Robert Creeley, “Onward.” Ray Bianchi, from his Chicago Postmodern Poetry 1) Where did you grow up? Was poetry and writing part of that mix? I grew up in the then farm town, West Acton, Mass -- some twenty to thirty miles north of Boston, and about eight miles north of Concord. Writing certainly wasn't a family habit -- my father (who died when I was four) was a doctor and my mother a nurse (she eventually became Acton's town nurse) -- but poetry in the old sense was. My grandmother knew reams of it by heart -- and two others of the family wrote, my older sister (and only sibling) Helen, one of whose poems as a teenager had been anthologized by Robert Tristam Coffin, and my mother's sister, Aunt Bernice, who published her poems, often witty parodies, in various local newspapers. It was Helen particularly who directed my early reading, like they say. 2) Who are your poetic influences, favorite poets, writers, artwork, other things that inform your work? It's an insistent meld finally. When I was young, prose writers were probably more an influence than any others -- Lawrence, Stendhal, Dostoyevsky, Cervantes -- and then on to Cocteau, Gide, Defoe, James, Celine et al. First poets really to get to me were Williams, Pound, and Hart Crane. Jazz was a terrific company all through college -- college friends then were more often musicians than not. So one needs include Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, etc. Then, in the Black Mountain days, visual artists became locating friends -- Kline, Guston, deKooning and contemporaries as John Chamberlain. 3) When did you 'become' a poet when did poet become part of your everyday life? I was always leery of claiming to be a "poet" -- who could tell? First off, I thought to write prose primarily, so it's not till I'm in my late twenties that it seems I'm to be primarily a poet. Consequently and like it or not, most of my life seems defined by fact of being a poet one way or another. Whatever the circumstances otherwise, it's what I did and do. 4) Where were you educated? Was this important? The last years of my secondary education are very important, just that they locate a whole world for me emotionally and intellectually. In my sophomore year I got a scholarship to what was then a small Episcopalian boy's school in New Hampshire, Holderness School -- seventy-five boys altogether with excellent teachers. That's where I first read Tolstoy and Joyce, which last we 'translated' parts of into Basic English. It's where I first recognized language as an agency, not just what one spoke. Harvard was sadly the total opposite -- with some great exceptions as F.O. Mathiessen. Harry Levin, Kenneth Murdock, Fred McCreary, and otherwise my peers there. Ellie Dorfman the photographer has this note in her Housebook: "Gordon Cairnie, proprietor of the Grolier Book Shop -- [was] one of only two people at Harvard who made Bob Creeley feel he might amount to something (the other, Fred McCreary)..." Anyhow it was such a bleak change from the nurturing support and intellectual curiosity of Holderness, and the Second World War was also an awful time to come of age period. 5) You have been friends with and learned from many poets including Olson, Pound and Williams is their a poet who has influenced you that may surprise your readers? When I looked in an old anthology I had had back in the forties -- Conrad Aiken's (Modern Library) something or other -- I was surprised to find the one poet I had really chosen to single out was E.A. Robinson, particularly "The Man against the Sky." (Marsden Hartley gets marked in the same collection.) You can find Robinson’s poem online at this link, the very last one of the poems there, and it still seems all too humanly familiar: http://www.hn.psu.edu/faculty/jmanis/earobin/earobin1.pdf I also read Conrad Aiken, be it said -- Brownstone Eclogues, etc. I recall as well being much attracted to Tristan Corbière, thanks to Pound, despite I could barely read him. Then there are particular modes of various poets, Norman Macleod's cadence and form in A Man In Midpassage, for example, Richard Eberhart’s use of couplets with a curious backbeat. 6) What is your favorite food? Paella, I guess, from Mallorca days. Or Huevos Rancheros from New Mexico breakfasts. 7) Sports Team? Red Sox and/or the Buffalo Bills. 8) Vacation Spot? I don't know that one's ever "on vacation" in the formal sense. Summers I work on my own commitments in Waldoboro, Maine -- where my sister first lived and we then followed some twenty or more now years ago. All my mother's family came from Maine, so it wasn't a great change. Now it's the one place we own, so to speak, and I have other family there as well. 9) Curse Word? It depends on the occasion. 10) It has been said that what happened at Black Mountain College in the 1950's defined poetry and visual art for the next 50 years who were in your opinion the most important figures of your time at Black Mountain? For me it was Charles Olson, just that he is the one responsible for getting me there to teach and also arranged for me to edit the Black Mountain Review, which starts in 1954 and stops in 1957, a year after the college closes. But remember that I was only in and out of Black Mountain, first from March into June of 1954, then from June ’55 into the winter of that year. The college by that time was all but in shambles. Ed Dorn was there, as were also John Chamberlain, Jorge Fick, Cynthia Homire, Dan Rice, Michael Rumaker – friends who stayed friends all my life. Then there was terrific Stefan Wolpe, the composer, and his wife, the poet Hilda Morley. I also first met John Wieners there, although he was just visiting. The Black Mountain connection, so to speak, led to Joel Oppenheimer, Fielding Dawson, the great “Abstract Expressionists” Franz Kline, Phillip Guston, Bill deKooning. Etc. It changed my literal life. 11) In a recent interview on this site Regis Bonvicino said that you were the American most worthy of winning the Nobel Prize for literature. If you did win what would you want the world to know about the poetic community in the USA? What would you want to tell the world about our culture at this time? I have no appetite for such "what ifs" -- and no expectations whatsoever. Craft Questions 1) How do you form a poem? I don't really "form" it, I do what it makes possible, so to speak. Obviously my head for years now has been stuffed full of possibilities got from reading, endless variables of "form" and the like. Best sense I've come upon is Robert Duncan's in "The Truth and Life of Myth" -- and the poem on which that essay centers, "A Poem Beginning with a Line from Pindar." From The Opening of the Field. 