Kerry Shawn Keys

Roots and early life

Keys was born 25 June 1946 in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, USA. Harrisburg is on the banks of the Susquehanna River near the Appalachian mountain range. His father, Elmer Richard Keys, worked as a plumber and sold kitchens. Elmer Keys was of mixed Swiss-German and Irish descent, and had been orphaned at an early age when Elmer's mother, Mabel Keys (née Hoffer), died of pneumonia and poverty shortly after his father a chauffeur, Stephen “Whip” Keys, shot in broad daylight in downtown Harrisburg his wealthy mistress and then committed suicide. This event marked his father. The poet's mother, Helen Louise Keys (née Kirk), of mixed English, Scottish and Irish ancestry, was a housewife and clerk typist. Both parents were active in sports, and his mother and older brother played the saxophone, and so athletics (in 1964 the poet was chosen as athlete-of-the-year in the Central Pennsylvania public schools) and music were very much a part of the household. The poet accredits his courting of the Muse of Poetry to his skill at stalking deer and to an inborn body-rhythm, and rhythms inculcated through music, dance, athletics, and silence. Both his parents shared a love for poetry as did Keys' maternal grandmother, but they were not schooled in it. The young poet from a very early age spent a good deal of time fishing and hunting with his father, and tramping the mountains around their family hunting cabin near Pine Grove Furnace and Fuller Lake. Keys often mentions the Blue Mountains and these outdoor activities as the true birthplace of his poetry.

Keys attended inner city, public schools. They were racially mixed – white and what was referred to as "colored" at that time. Soul music, bluesy rock, "hillbilly" tunes, and especially jazz all combined to influence the rhythms and oral thrust that permeate much of Keys’ poetry. Another major influence from this period was the cadenced, visceral Sunday sermons of Christ Lutheran's spellbinding minister, Pastor Rudisill.

Profession

In 1964, Keys went to Philadelphia to attend the University of Pennsylvania on several scholarships given partly as a result of a new "quota" system the Ivy League institution was using to recruit "Colored folk" and the economically disadvantaged. Keys took a leave-of-absence after his sophomore year (1968), and joined the Peace Corps for a 2-year stint as an agricultural assistant in the south of India in a town the town of Devarakonda near Hyderabad. Here, for the first time, he had the leisure of reading dozens of books of quality literature, and after reading García Lorca, Valéry's essays, and Tagore made the definitive decision to be a poet. He also delved deeply into Hindu religion and philosophy. And at this time the seeds were planted for his monumental, polyphonic epic poem, A Gathering Of Smoke, first published by P. Lal in Calcutta, and later by Three Continents Press in Washington, D.C. in 1986. Returning to Penn in 1968, he majored in English literature and took his B.A. in 1970. During those final two years, Keys was much influenced by an omnivorous reading of English-language poets from the canon, but particularly by Shakespeare, Donne, Keats, Dylan Thomas, Yeats, Wallace Stevens, and especially Pound's Cantos. Other major influences at this formative time were Joyce, Jung, Pablo Neruda, Whitehead, Nagarjuna, Thoreau, Chuang-Tzu, and Bachelard and Husserl. After graduation, the poet lived in Center City, Philadelphia for two years, and started to read many of the poets of the 50's and 60's, most of which he came across via the groundbreaking anthology of the time, Naked Poetry, and through Robert Bly's literary journal, The Fifties and The Sixties. Of considerable importance were Gary Snyder and W. S. Merwin and early Robert Lowell, Ted Hughes, and Antonio Machado. During this time, Willis Barnstone's Modern European Poetry Anthology became an inexhaustible reference for further reading, and spurred Keys on to enroll in graduate school at Indiana University at Bloomington, where Barnstone taught. Shortly before matriculating, Keys married Ann Fletcher James, a Temple student from the Harrowgate / Fishtown area of Philadelphia. While at Bloomington, Keys became close friends with the poet, Robert Bringhurst, who became a kind of literary sidekick and example of complete dedication to the Muse of Poetry. Bringhurst was, perhaps, the only contemporary to exert an influence on Keys’ poetics other than the poet, Michael Jennings. Keys earned his M.A. in English Literature in 1973.

