press,U.S.
- Format Paperback (US Trade)
- Pages 162
- Language English