2) Do you use collage, found language? I do when it fits, i.e., you'll find a lot of 'quoting' much like jazz's use of such in what I've written -- tags, echoes, allusions. One poem I think of quickly as a good example -- "In London" from Pieces. 3) Is poetry an organic or synthetic process for you? For me it happens, and over the years I really haven't revised as a practice. That is, I'm stuck or blessed with what I write -- and if it doesn't work, then that's that. I do something else, albeit what's been the prompting can come again in different manner. 4) Where do you write? Is Ambiance important? Do you have rituals or habits when you write? Most usually I write (and have written) in a place particular, i.e., a workroom of whatever kind -- with books, typewriter, or now computer, at hand. I like music as a "place" to get started in. I don't like to be too separated from family or whatever's going on. Most usually when I am working, all else fades away in any case. I also write on the road -- I did a lot of traveling until recently, now slowed down a bit. Then I use whatever's to hand -- and it's primarily poems that come. 5) In the balance between found language and created language where does your work fall? Do you use many sources? I really don't know. As to sources, I have all that otherwise my life would be said to have, viz body on out. 6) Your work is very controlled how do you continue to control the evident energy in your work? I'm not religious, so I can't say “God” does it -- but I really don't "control" in any intent to. As Williams best puts it, I write what's "there to be written." I am not its primary determinant in that sense. Lawrence says, "Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me!" That's what one is paying attention to -- something's happening, coming to be. Taylor Brady It's taken the sad news of Robert Creeley's passing to bring me back here, just to mark in some way all that he was, in words and in person, to me among so many others. Those others have already said well much of what needs to be said -- the necessary clarity of a poetry based on hearing words, the generosity of the man as teacher, listener, and friend. There isn't really much that I can add that's particular to me. In fact, if I had to say what Bob was to so many younger poets, it's that he was particular to all of us, in company, as he might say. So my Bob story is the same as many others': at 17, discovering in his writing that "poet" was something I might be, at 24 discovering in his talk and presence that being a poet was a matter of finding endless resource in small talk, small occurrence, a life lived, and since then returning to his work and through him to others as one measure of what that life, and the company in which he continued to insist on locating it, might be. Speaking of measure, the poem I wrote today in lieu of working looks for prosody to Williams and Zukofsky -- but those are measures I first heard clearly through Bob. There's also a story buried in there of his remarks to our Zukofsky reading group upon returning from a viewing of Babe with his daughter. That one came back to me this morning, a laugh breaking through the sadness walking around Lake Merritt. So thanks for that, too, Bob. I miss you. Lines for Robert Creeley, 1926-2005 If between lines Holes To be a Part Of come apart— Of The time between Lines “A breathing crisis” In The mouth of Speech That is speech This I learned to Hear Hearing you who Would Not teach but Heard And I saw You Hearing it or Heard You seeing that Hole In words between Words That is to Say * Between two it Opens As a hitch Closing Eyes the gasp Listens To the gap Echoes Beckon two to Enter Take a turn Ancient Turn of phrase Taken As literal together Around The lake say Cloudless In the gap Between Spring rains the Covers Blown back and Nothing To be seen Beyond That blue the Housecat There turns double Enters Space between lines Crosshatched In wire enclosing Chickens In their geodesic Shelter In fact of Hunger Mouth of appetite Open * That dear pig Parable You called it Returning From the multiplex Purposive Called that wide Wandering Tight spots to Extricate Oneself from the Slaughterhouse For instance purpose Animating Meat’s escape into Ongoing “One’s simply food Otherwise” * Liveforever flower in Zukofsky read In your measure I thought And think a Form of Selfishness in me To be Yours and name What you Would have to Go on Being in my Rush to Write and fill That gap In place of Standing by To let you Pass there But what thinks In holes Is all thought The whole Of where you Are not Now but fact Of it You said again And again The albumen blobs Ducks leave Underfoot here eucalyptus Acrid after Three days of Wet what Breathed in what Walked over What I stand On beside The blinding lake The gap In what’s to See water Flows into location An indrawn Hitch I can Almost stand * The line turns At its end To holes in Words in which We meet to Face each other As what goes In what turns One to face Another passing by Hank Lazer Absolutely exemplary. Certainly these last ten years or so, a quality of sweetness, pleasure, and generosity. A life lived in and of words with absolute integrity. For me, personally, no more important poet, no one better able to show ways in words to make manifest the grace, pleasure, complexity, cadences, and play of mind at work. I met Bob in the late 1970s, at a Black Mountain College celebration at Warren Wilson College. We spent a couple of days in conversation; I interviewed Bob; I listened to him read. Much of our time together I asked him for information on the three-line stanzas that he developed, and what relationship his writing had to similar modes in Williams. Great fun witnessing a packed auditorium at his reading, only to have Bob tell stories and follow