Robert Kocik returns to Chronogram after a 17-year hiatus with All Peoples Calendar, a reworking of his January 2009 cover. Kocik is a poet and an architect living in Brooklyn, known for developing, with choreographer Daria Fain, The Prosodic Body, an area of research that explores language as a vibratory medium interrelating art, health, and social change.
“Conventionally, prosody is understood as the musicality and expressiveness of language: intonation, pause, cadence, emphasis, innuendo, allusion, and so on. The most elemental way to say this is that prosody is cosmogenic. It’s vibrational signaling, formative energies. In my story of prosody, the phonemes were here before us. They’re formative energies. They formed our bodies around us in order that they be spoken. The same forces that formed the vocal tract and our sense of hearing set the celestial bodies in motion. Just as these bodies are in interrelationship with each other, we are with each other, in relation to them,” he says.
Kocik doesn’t restrict prosody to speech, but extends it to all phenomena. The All Peoples Calendar is an attempt to return our sense of time-keeping and time-passing from a conventional grid of dates to its circular, spinning nature. The 365 days and their dates follow along the circumference of the circle. Just within the circumference, the moon phases move. Concentric rings radiating from center-point represent different hours with 4 o’clock as center point. The point where a day’s radial line intersects the am and pm lines marks the minute of sunrise and sunset, respectively. The 12 astrological signs in their 30-degree sectors frame the page.
The calendar’s complex interworking comes from the time and astronomical cycles that are not perfectly measurable by the same standards. Kocik visually represents the variable speed along the Earth’s elliptical orbit, which produces seasons of unequal lengths. For Kocik, everything translates into prosody.
Kocik frames the project as a way to tune our daily lives to the cosmic mechanics behind them. “The calendar shows the inner workings of the solar system that give us our local experience of time, as we variously celebrate our days as we move around the sun. The calendar, I hope, maintains a beholding of this. Each day is a revolution! Perhaps the solar system is a syllable. Openness is vocalic, closedness is consonantal. Sky. Shelter. Empathy. Enclosure. Space. Stuff. Pretty basic,” he says.
“Even evolutionarily, there’s evidence that prosody is the precursor of both language and music. Like a newborn’s starting point, which is playing in the wonder of sound-making, trying things out. Growth is a process of being nurtured and guided by prosody. We grow into it, fulfill our lives by means of it,” he adds.
Kocik came to Ulster County 30 years ago, fresh out of engineering school in Lausanne, Switzerland, seeking to rebuild a 3,800-square-foot, former gambling casino. “The plan was to convert the ruin into an artist’s atelier with an adjoined living space, working from the ground up to make a luminous, hand-crafted, locally sourced dwelling that pretty well rooted me in the Catskills,” he says. Today, he’s designing an accompanying outbuilding on that same property. He’s also built and renovated a number of buildings from Kerhonkson to Kingston.
“I came to the Hudson Valley to found a regional architectural/furnishings practice, based on traditional building techniques and tools mixed with new materials’ research. The nature of my practice is to realize all materials are Mother Earth, to work where the need is great, build with local materials, and hire locally,” he says.
Since 2018, he has taught at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in Manhattan at the invitation of then-curator Simone White. “After the residency, students wanted to continue meeting, which we’ve done, at varying intervals, in different settings, and now also through Zoom, since,” he says.
Upcoming publications include a collection of writings on prosody covering the course he has taught over the last seven years titled Prosody and the Preciousness of Life (Auric Press) and a re-publication of an earlier collection, Supple Science, by Station Hill Press in Barrytown. Copies of the calendar are available at: Robertkocik.org.
This article appears in January 2026.
