Robert van Vliet

@letterspace.org

554 Followers 284 Following

Poet. St Paul MN. inventions (above/ground 2026) Vessels (Unsolicited 2024) This Folded Path (above/ground 2023) Blog: www.letterspace.org Homepage: www.robertvanvliet.com he/him

This work is by Barbara Kruger: Untitled, 1991. Text stylized like the stars and stripes of the American flag. In the blue field, these words in white: LOOK FOR THE MOMENT WHEN PRIDE BECOMES CONTEMPT. In the red field, these word in white: WHO IS FREE TO CHOOSE? WHO IS BEYOND THE LAW? WHO IS HEALED? WHO IS HOUSED? WHO SPEAKS? WHO IS SILENCED? WHO SALUTES LONGEST? WHO PRAYS LOUDEST? WHO DIES FIRST? WHO LAUGHS LAST?
The cover of XTC's Drums & Wires.
Close-up of a blank day — today! — in a paper calendar.
An image of the book "Journeys of the Mind," a memoir by Peter Brown, a historian of Late Antiquity. The joke here (if I may be forgiven for explaining a joke) is that in "The Ballad of John and Yoko," there's a line that quotes the Beatles' manager, Peter Brown. They are obviously not the same Peter Brown. But the song frequently gets stuck in my head whenever I'm reading this book (or other works by the same author). Also, there is a cover photo of Brown in his tweed jacket, pencil in hand, looking very much like Bilbo writing the Red Book of Westmarch.
Cover image of SONNY ROLLINS VOLUME ONE. Blue and yellow. Rollins behind his sax, looking whimsical and inscoucient, hand to his forehead.
An opened cardboard box showing stacks of poetry chapbooks.
A copy of THE PUBLIC SCHOLAR by DAVID M. PERRY (in all-caps to match the cover), seen here with what I hope is an interesting background. (No pets, sorry: allergies.)
A small stage with a brick façade, a stool, and a mic stand like it's a comedy open mic. Lots of small tables that will soon be filled with listeners.
Top to bottom: Burgi Zenhaeusern: White Door Wislawa Szymborska: MAP Harryette Mullen: Regaining Unconsciousness Terrance Hayes: American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin Jane Zwart: Oddest & Oldest & Saddest & Best Donna Vorreyer: Unrivered Michael Bazzett: Cloudwatcher Bernadette Mayer: The Golden Book of Words Harry Mathews: Collected Poems 1946-2016 Ron Padgett: Very Collected Poems
the army took the hilltop but only because of its beauty
The Uncollected Louis Zukofsky, edited by Jeffrey Twitchell-Waas & Mark Scroggins.
how easy to think of one's failings disaster is often a matter of vocabulary shock grown ordinary approachable a fetish on the table beside the salt
peace can survive / anything even / paper
My increasingly tattered author copy, with tabs and bookmarks, and a sheaf of paper stuck between the pages.
A weird little doodle, which could be a figure crouching, contemplating a small orb in its hand, or could be a jaunty smiling creature with a swooping coiffe as an airborne serpent disguised as the letter M stoops down upon it.
Kyla Houbolt's "Becoming Altar: New and Selected Poems" atop the enormous three volume translation of the Hebrew Bible by Robert Alter. Altar, Alter. Get it? If only I still had my old copy of the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure, "Third Planet from Altair." Hat trick!
A weird little black and white doodle that vaguely resembles an upper case A tipping over, with a very long cross line and a small lower case n attached to its side. A dot hovers to its right. Around it, one faint square of graph paper frames but doesn't quite contain the doodle.
An extreme close-up of a strange little doodle: a circle bisected by a line, with two dots, one inside the circle, one outside. Several other doodles are almost visisble around the edges of the screenshot.
Several American flags on the busy street lined with people. A man with a t-shirt that reads, "YOU WILL HAVE TO GO THROUGH ME," and a woman with a shirt that reads, "The horrors persist, and so do I."
A copy of Henry Gould's newest book, Parmenides in Minneapolis, published by Contubernales Press.
chocolate oatmeal digestive biscuits
My copy of Vessels with post-it flags sticking out.
Cover image of Art Pepper’s 1977 album, No Limit. It shows three rows of tall, narrow figures, drawn in simple lines and in many different watercolors, all playing the sax in a number of empassioned positions, leaning forward and backward. The artist and album name appear at the top, along with the names of the three other musicians: George Cables, Tony Dumas, and Carl Bennett.
A graphic including images of your humble author and the book cover, with a number of salient details, including the date and time of the event, which was 1pm on March 15th. The event is over now, but the video is now available on Youtube.
A graphic including images of your humble author and the book cover, with a number of salient details, including the date and time of the event, which is 1pm on March 15th — THIS SATURDAY!
A copy of Henry Gould’s newest chapbook, “One Grain of Salt.”
A graphic including images of your humble author, the book cover, and host Claire Wahmanholm, with a number of salient details, including the date and time of the event, which is TOMORROW at Next Chapter Booksellers, starting at 6pm.