out a range of thoughts for forty-five minutes to an hour before he read the first poem. Many left before he read. They missed a superb reading, one that was absolutely continuous with the talking that preceded it. Yes, quite simply one of the greatest conversationalists of all time … At the time of that Black Mountain event, I knew only parts of what Creeley had written – mainly Words and For Love. From then until now, I have grown more and more familiar with the range of his writing – the poetry, yes, but also the essays. In fact, when I got news of Bob’s declining health, I was reading a new essay of his on Whitman’s poetry of old age (in a special issue of Virginia Quarterly Review celebrating the 150th anniversary of the publication of the first Leaves of Grass). In the mid-1990s, I gave a reading at Buffalo. Bob attended, and I had the pleasure of reading new poems (which became the book Days) which were very much based in what I had learned from his work. We spent the next morning, over pastry and coffee, sitting and talking, along with my good friend Yunte Huang. Bob’s generosity to Yunte is another story, but typical of Bob’s kindness to so many younger writers… Here, at Alabama, I had the pleasure of hosting Bob for a reading a couple of years ago. Again, a packed house. A superb reading, though Bob had to sit for most of the reading, as he did for the conversation/discussion the following day. That particular visit enhanced by the presence of Donald Revell (in residence for the semester), another poet deeply steeped in Bob’s life and writing. And again, Bob made time for a morning of coffee, pastry, and conversation. Last saw Bob at the Louis Zukofsky Centennial at Columbia this past fall. Some familiar anecdotes, and some unfamiliar. I’ve been quite moved by the increasingly emotionally open work of Bob’s last couple of books – Life & Death and If I were writing this. He seemed able to circle back, to realize the importance and vitality of late 19th century verse – a family tradition of popular poetry – in his own practice. Or, to make of Keats’ work such a central thing. We corresponded sporadically via e-mail. I would often send Bob a few poems, and his remarks were always appreciative. He blurbed a book of mine – an extended chapbook called As It Is (published by Mark Scroggins) – and was always supportive of my writing. What Bob showed was the pleasure and work of making one’s way in a writing life. It is rather amazing to think of how many of us have learned from his example. Yesterday, the day of Bob’s death, at the end of the day, I went with my son, Alan (16 years old), to Beulah Baptist Church – a black church on a hillside on the way home, a place that I’d often admired but where I’d never stopped. A modest graveyard with a cement angel of Memory leading the way up the dry, red clay hill. At the top of the hill, we walked around for a bit, sun streaming through the clouds. The wisteria now in bloom, we looked at the tombstones, stood beside one for “Pa Pa” Jones, and I read aloud several of Bob’s poems from Life & Death. Earlier in the day I’d been in touch with several others to whom Bob had been so important – Charles Bernstein, Yunte Huang, Joel Kuszai, Don Revell, Claudia Keelan, Norman Fischer, Tyrone Williams. Even at the time of Bob’s death, it’s hard not to bear in mind his favorite closing in correspondence: “Onward.” Without Bob here to be the figure of Onward, we must take what we have learned from him and be, in our writing and friendship and conversation and correspondence, that no longer singular figure of Onward. * Here’s the e-mail I sent to Bob on Monday, March 28, 2005: Dear Bob, A gray cold day of spring break, giving way to sunny windy afternoon. I spoke with Joel Kuszai mid-day, and learned some of your health difficulties. And then heard from Charles Bernstein, a more optimistic version. I'm simply writing to let you know I'm thinking of you. And thinking with you. Got in today's mail the latest issue of Virginia Quarterly Review -- on Whitman, and your superb piece on Whitman's poetry of old age. When I read at the Walt Whitman Center in Camden (several years ago, back when Alicia Askenase was in charge of the reading series), I visited Walt Whitman's house, and recognize it in the last photos. For me, the determining feature of my early years of writing poetry was to have an especially close relationship with my four grandparents -- all Russian Jews, all living close to us. In the way that drugs & zen of the 1960s allowed it, I spent time with them, in their decay mental & physical, with a mixture of love, curiosity, and observation (rather than the disabling frustrations that I saw in my parents' relationship to their aging parents). My poems began with telling their stories, my grandparents, and with learning (or trying to learn) something of the phenomenology of aging. And thus, yes, a reading of Williams' later work and others, including, eventually Oppen. A rambling way, Bob, to say that you are on my mind these days, as your poetry and your essays and correspondence will always be. With much love, Hank * And a poem, from several years ago, very much with Creeley in mind, from an ongoing work, Portions. YOU so the old cabin leans “sit up” i said as if to someone i said it to you i always do if there were no one else if there were only you i would say “sit up” & think someone heard such is my sense the old cabin leans what is never passes away Ken Rumble This past Tuesday (March 29th) evening I taught Creeley's "For Love" for the first time. We were talking about it in an introduction to college/grammar writing class for first semester continuing ed students. I'd read and enjoyed the poem casually a few times but never spent any time going over the details. I knew Creeley mostly by reputation and not experience. In this class, though, we spent about 30 minutes going line by line and stanza by stanza through the poem, sifting through the vague and doubling referents, tracing the syntax over the line breaks. I won't say what we found there; I will say that going through that poem so closely showed me that in living with Creeley the legend that I'd missed out more than I'd ever imagined. My students seemed to dig the poem; they