VESSELS
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.
Poetry/ 978-1956692891/ December 17, 2024
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.
Poetry/ 978-1956692891/ December 17, 2024
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.
Poetry/ 978-1956692891/ December 17, 2024
Praise for VESSELS
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, author of Public Abstract
“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, author of THE INVENTOR: A Poet’s Transcolonial Autobiography
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, author of The Green Radius
In the author’s note at the end of VESSELS, we are given the kindling for the conception of the book. A methodology of pre-fixed words, of random lines sourced from a small number of books, of boundaries, of casts of the dice. From those are skillfully & deliberately shaped the shortish poems found in each of the three separate parts of the book. But weaving their way through the book, across all the parts, are a series of longer poems, sermons almost, deeper, more impersonal than the shorter poems in the book. Yet those shorter poems are the feedstock from which the longer ones are recreated; & the longer poems are the stakes that the shorter poems grow stronger on. 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
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.
To swim over the green
earth, as thunder swims
over the mountains. And we
will meet beneath the lake, to
drink in readiness.
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, author of T’shuvah
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, author of Zion Offramp 1–50
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.—Claire Wahmanholm, author of Meltwater
About ROBERT VAN VLIET
Robert van Vliet grew up in the Twin Cities and spent many years living in lots of other places. He has been, among other things, a process manager, a singer/songwriter, a repair technician for Macintosh computers, and a typographer. His poetry has appeared in The Sixth Chamber Review, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Wine Cellar Press, Otoliths, and elsewhere. He lives and teaches in Saint Paul, Minnesota.
