Kelsey's Dismantling and Reinterpretation of Accumulation

In Karla Kelsey's Knowledge, Forms, the Aviary our notions of knowledge, recollection and experience find themselves liberated from "soft" entrapment, from passively accepting their accumulation. Kelsey begins her onerous journey with a quote from Plato, most importantly "will [the possessor of knowledge] describe the 'catching' of [knowledge] and the original 'possession' in the same words?" The answer is a resounding no. Kelsey's work again and again articulates the need for a "re-catching" of knowledge, that knowledge is always in flux. In addition she harkens to pre-Socratic philosophy which breaks down and complicates our conceptions of identity and existence to their core.

Furthermore she inherits Plato's metaphor of the "aviary" where "man" keeps the (once) "wild birds" of knowledge. Thus in the bird's lack of wildness alone the aviary already seems incapable of providing a meaningful idea of knowledge. Kelsey's poem "Of Under Ash And So" shows the weakness in simply holding knowledge:

Then paler blue then something approaching

white or nothing, the page, the bone gone back to the originary plan of

an aviary built with mesh siding, illusioning the possibility of flight. Soft

walls, soft keeping us here

Here she draws clearly the limitations of the aviary while showing the change and flux inherent in language. Kelsey's use of "originary" and "illusioning" show that language will always undercut the dexterity of the aviary, that words will constantly shift (they are indeed wild) and rearrange. Kelsey's poem "I Was Working the Free Radicals" moves this idea further and shows us the beauty of reinterpretation and openness:

Allowing a "her" into

the abstraction arrests it for a moment. This abstraction has been arrested

as a form of grace, light in ash-dense air gilds trees.

The abstraction, perhaps an "aviary," is not open enough to encompass ideas such as feminism. In the second stanza Kelsey gives us the beauty and joy which comes out of dismantling abstractions.

For if earth is the center of the body, heaven in the center of the

soul, with its planned moving, mutability conceded for the pattern, for

a constant assurance of species and parts. Orange-red. We are her

species. We are her parts. The abstraction loses its arrest and we wake

to the story of the flying bird, now held in her hand and slit down the

middle.

Here we are amidst the workings of knowledge, the wild bird is open to us. Thus in the interdependent "we" Kelsey often employs she works with the plurality of our existence, strings of reference and attachment, codas echoing the familiar fugue. Yet she weaves between the walls of our associations, cutting off the certainty of definition so that certain echoes never truly have the same language (Aperture 3). Kelsey challenges our assumptions in one of the most philosophical, complex, enriching and beautiful ways we have seen.