said things like "why does he think love is so hard?" I think they got the point. I closed class with a quick reading of "I Know a Man" and drove home. Joel Lewis I mostly remember Creeley's small kindnesses and his real devotion to poets and poetry. I vividly remember when he came out to read as part of a conference held at a community college in Paterson, NJ. On a Saturday evening, he agreed to join a bunch of us local Jersey poets for a meal at a local Italian joint on Cianci Street near the Lou Costello monument (a native son, no kidding). He said more than a few times how touched he was that we invited him -- & we were mostly out of our heads that WE were breaking bread with CREELEY! Later poet Ed Smith & I drove him back to his roadside motel and again he was moved that "we were going out of our way". Of course, we thought "WE HAVE ROBERT CREELEY IN THE BACK OF THIS CAR!!" Linh Dinh I'm proud to say that I was the first to translate him into Vietnamese. When I got in touch with him to ask for permission, he sent me a CD reciting his poems, with the Fugs as backup. I'm sorry I never got a chance to meet him. Sent by Jonathan Minton from “Letters to Bob Creeley” by Steve Finbow, forthcoming in Word For/Word #8(www.wordforword.info) Letter 8 So I’m shaving because the universe is rhythm mechanics, rules of verse, the actual at dusk obsessed with conduction & cream, the rollicking months sutured beyond habits that spell, you enter born the addressor the wintering flags/birds a development of trees/these are you all that implies? what is the verification of pieces? can you intention? is this in the passed? what about that tern? will another constitute the predicate? is it a distance? patterns are swollen by matches/mouths to explain at a rate the value that all depends & already that part of Ann Lauterbach A Daffodil for Creeley Reluctant spring up from under as if for love without for love the intimate voice for love kept us ever in readiness for love host for love companion for love dear friend Elizabeth Robinson About a year ago, I was sifting through the remarkable shelves of Serendipity, the bookstore in Berkeley, and I came across a plain typed postcard in a plastic envelope. It was written by Creeley in the 1950's or early '60's to a publisher. In the space of about four lines, the following were included: "you dig," "like they say," "the company of poets," and "onward." It seemed somehow ethically wrong to buy such a thing, so I put it back on the shelf for someone else to find. After all, I have several letters that are full of the same phrases. By way of analogy, I want to say that Bob was someone upon whom a poet could rely. While his energy was indefatigably moving "onward!" he was utterly passionate and sincere in his welcome to poets into that company that he worked to create. Over the course of the last 25 years, he was unfailingly generous to me, always willing to engage with my work and respond honestly. Yes, he wrote a blurb for me, and I experienced that as a central moment in my life as a writer. When people joke about the many, many blurbs he wrote, I think they misapprehend Bob's approach to writing and community. I would not want to be one of the few for whom he wrote an affirmation; I am intensely grateful to belong in that remarkable and various community of writers whom he knew as peers and welcomed into a vital conversation. I am inconsolable at his passing. Lance Phillips to Don Revell Dear Don, When I heard of Creeley's death last week these are the things I thought, in order: 1) "Position is where you put it, where it is..." This is a couple of lines that I've thought about probably every day for the last decade. 2) I hope Don is OK. 3) Position is unerring and ever, upon one's mind. I hope you know you have my condolences and my thoughts; I know you were close to him. But bear in mind, for what it's worth, YOU brought Creeley alive for me (and I'm sure many others). That SOUL, product of the kind friendship between the two of you, is still as plural as can be, is still and will be the heavens one knows. Please let me know if there's anything I can do. Love, Lance Brent Cunningham When I studied at Buffalo in 1998 I did an "independent study" with Creeley. This consisted of alphabetizing his bookshelf, for which he handed me sorely needed funds, followed always by my having lunch with him, sometimes Penelope his wife also, in that great converted firehouse they lived in. Having lunch meant listening to stories, most commonly of Olson, Duncan, Zukofsky. He repeated certain paradigmatic moments and phrases from his past so frequently it was tempting, as anyone who knew Bob will remember, to say to him, actually, I've heard this. But years later, with all the faults showing up in my memory, I view the repetition in a different light, and am grateful for it. That sense he had of an oral transmission, a school of initiates--take his reviews, which often quote for pages--was to me exemplary on many levels, showing how to be a writer, to accept it as inheritance. The story I remember most was simple enough: in New York, I think the 1950s still, he goes into a bar to meet Olson. Bob is cold and wiped out, maybe from over drinking, then Olson sees this and him, puts his big "paw" of a hand around the scruff of Bob's neck, and says, "Bartender, bring this boy some soup." I recall that story (and this is pertinent to Bob's work generally) because I didn't exactly get it--there was some problem there, something Bob was chewing on, and it was evident he told it (telling becomes this, writing becomes this) in order to try to see what it really was or said. Why did it stick, in short? Some part, my own interpretations, changed even as the story stayed the same, but I think the word "boy" was the spindle: Bob had such desire for a patrician, someone to see through him, and take at that time responsibility for him, which manifests itself enough in the hardest things to forgive in his earlier work, where it's so stupid about gender, and where it asserts presumingly that mutual torment is inextricable from love--true or not I think the presuming bankrupts its possible truth. But that Olson anecdote also has, of course, the love itself about it. It