In 1973, Keys returned to Pennsylvania to live in the family's hunting cabin, determined to live simply, write poetry and do little else. Bringhurst joined him briefly, right after inaugurating Kanchenjunga Press with his own first book of poems, The Shipwright's Log (1972). The next book published was Keys’ Swallowtails Gather These Stones (1973). That was soon followed by Keys’ second book of poems, Jade Water (1974), designed and published by Bringhurst. Failing to attract the attention of the major publishing houses, Keyes resorted to publishing his own material. From the early 70s to the mid-80s, Keys and Bringhurst maintained an extensive correspondence now housed in Keys’ archives at Dickinson College in Carlisle, and at the National Library of Canada in Ottawa. It was Keys who first brought Bringhurst to Gary Snyder's attention, and Bringhurst wrote a foreword to Gary Snyder's recently reissued study of a Haida myth, He Who Hunted Birds in His Father's Village (2007). Robert Bly also visited the poet at this time and encouraged Keys to move to Brazil, a move that Keys and his wife were already planning. From 1974 to 1978, he lived in Rio de Janeiro, teaching, translating, and writing poetry. He often frequented the Vila Isabel Samba School (club), and was an affiliate. . While in Rio, Keys became friends with Carangola and Lêdo Ivo and soon began translating Ivo and João Cabral de Melo Neto, resulting in their publication by New Directions, and some years later a Selected Poems of Lêdo Ivo's, Landsend (1998) in Keys’ own Pine Press. Keys also organized and edited a groundbreaking, bilingual anthology of contemporary North American poetry, Quingumbo, published in São Paulo.

In 1977, Keys and his wife returned to Pennsylvania and built a post-and-beam cabin, Oak-Omolú, in the hills of Perry County, where Keys lived for nearly two decades, except for two more years in Brazil (Salvador), a year of which (1983–84) the poet did research on African-Brazilian liturgy on a Senior Fulbright grant. At the behest of the Brazilian novelist, Jorge Amado, Keys resided in the neighborhood of Rio Vermelho. During that time, the poet divorced and was remarried to the Bahian Valdenice dos Reis Almeida “Ziza”. Many collections of poetry saw the light during this period, with considerable thematic content: India; Brazil; the Tao Te Ching; flamenco; Central America; and of course the beloved Pennsylvania hill country. In these poems, Keys continues his phenomenological and lyrical exploration of Dasein in regard to etymology, rapture, and metaphor. Though like Auden and many other prolific poets, Keys does not hesitate to write songs; light verse; limericks; pithy satiric squibs; erotica; ideograms; haiku; epigrams, parodies, and enigmatic epiphanies and riddles. His prose wonderscripts and plays are dense, and often dark and absurd. His children's books verge on fables.

Of considerable importance from the early 70s to the mid-90s was Keys’ relationship with the artist and flamenco guitarist, Frank Rush Miller (Paco de Nada). They were close colleagues and friends, lived together for a while, and on occasion performed in tandem in Pennsylvania, Spain, Central America, and Brazil. Another important link has been with his friend, the poet Gerald Stern, which began in the mid-70s. Stern, the consummate, pastoral urbanite, came to live in rural Perry County at Keys’ invitation, and wrote many poems evoking the landscape, such as the much anthologized poem, Nice Mountain which visits the "great open space" that Keys homesteaded. Other poets during this time who became close, influential friends, were J. C. Todd (Jane Todd Cooper) and Craig Czury. Keys also gained a reputation as an outstanding reader of poetry, performing for academic and café-bar scene audiences. He was the American Poet-in-Residence at the Iowa International Writing Program for two semesters, and also semesters, and also worked then (and now) as a cultural and language facilitator for international visitors from abroad. Keys again divorced in the mid-80's and then lived for some half-dozen years with the singer-songwriter, mythic mountain woman, and textile artist, Janet Pellam who with the poet "invented" a method of binding Pine Press books using a Singer sewing machine. In 1992, he received the Robert H Winner Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. During the 70s and 80s, Keys occasionally taught English literature, grammar, and composition, and poetry at Penn State University, Harrisburg Area Community College (where he co-founded and co-directed the Wildwood Poetry Festival), and Dickinson College. His papers are archived at Dickinson College, Carlisle, where he was an honorary Associate Fellow for 12 years.

