The House Seen from Nowhere

In Keith Waldrop’s The House Seen From Nowhere, we are invited into a meditational drift that explores the “tense emptiness” of being. The construction of all that surrounds us, the carpentry, wavering between order and the instability of order, is manifest in syntax and etymology. In this house, which is all things—body, fortress, residence, logic, language, mortality—we find mirrors, echoes, and spirits: “the figures light/delineates not/the light itself.” Where we might use Zeno’s Paradox to understand the relation between the knower and the known, it is in Keith’s house that we find the paradox of “empty distinctions,” a tension between asymmetrical opposites. The house exists “not to inclose but / to include // without redemption.”

Keith Waldrop (1932-2023) is a poet, translator, and publisher. He studied at Aix-Marseille and Michigan Universities, earning a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature in 1964. His first book, A Windmill Near Calvary (University of Michigan Press, 1968), was shortlisted for the 1968 National Book Award. Recent books include Selected Poems (Omnidawn, 2016); Several Gravities (Siglio, 2009); and Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy (University of California Press, 2009, winner of the 2009 National Book Award). From 1961 to 2017, he was the co-editor of Burning Deck Press together with his wife Rosemarie Waldrop.