Nikki Giovanni Letter @ Virginia Tech Special Collections

Dear Kelly and English Department,

I am an English Department Alumni (1990) and Instructor/Tutor

locally of many years. I wrote a letter to Nikki Giovanni while I was in

graduate school and after Nikki's recent passing I wanted to share it with Virginia Tech

and Newman Library. I am going to meet with Special Collections today (2/26/2025) to bring the hand written letter over (from Summer of 1995) and I wanted to touch base with you in the Department as well. Please visit my own archive @ https://projectendofdays.blogspot.com/2022/08/letter-to-nikki-giovanni-1994.html

to read the letter and see a photo of it as well.The letter will be at Virginia Tech in special collections after today.

Thank you for your time and please let me know if you have any questions. 

With best wishes always,

-T. Byron Kelly

Link to letter at VT Special Collections @

https://ead.lib.virginia.edu/vivaxtf/view?docId=oai/VT/repositories_2_resources_4430.xml

PEOD ARCHIVE GALLERY 2/14/2025

 

https://sites.google.com/view/peod-archive/virtual-gallery

The River of Swans 1995 Vandalia 2025

 

The Poetic Story Line

Diggendicht was an extension of transcendentalism for me after a time-"beauty rests content with itself" was how Goethe put it. I am still interested in the poetic story line. The art of Rilke's in-seeing as giving the object a consciousness of its own. My early poems were greatly influenced by the dialecticism of William Blake and the visionary surrealism of Jim Morrison. The later poems merge elements of the French symbolists, Emersonian Transcendentalism and the ancient oriental aesthetic of Li Ho and Wei Tai. I paint poems and found a kind of home there> My paintings have always been rather cartoon like and fantastically oriented, a rendering of a dream if you will- I always thought (about realist art) that if you wanted a photograph then why not take a snapshot with a camera?  

credits

2015

Rimbaud’s Illuminations

I remember discovering Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations around 1994 or so and thinking that those poems were the pinnacle of his artistic expression and perhaps poetry itself in terms of subject matter and beauty. I soon set out to write The River of Swans, Advent (Omega) and much later Vandalia (the continuation of the River of Swans) , which all utilized the (open and suggestive) prose poem form that Rimbaud employs so well throughout Illuminations. 

9/19/2024

The Poetic Vocation

I always thoight the poetic vocation was to be 

as Hesse said "the bearer of human longing" and 

to convey Divine mystery. I think about the "ordinary extraordinary"

as Goethe put it as well that surrounds us all of the time.

The Poet's Year @ https://tbyron.livejournal.com/496630.html

has always given great insight since 1990 or so.

Correspondence with P.S. Colley

9/9/2024

Midnight Poems 1994-95

 https://sites.google.com/view/peod-archive/first-draft-manuscripts?authuser=0