With no health insurance and a severe injury to his leg and back while felling trees, Keys began toying with idea of a move to Europe, and visited Croatia and what was then Czechoslovakia, and soon was spending considerable time in Olomouc with the Czech poet Petr Mikeš. It was from there in 1996 that he journeyed to Wrocław to visit the Polish poet, Urszula Kozioł, and then on to visit Leszek Engelking, a poet and Pound's and Nabokov's Polish translator, living near Warsaw, where he met and established a close relationship with the Mexican ex-pat poet, Gerardo Beltrán (Zorro) and with the Lithuanian poet, Kornelijus Platelis (Zapata). They later became known as the Three Z's, Keys having already been dubbed with the sobriquet, Zopi, in Tela by the Garifuna community. When the poet moved to Vilnius in 1998 to teach translation theory and creative composition for two years as Fulbright professor at Vilnius University and Vilnius Pedagogical University, he took with him Pine Press and soon began producing these "Singer" sewn books with the budding Lithuanian Press, Vario Burnos, under the direction of the book-designer and architect of words, Tomas Butkus. These eccentric, cheaply available editions of poetry had considerable impact on the local scene. Books by Tomaž Šalamun, Charles Bukowski, Vytautas Blože, João Cabral de Melo Neto, Michael Jennings, Brian Young, Bill Shields, J. C. Todd, Craig Czury, Hailji, and others infiltrated the Lithuanian younger generation, as did poetry readings at Keys’ Hermescort Saloon-Salon. The poet was married for a brief time to the Lithuanian Presidential archival photographer, Džoja Barysaite. From 1998 to the present, Keys has lived for the most part in Vilnius, publishing, editing, translating from Lithuanian and Portuguese, and writing poetry, plays, children's books, and wonderscripts. Two significant books of Keys’ poetry (one a bilingual Selected, Vultures’ Country, and the other, Tao te ching Meditations, Bones & Buzzards) were published in the Czech Republic, both mid-wifed by the Czech poet, Petr Mikeš, and two books in Lithuanian with commentary by Kornelijus Platelis and Sigitas Geda, both eminent poets of their respective generations. And Keys’ chapbook and book translations of Lithuanian poets include works by Eugenijus Ališanka; Sonata Paliulytė; Jonas Jackevičius; Sigitas Geda; Laurynas Katkus; and others. Keys has also helped to usher into Lithuania bilingual editions a Selected Poems, The Banks of Noon, by Emily Dickinson (translated by Sonata Paliulytė) and a Selected Poems of Menke Katz’ English-language poems, collaborating with Menke's son, the Yiddish scholar Dovid Katz who is at times based in Vilna (Vilnius). He has at the same time published books in America: one with the Virtual Artists Collective; and three with Presa S Press, the most recent, Transporting, a cloak of rhapsodies, 2010, with cover artwork by the Paris-based Brazilian painter, Gonçalo Ivo, whose artwork is also found on Pine Press books from the 90s, and a book of poems, Night Flight, 2012. Since the mid-90s, Keys’ poems and translations have been published extensively in European journals and in the USA. By deconstructing his own poems, he has performed throughout Europe and Russia with the Russian/Lithuanian free-jazz percussionist and constellation artist, Vladimir Tarasov. They released a CD with Prior Records in 2006. Recently he performed as Biblical Chronicler and Speaker in Tarasov's and Frido Mann's multimedia project, The Flood, and has also ventured into voicing an interactive audio-e book for children, Strawberry Day, by Kestutis Kasparavičius. He has received translation and book-art laureates in Lithuania, and is a member of the Lithuanian Writers Union and PEN, and has been Writer in Residence for SLS Lithuania since 2009. Keys is also the World Ambassador to Poetry from the Republic of Užupis, and writes the “Dispatch” literary column from the Republic for Poetry International, SD. He resides in Vilnius with the Lithuanian poet, translator, and former actress, Sonata Paliulytė, and their two children.

Notable awards