Shame / Scham: A Collaboration

by Robert Kelly

Shame may be the most perdurably uncategorizable and daring book Robert Kelly has yet published during a career containing more than sixty sui generis volumes. It is a purloined correspondence, an investigatory improvisation, an apologia, a psychological expose, a desideratum, a profundity, and jazz. Yet, Shame is a collaboration. When Birgit Kempker -- a younger German writer living in Basel, Switzerland -- invited Kelly to create a work together, neither knew the other except by reputation. They proceeded to communicate by e-mail for two years through sixteen exchanges, and the subject was to be shame at its most personal, prosaic, intimate, and even sometimes fetching; and shame at its most generic, couched, poetic and hallucinatory. The barrier between them was not merely not knowing one another while risking the limits of naked trust, but of surmounting age, gender, nationality and language. Birgit Kempker wrote in German, and Robert Kelly in English. Shame is a love story. A story of two tongues. Shame is a book spoken between two lovers who will never be lovers, a book of the unabashed and prised apart secret intimacy that can be laid bare against all constraint by ghostly lovers -- virtual, exemplary, psychic guides to one another, and all of the rest of us.

240 pages, Hardcover

First published December 16, 2005

About the author

Kelly has published more than fifty books of poetry and prose, including Red Actions: Selected Poems 1960-1993 (1995) and a collection of short fictions, A Transparent Tree (1985). Many were published by the Black Sparrow Press. He also edited the anthology A Controversy of Poets (1965).Kelly was of great help to the Hungryalist group of poets of India during the trial of Malay Roychoudhury,with whom he had correspondence,now archived at Kolkata.

Kelly received the Los Angeles Times First Annual Book Award (1980) for Kill the Messenger Who Brings Bad News and the American Book Award, Before Columbus Foundation (1991) for In Time.

Reviews

[Dinah]

I started this book, but stopped again. A poetic meditation on shame--shame in intimate relationship, early on. A creative correspondence on topic, with prompts for each from each reply. But I didn't want to meditate there with them. While insightful things are said, I didn't feel like biding in shame. May try again.

[Pierre · Rating 5 out of 5]

An amazing collaboration between Robert kelly and Birgit Kempker – one of my favorite prose works of the last 10 years – and a gorgeous book to boot. A must.