Groovy graphic for my book launch at Next Chapter Booksellers in St Paul MN. There are little photos of your humble author and of host Claire Wahmanholm, as well as an image of the book cover. The important text reads: Book Launch & Reading Tuesday Feb 25th, 2025 at 6pm.
Groovy graphic for my book launch at Next Chapter Booksellers in St Paul MN. There are little photos of your humble author and of host Claire Wahmanholm, as well as an image of the book cover. The important text reads: Book Launch & Reading Tuesday Feb 25th, 2025 at 6pm.
Groovy graphic for my book launch at Next Chapter Booksellers in St Paul MN. Thre are little photos of your humble author and of host Claire Wahmanholm, as well as an image of the book cover. The important text reads: Book Launch & Reading Tuesday Feb 25th, 2025 at 6pm.
My copy of Vessels with post-it flags sticking out
A graphic showing the three poets (myself included) and a goofy cartoon oastrich squawking the word "NAWP!" The text reads: "A NAWP Reading - Frances Klein - Robert van Vliet - Wendy Wisner - Hosted by Mitch Nobis - Tuesday, January 21st, 7-8pm EST."
Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek: The old Kabbalistic phrase is “the Mystery of the Splintering of the Vessels.” The words refer to the shrinking or imprisonment of essences within the various husk-covered forms of emanation or time. The Vessels splintered and solar systems spun; ciliated rotifers whirled in still water, and newts with gills laid tracks in the silt-bottomed creek. Not only did the Vessels splinter: they splintered exceeding fine. Intricacy, then, is the subject, the intricacy of the created world.
Your Humble Author signing a copy of Vessels, the bookstore in the background
Images of poet Anne Leigh Parrish and Your Humble Author, accompanied by the text: Poetry Unvelied: A Winter Evening with Anne Leigh Parrish and Robert van Vliet
Cover image for Ava Mendoza's album The Circular Train, showing a slightly blurry Mendoza on stage with an orange and red Fender Jazzmaster guitar
a copy of the book with post-it flags sticking out
A late addition to the great tradition of wisdom texts, Robert van Vliet’s Vessels attends to what it means to be alive in the anthropocene, an era of climate destruction and dislocation from the natural world. ¶ “That is / the puzzle for / every generation,” he poses, “to / fix what has / been fixed.” The poet’s gentle, prophetic voice ekes out an intrepid authority, half-whispered into the ear as “water whispers to / the seed as it lies / on its belly,” and the poems function as both meditations and instructions for use. “Speak / carefully,” he instructs in one of the book’s many near-adages, “or the / listening fish will mistake / your confusion for their order.” ¶ Guided by gnostic and transcendentalist thought and built on found materials and chance operations, these poems walk a wooded path, where there is refuge, dissonance, ash, strange magic, and where below the observable world is the “unforeseen” territory of the spirit. —Jane Huffman
Written—composed—assembled—or made, through processes both of aleatory and of careful composition, over the course of a moment of profound historical, social, and existential angst, the poems of Robert van Vliet’s Vessels are marvelous, echoing, delicate crystals of profound stillness. ¶ They resonate with wisdom—the vivid metaphors of the I Ching, Thoreau’s quotidian observations, ancient Gnosis. But these vessels of stillness shiver with the promise of both revelation and obliteration, leaving the reader moved and disquieted by van Vliet’s subtle lyric art. —Mark Scroggins
Robert van Vliet’s poems are, paradoxically, both quiet and powerful. With an understated idiom, they express remorse, unease, and struggle—while delivering, at the end, a sense of enigmatic wonder and peace. ¶ It is a balance of contraries. The poems are forthright, simple and clear : yet beneath their unobtrusive surface resides a well of glowing, flashing images; an urge toward existential reckoning. ¶ Simone Weil wrote : “Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer. If we turn our mind toward the good, it is impossible that little by little the whole soul will not be attracted thereto in spite of itself.” The challenging, obdurate, questing voice at the heart of Vessels is unmistakably authentic. It unfolds a basic sense of rightness—which offers, to the reader, a profound encounter with reality. —Henry Gould
“The sky remembers / what the tongue / can no longer pronounce” because the world, as well, is a vessel. Its containment may not be discernible because the world is vast. But world——like its word itself——holds all within its embrace. Such poses necessary implications, like “the hope of forgiveness” or like how one “work[s] on what / has been spoiled, not / dwelling too much on // who spoiled it and / why.” ¶ All creatures, such as humans, are also vessels but because we’re all within the same world, when we hear others as “the red / clay cracking in the empty lake. /…we must / help each other.” To live in a shared vessel also means the relevance of courage: “the tree is more than its reach.” ¶ Robert van Vliet’s Vessels is not only moving and engaging poetry; its words also have crafted a worthwhile lesson that can be summed up by the book’s beautiful raison d’etre: “Every straight line / is perfectly round.” —Eileen R. Tabios