describes comprehension of another's living status, a "brotherhood" in Bob's old gendered-speak, where "men" recognize each other, implying also that it wasn't intellect that connected him to Olson, or to anyone, but a condition of bodily needs: he was cold, hungry, and Olson noticed, and knew what to do. In Bob's writing this problem of love is probably forever two sides of the same coin, one I find him always rubbing and worrying--love indicates a gap just where and as ("if and as" he endlessly said) it crosses it. Well, I also loved him, thought of him, and miss him a great deal. Jim Ellis Dear Lance: Hadn't heard of Creeley's death. This poem has always meant a lot to me: For love - I would split open your head and put a candle in behind the eyes. Love is dead in us if we forget the virtues of an amulet and quick surprise. Annie Finch CREELEY'S LAST READING I was at the reading which seems to have been Bob's last, in the balcony of the University of Virginia bookstore in Charlottesville in late March. I had heard him at Orono in July, where he also told anecdotes, but this was different. For one thing, he had an oxygen tank on the floor at his feet and couldn’t use the podium--the tube just reached to his nose when he sat on a table with his blue-jeaned legs dangling youthfully down. The contrast between the spryness of his body (and mind) and his labored breathing through the tube was poignant. He said he had had to breathe through the tube since February. When I saw how much weaker he looked than he had in July, I was worried--it seemed as if the downward curve was pretty steep. He read from the latest book, which includes numerous poems in heroic couplets. At one point he said, "the rhyme grows more obvious in these late poems--but it was always there; people just didn't see it." The poems are raw and honest and focus on life-death issues, and he spoke in the same vein between poems. It was very intense, direct, honest, almost childlike, the voice and the words of someone with nothing to lose. He said some very simple things that felt like the truest things one had heard in a long time, things like, "there has been so much war and pain during the last century. We need to learn how to be kind; kindness is what makes us human." The audience was, I think, pretty much awed; there was deep silence. Afterwards I was so struck I was almost in tears, and many of those with whom I shared glances had the same stricken look. In retrospect, I recognize the feeling palpable in that place after his reading as the death-feeling, the same feeling there was in the house when my father was dying, that larger-than-life bitter flavor of simplicity and depth. After the reading he signed books graciously for a long line of people. I waited till they were all through to speak with him; I had just moved to Maine, a place we loved in common and had talked about before, and I wanted to share that. He signed my books very carefully, deliberately placing a black dot in the upper-left hand box of four boxes in the publisher's logo on one title page. Then we talked for a long time, me awkwardly half-kneeling in front of the book-table. We talked about Maine, and, since he was staying in Marfa, Texas, about the minimalist sculpture of my ex-brother-in-law Donald Judd. He was scathing about the inhumanity he saw in Judd's metal boxes, how incongruous he felt they were in the desert landscape, and we both shared our visceral response at their lack of effort to harmonize or blend in. I asked him how he understood Judd's intentions, and he said something very helpful, which cleared up a question that had burdened me for a long time: he said he thought of it as a belated Romantic attempt to assert human presence. After we discussed various other things, we talked about how we would see each other in Maine in the summer. I remember feeling that it might not happen. We said goodbye, but I turned back on a very strong impulse to ask him about one more thing rather than putting it off: I asked him about Robert Duncan. He told me movingly about Duncan's warmth, compassion--told about how once he had been walking with Duncan and telling him about problems with his marriage, and looked over to see tears on Duncan's face. You would have liked him, he said. He looked tired. We touched hands again. "Till Maine," he said. I am now so glad I turned back. I'm also glad that last July in Orono, I spoke with him about something even more urgent I wanted to discuss before it was too late. I mentioned to him how people were continually quoting as a truism only the first half of his famous dictum, "Form is nothing more than an extension of content, and content nothing more than an extension of form." He was very disturbed by this and said that the quote was not meaningful without both halves. I asked him if he would send me an email stating this so that I would have it in writing from him, and could quote it honestly/accurately, and he told me that in fact, he had just put it in writing in a recent interview. Soon after he sent me this email: Dear Annie, Now I hear you've taken the job, which is terrific for "our side." Thinking of that "form" business, what I was thinking of then was this comment in interview with Leonard Schwartz: http://jacketmagazine.com/25/creeley-iv.html It's there pretty much at the beginning. I can feel fall today, and somehow that's a pleasure -- just the sharpness of air and the extraordinary specificness of color. Ah well! Again congratulations and all best, Bob This is the quote from the interview he was referring to: RC: Well, content is never more than an extension of form and form is never more than an extension of content. They sort of go together is the absolute point. It’s really hard to think of one without the other; in fact, I don’t think it’s possible. Anonymous reaction to Creeley’s death from "I know a man" drive, he sd, for christ's sake, look out where yr going. Chris Stroffolino been really shaken up by the creeley passing, not so much that it was tragic or anything-- he lived as full a life as i can imagine a poet, but more seriously because there goes another one who dared explore the ups and downs of love more intensely than most of my tepid contemporaries and slightly olders (of the male persuasion) who censor themselves and others.... when i have more time, i'll have to write about it.... Joseph Lease, from a work in progress Robert Creeley (part one of an essay) As I see it, Robert Creeley is our best poet. There aren’t words enough—many, many poets will speak of his extraordinary generosity, his kindness and clarity of soul. I will too. I owe him more than I can ever say. But tonight I just need to write about his work. And I can’t even do that. Not tonight. I’m grieving, and I’m tired. There’s so much I need to try to say. I need to try to speak about a musical grace as clear and remarkable as Dickinson’s or Celan’s or Williams’s; I need to try to speak about a kind of thinking—at once specific and marvelously abstract, a kind of grace of accuracy. Creeley’s poems are deeply experimental and deeply traditional. They are the real shock of hearing and seeing—of authenticity—they make it new. I start with William Carlos Williams. Williams wrote that he found in Robert Creeley’s poetry "the subtlest feeling for the measure that I encounter anywhere except in the verses of Ezra Pound." And John Ashbery wrote: "Robert Creeley's poetry is as basic and necessary as the air we breathe; as hospitable, plain and open as our continent itself. He is about the best we have." Gale Nelson said Robert Creeley “was one of the most important 20th Century American poets.” And C.D Wright wrote: “He made his poetry livable, durable. He included us. You wanted to lean into him like a barn. Or draw your chair near his fire. You wanted to take his hand so everyone would see and would know, this is my friend. If Bob could make poetry his life, and he did, the rest of us doubters can be assured, poetry really matters. Oh man, we have to make good on what he gave us. We have to aim true to make our language bear up to his light.” And Robert Duncan wrote: "Visionary and Oracular, Creeley has been a worker in the deep romantic vein--words in this poetry are magic, charged as they are in dreams with message of the dark of the human condition. He continues the art of the troubadours with its themes of love and trial. He loves the daily popular tunes, the ring of contemporary coinage, flashes of wry and sardonic humor, the lover's chagrin--for the sake of the human condition they are immediacies of, but it is a music of heaven and hell he listens for in it all." Oh Bob, I really can’t say it. Your poetry and your way of reading poetry mean the world to us (literally), give us the world. (More very soon.) MUCH LOVE, j ps I’m going to include part of something I wrote in 2001. In a way, it’s a digression. It sounds wrong because it isn’t a memorial. But I want to place it here because it expresses part of the weave, the process, that Creeley’s poetry has provoked in me for years and years. And, by the way, Tayt Harlin wrote: “His poems aren't made things at all: they are life itself. I am humbled by their breath.” Between and after Black Mountain poetry and Language poetry, poets are re-imagining narrative and the lyric self--exploring (through composition-by-field) the texture of involvement, the particulars by which we feel our way, and by which we feel culture and history entering our own weave. As we write the particulars--the ways a self (the lyric "I") is woven by history, by the culture--we may say, "But I'm suspicious of ‘experience’" and we may also say, "If you don't have ‘experience,’ what do you have?" The answer might be something like this: what you have is experience working on its own margins, critical of itself, and finding the points where it breaks down. Poets such as Dickinson, Stein, Williams, Creeley make meaning at the edges of meaning. As Edward Foster puts it, Dickinson's and Creeley's poems should be read as enactments; the poets are "concerned with meaning as a process, something toward which one struggled rather than something already known and tested" (88). Foster also proposes a connection between Creeley and Charles Bernstein, a connection that explores the lyric "I" as self-in-process (rather than the assumption of a fixed, unified self): "Creeley's lineation brings attention to the words as such … as Charles Bernstein said, 'Writing becomes not the wish to express a self egocentrically but rather to hear--attend--the order of syllables in the world and in so sounding find out who 'I' as a 'self' am" (84). We read Creeley’s poetry and realize that what we want is self-in-process--resisting reifying experience in order to continue fluid engagement with the particulars of culture and nature. And, at its best, American poetry has always known that the "I" can be a trap, a hoax, a collapsing box, an explosion. The lyric does not have to promote thinking that celebrates individualism--the American tradition of introspection in lyric is never--from Whitman to Creeley--merely personal but representative—in other words, personal and political. And the lyric "I" is the ground for the critique of romanticism and materialism in American culture. Robert Creeley’s poetry provoked me to explore the particulars of poetic form, to make rites of passage actual in a construct of words. Tonight I’ll have to stop here. But I’ll keep going—I’ll try over and over again to honor and remember his poetry. (part two of an essay) [to be written soon] Stacy Szymaszek, where she asks Robert Creeley 3 questions and he asks her 3 questions Date: Fri, 11 Oct 2002 15:52:11 -0400 From: Robert Creeley To: Stacy Szymaszek Subject: Re: Questions from Stacy Dear Stacy, Let me write quick answers to three of your questions below and then, in a separate email, I'll send my questions to you either later today or tomorrow: 1. I know you have been friends with a lot of visual artists. How does painting influence your work? Literally it gives me an active imagination of the world sans the usual verbal frames and habits. It gives me insight into an equally decisive art's ways and means of "figuring" or "picturing" the world other than the literary one. It also gets me thinking about ways of seeing the world, or making sense of it, giving it substance in mind and feeling, that otherwise I would not know. All these things prove active prompting for my own work as the numerous collaborations I have done with artists -- Alex Katz, George Baselitz, John Chamberlain, Marisol, R.B. Kitaj, Robert Indiana, Susan Rothenberg, Jim Dine,Francesco Clemente and others -- must make evident. 