Kelly

At a used bookstore in Moab, Utah, last summer I got a 1st edition of Robert Kelly's work, The Cities.  It seemed like something I should have, a short prose fiction of 65 pages without much of a plot. Kelly is not my favorite poet, but I was somehow moved to get it. It was published in 71, and has some kinship with Calvino's Invisible Cities, published a year later as it would happen. It doesn't have the Oulipean structure of Calvino's book, but both consist of fanciful descriptions of imaginary cities mostly in an imaginary Asia. The resemblance is striking, and of course I am not the first to notice it, as a quick google search reveals. Neither book was inspired by the other, though Borges might lurk behind both.

I am often more interested in the "poets' novels" than in novelists' novels. Calvino's, of course, is much better known. Kelly's overdoes the whimsy a bit, but it stands up well to its Italian counterpart, and I like the two books for similar reasons.