SOURCE: Kelly, Robert, and Larry McCaffery. “A Rose to Look At: An Interview with Robert Kelly.” In Some Other Frequency: Interviews with Innovative American Authors, pp. 170–95. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996.

In the following interview, Kelly discusses his interest in poetry and fiction as well as his creative process.

Say it all over again. but say it all. Write everything. 

—The Loom

The literary task Robert Kelly has set for himself—that is, to “write everything”—is, to be sure, an ambitious undertaking; but in a career that now spans some forty years Kelly certainly has a good running start—some fifty-odd books published, most of them poetry; several volumes of wide-ranging essays; an unduly neglected novel, The Scorpions (1967), which blends detective and science-fiction genre motifs with Eastern mysticism and epistemological concerns in the manner of Borges and Nabokov; and four collections of fiction that appeared in rapid...