A FABLE - MY POETRY BOOKSHELF

The poet Robert Kelly tells a story of a woman who, despite nagging sisters and clucking hen country folks of the town found love – actually, found Eros – and actually her name was Psyche. An excerpt from near the end. 

…Eros said
“we have lived here too long
even the rocks
are the town’s
rocks & the trees
drink poison
from the shadows
of the the townfolk
on their roots
we must build
a labyrinth
to hide the monster
of our perfected
love’

so they went out
of the cave
& built the first
city
in the world
& called it this
& said it was
the end
of the family
& Love said
‘here we can live, here
the city can
nourish men
& free them from
all the things but
themselves

together here
we can through
all complexity
one day
find ourselves
again’

& Love
hid themselves
in his city.

Excerpt p.161, The East Side Scene, American Poetry, 1960-1965, A Doubleday Anchor Book, 1972

The East Side Scene was a dear book of poetry typical of anthologies we shared about in the day. Included Kupfenberg, Corso, Sanders, many more. Like many of my honeyest pets – has soot of a fire on its spine. Typical too of the charmed objects that led me to go live on the East Side for a time, and I may have picked it up there, say at 8th Street Bookstore where I'd like to imagine Romanian exile Andrei Codresqu was working the counter. As Kelly described the City above, I saw in fits in NYC.

Some about Robert Kelly - All stuff I did not know - Kelly, on his influences: ″I want to say the names of the great teachers from whom I learned what I could, and still am learning. Coleridge. Baudelaire. Pound. Apollinaire. Virgil. Aeschylus. Dante. Chaucer. Shakespeare. Dryden. Lorca. Rilke. Hölderlin. Stevens. Stein. Duncan. Olson. Williams. Blackburn. I mention only the dead, the dead are always different, and always changing. I mention them more or less in the order of when they came along in my life to teach me.″

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Kelly_(poet)

Robert Kelly Robert Kelly (born September 24, 1935) was an American poet associated with the deep image group.Deep image is a term coined by U.S. poets Jerome Rothenberg and Robert Kelly in the second issue of the magazine Trobar in 1961.They used the term to describe poetry written by Diane Wakoski, Clayton Eshleman, and themselves. In creating the term, Rothenberg was inspired by the Spanish cante jondo ("deep song"), especially the work of Federico García Lorca and by the symbolist theory of correspondences. In general, deep image poems are resonant, stylized and heroic in tone. Longer poems tend to be catalogues of free-standing images. The deep image group was short-lived in the manner that Kelly and Rothenberg defined.