The poems in Robert van Vliet's debut collection murmur with quiet affirmations of being-in-the-world; the sounds the earth makes when no one is listening but which, nevertheless, pulse with fragile urgency. Vessels performs a book-length meditation on evanescence and the deep pleasures of the immediate. The reader who surrenders to these richly enigmatic poems will find themselves floating inside the aviaries of Logos, ready to embrace the gifts of spirit. —Patrick Pritchett ¶ Language is both the landscape of meaning in which we live and a tool for exploring, shaping, and reshaping that landscape. Rooted in operations that make use of both those truths, the poems in Robert van Vliet's Vessels illuminate with a laser-sharp clarity the path one consciousness has taken in order to build, moment of perception by moment of perception, a meaning for his life. It's a path well worth walking with him. You will learn important lessons about what it takes and what it feels like to make that journey for yourself. —Richard Jeffrey Newman ¶ Vessels is a spiritual text, a canticle, but not necessarily a denominational one. A catechism in the sense it is an exposition of belief, where the mysteries of nature & relationships are the divinities. It is a communion with oneself, with others, with the great beyond. It is a thoughtful & thought-provoking compendium of answers to those questions we needed someone more astute than ourselves to ask. —Mark Young
In Vessels, Robert van Vliet works as a medium, reminding us that foundational texts—in this case the I Ching, Thoreau’s writings, and the Nag Hammadi library—can constitute us as much as the news cycle. Here, past fortitude and present urgency scrape against each other like tectonic plates. In the tradition of such wisdom literature, van Vliet’s poems are koan-like, gnomic, paradoxical, shot through with uncertainty and stitched together with guesswork. But they are also unmistakably tangible: van Vliet shuffles the natural world and fans its elements before us like tarot cards—“a flat cloud stained like a bloody liver”; “a nest of hair above the dry lake”; “thunder swim[ming] over the mountains.” The subject matter of Vessels is nothing less than the act of poetic creation. Van Vliet invites us to consider how and why we make poetry, and how we might use it to survive these times.
Vessels was written during a time of disquiet, isolation, and absences, when each day was folded over on itself, false and empty. To keep working, Robert van Vliet challenged himself to build a ten-line poem each day that needed to include five words and a line or fragment from a book, all chosen randomly through chance operations. ¶ He knew that he was too swamped by the quotidian to allow himself to choose the words—they would be nothing but fear, mask, Covid, police, racist, murder, climate, rage… The chance operations allowed him to leave most of the decisions until the very moment he began composing. ¶ The result is a collection of three suites, each seeking a path beyond the polarity of either willfully ignoring the appalling spectacle of those pandemic years or being angrily transfixed by it. Three paths out of mute heartbreak and toward a third space of hope, presence, spirit.
A copy of Vessels with post-it notes sticking out the top and sides, marking poems I might read at upcoming events.
Two Field Notes memo books side by side: one used, one new
A copy of my book lying on an ottoman; a fire in the fireplace in the background.
Cover image of my debut book of poetry, Vessels. It is a close-up of a leaf, its veins fading from bright red to pale green.
The front cover of The Green Radius by Henry Gould, newly arrived in the mail.
Yet another screenshot of my Bluesky number because apparently I can't stop flogging this dead horse.
Thomas Pynchon from the Simpsons with a paper bag over his head with a large black question mark and eye holes.
A Bluesky badge celebrating 10 million members, and informing me that I'm member #1173896 and that I joined on 22 Sept 2023.
A Bluesky badge celebrating 10 million members, and informing me that I'm member #1173896 and that I joined on 22 Sept 2023.
Two Field Notes memo books side by side: one used, one new
Henry Gould's chapbook, Parmenides in Minneapolis, lying on a table, with a small cobalt-blue mug neaby
The detail of a leaf, mostly pale green with darker green veins, fading to deep red at its spine, and the text 'VESSELS Robert van Vliet' printed vertically on one side.
Album cover for Fripp & Eno: No Pussyfooting. Brian Eno is holding a deck of what may be tarot cards. Nine colorful cards are dealt on the table beside him, in three rows of three. There is a small framed painting lying nearby. Eno's pale hair is long and straight, and he is made up with eye shadow, lipstick, and blush. Robert Fripp, wearing glasses and with a neatly trimmed beard which matches his curly head hair, sits facing Eno. They are in a mirror-lined room, so their reflections repeat a dozen or more times into the distance, growing progressively dimmer. A glass shelf is visible over Eno's head, holding a small collection of old leather-bound books. There are many other elements in the small, shiny room that seem indescribable.
Cover image of Julian Lage's album, Speak to Me, showing a black and white photo of Lage looking out at us with a calm expression
Two bookmarks from Subtext Books, one side showing a splattering of black ink, the other side largely blank but labelled "Notes"; in the center of both, a faint round stamp that reads: "Subtext Books Downtown St Paul MN Established 2012."
cover image for the Pauline Oliveros album, Ghostdance, showing a black and white photo of a bare room with a person moving near the far wall; the photo was taken with a long shutter time, so the room is saturated with light from the two windows, and the figure is blurred and indistinct, ghostly in her movements