Kerry Shawn Keys

Kerry Shawn Keys (born June 25, 1946 in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, USA) is an American poet, writer, playwright and translator. He is a citizen of the United States and Lithuania.

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.

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.

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