2. As editor of Black Mountain Review, you were really disobedient, it seems, from the vantage point of the present, to the boundaries of writing camps: Black Mountain, Beat, SF Renaissance. Were you consciously seeking to challenge people's tendency to fracture off? What did you enjoy most about the editorial process? Those "boundaries" were established well after the fact, probably most secured by the groups that Donald M. Allen's New American Poetry created. It was his attempt to prevent the usual critics from dismissing us all with one imperious gesture. In any case, I had gone to college with John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch although I only met Kenneth while there. The Black Mountain connection came through friends in common. Vincent Ferrini first introduced me to Olson, Denise married one of my classmates. Ezra Pound put Paul Blackburn and me in touch by letter. The point is that our various groups had far more in common – a belief in improvised forms, a dislike of the strictures of the status quo verse of the period --than otherwise. Among our consistent heroes were Williams and Stevens, and their interests in turn as the French. The San Francisco group then came in both from the Beat connection -- Gary Snyder, Phil Whalen,Michael McClure -- or else through Robert Duncan by way of Olson. We were, in any case, outside the literary orthodoxy of the period and that was our common denominator. You'll find the best illustration of it in A Controversy of Poets, edited by Robert Kelly and Paris Leary, published by Doubleday no less in 1965. 3. I read something that Gary Snyder said: "In the spiritual and poetical loneliness of America of the 50's you'd hitch a thousand miles to meet a friend". Do you think this level of camaraderie between poets is still culturally possible? Necessary? For me it has certainly been possible and necessary-- to feel a world was possible initially, and then to keep faith with its company. Poets, despite the emphasis so familiar on their "loneliness," are really very social people, fact of community, of ways of saying the world, of bearing witness and testament. Remembering that the fifties were the time of "The Lonely Crowd" and of an insistent public "silence" not unlike that presently the case, "the distances," as Jonathan Williams also spoke of them, were often very harsh and corrosive. Yet one held on -- and would gratefully, as Gary suggests, drive hundreds of miles to find a like spirit. -- That seems enough! Thanks again and I'll be back shortly with questions for you. Best as ever, Robert Creeley Date: Sat, 12 Oct 2002 18:38:51 -0400 From: Robert Creeley To: Stacy Sz Subject: Questions from Robert Dear Stacy, Here are three questions I hope prove useful. Somehow it all smacks of some very old story -- and why not. 1) In your poems there is a pleasant shifting of means, call them, particularly in these sequences taken from your longer work, "Some Mariners." Sometimes they feel akin to “Language poetry,” at others to an older tradition of lyric narrative. What is your own sense of relevant models which have given you useful instruction? 2) Given you are there in Wisconsin, I am fascinated that the sea and all its echoing, mythic associations with the initiation of human life, is a locating context and metaphor in your poems, most especially in this present long work. Have you come from the sea, like they say, lived on its edge? Is it a place of your experience or imagination? 3) Clearly, as a poet, you have a will to find source, to arrive at a place of primal fact and origin. What has brought you to that determination and whom do you consider to share it with you? See what you think and if these don't work, I'll try again. Thanks for your patience -- and the earlier questions you generously provided. Best as ever, Robert Stacy’s answers: 1) Language poetry has not been one of my models. I had a fairly traditional education in poetry and wasn’t aware of these other options. I was reading Dickinson and Rimbaud. Then found the New York school, the French Symbolists, the Objectivists, the New American Poetry poets, in that order. I love reading theory, but it effects my writing in a more indirect way than the Language poets. Lyricism and narrative are important to me, but obviously they are complicated by other concerns. Since the day I read Duncan and got the idea of poets as “language workers” I have thought of the poem as a site to experience language, a site of linguistic intensity. 2) The sea is a place of imagination for me, but I feel that imagining and experiencing are often blurred, not in a deranged way but in a way that creates apertures for seeing the strata in what we take as our daily reality. How the sea became the locating context in “Some Mariners”... I don’t remember deciding, it was inevitable. I had a fascination with sailors, their community, their lore, their homo-eroticism, and the possibility/improbability of utopia. Then, the more obvious correspondence between language, meaning and identity being in flux, like water. How to exist in a state of ambiguity? 3) My determination to find source is driven by an outsider desire - is there an “originator” who has unconditional joy in my existence? It could be a poetic response to Christianity, specifically my experience growing up Catholic. Whose image was I made in if not God’s or my family’s? There’s a childlike quality in James, the character that emerges in “Some Mariners” - he wants to be recognized but he also can’t make it too easy. The poem ends with a sailor tattooing the back of his hand in Greek. The source, this poem figures, is the word, the embodiment of the word. I read Etel Adnan, Fanny Howe, Gustaf Sobin, Susan Howe... the Frenchmen Char, Eluard, Reverdy... I feel close to Duncan sometimes. Ed Smith _______________________________________ May 21, 1988 Dear Ed Smith, It was good to see you there- and thanks again for your books. You bring Ted Berrigan very close, and all you say has solid human tone. ok! Best, Bob Creeley ____________________________________________________ Above: reference to Dwasline Road (Gaede's Pond Press, 1983) and At the Green Pool (1985) chapbooks edited by Joel Lewis. Below: Creeley postcard dated Dec. 1, 2002 from Buffalo, NY to Ed Smith, Manasquan, NJ referring to Ed Smith's Greatest Hits 1980-2002 (Pudding House, Ohio) chapbook. ____________________________________________________ CREELEY BUFFALO, NY 14207 Dec. 1, '02 Dear Ed, Edward Smith That's a charming book-and as ever many Thanks! So to say it Manasquan, NJ 08736 again, "Ed your poems are solid!" Now if we can just ge through this bleak patch of shrub paranoia, all will be terrific. Onward! All best as ever, Bob ________________________________ Robert Creeley wrote: Dear Christine Bauch, I had spoke to Robert Pinsky in May about a poet from New Jersey who much impressed me-- and I believe they met briefly somewhere after that. His name is ED SMITH --and seeing him just now at some business in New York, I suggested that he send some poems he felt possible for SLATE. I just find his work very effective, very affective-- a sense of place and person all too generalized in so much of today's poetry. In any case, let this note serve to him specific. Ok! Best as ever, Robert Creeley -- Buffalo, NY 14207 Dear Robert Creeley, Many thanks! I'll be on the lookout for his poems. Best, Christine Bauch Slate 9/22/99 Dear Ed, It was a great pleasure seeing you both there like that - a very beneficent omen! Next day I saw your note in their guest book, so here we go. Are you equipped to send and email/note with or without ms. included- to get appropriate address for sending your stuff? If not, let me do it. Here's hoping something works out! Your poems are solid. All best, Bob ________________________ For Robert Creeley 1926-2005 by Ed Smith From New England you came down to teach us to talk about "love." You looked around "indeed" with us younger poets. We wanted to attack the "fort" and everything around it. Now you are among "a company of poets" and we the living must as you said go "onward." 4/3/05 Jonathan Skinner Creeley's death was a real blow, and a shock ... I finally got around to reading your useful page of tributes. I was about to send/ write something, when you put out the call, but every time I started, the gesture of memorializing felt too early, too unreal. As many, many tributes have acknowledged, it's surprising, on losing him, to realize how close, how personal Creeley's presence was. Of course, here in Buffalo and for me Bob's presence was in many respects real-time-- including his great family, Penelope, Hannah, Will. But there is that tutelage of his ear, the sincerity and seriousness of the line break and _doing it_ in words, on the page, that many of us came to early, and grew up with. As a teen cutting my literary teeth on the Beats, behind the exuberance of Ginsberg or Kerouac, the whimsy of Corso, Creeley's short lines held out a bridge to more terse and lasting measures of lyric art, back with Wyatt, say . . . My parents had many of the New American poets on their shelves, but I think I came to Creeley before Olson, Duncan, Zukofsky . . . What I might call Creeley's Elizabethan measures (and tones) really made him to my ears, and continue to make him, perverse as it sounds, more immediately accessible. I'm not talking about fixed, stanzaic form, here; rather about syllable, rhythm, bittersweet tone. Zukofsky's Elizabethanism, for instance, tends to emphasize the dulcet . . . overly sweet, at times. There is a real bite, perhaps an earthiness, to Creeley's sounds that I never tire of. None of these considerations are separable (of course) from "content." The relation of loving and fighting to what happens at the "surface" of the poem, in the breaking and joining of words, strikes a sharpness of feeling that is neither formal nor immediate-- an emotion unavailable to more expressivist modes. I think the refrain comes out in Creeley's later work (especially the last book) but it's almost a resistance to musicality that I learned from For Love, Words and Pieces. An austerity given over to, or "for," love. Maybe it's a certain Protestantism, a fetishizing of discipline: in any case, Creeley's is the work that makes me want to write, everytime I read it. His are the measures to remember, when I want a more severe judgment of my own. Oddly, I only came to the American ground of Creeley's writing (viz. Williams) much later . . . And I probably haven't even begun to tap into the nineteenth-century strain in his work; although the most moving reading of a poem I ever heard Creeley give, a couple of years back, was of Arnold's "Dover Beach." Then, of course, as Taylor Brady notes, there was meeting Creeley and the immensely human bringing-down-to-earth of his friendship, "discovering in his talk and presence that being a poet was a matter of finding endless resource in small talk, small occurrence, a life lived." And there was the almost unbelievable solicitude toward younger poets, the prompt correspondence and effective helpfulness, shared out literally to hundreds of us. There is much, much more to say. Enough to say, for now, that Creeley's disappearance has left a gaping hole in our lives. Also that he "made it," like they say-- in the mark he's made on our language, on our lives in language, Creeley will be with us "forever," in his sense of that word, here and now. Here are some words I wrote four days after Creeley's death, as a final, April snowstorm muted the echoes. While You Sleep (for r.c.) who knows what dreams are in- side of what de- sire knows I do not the new press of flesh cloaks the world in April's snows sounds a soft flurry what dreams engineer the lady knows, does not sleep toward the wall the gist is satis- factory an angel's might the hurt is snow bound what small birds are heard to say when the wind dies words move remove above the sun delights mountains behind the mind remains as I write all of this a choked highway drops peace slow-- the frozen rain sighs cars through it ruffles sirens at the world's edge the one-eyed cat stretches a white paw beneath the door another breath catches you back of sleep desire's whole each time, wants to shake you no backing out to grow young stay old no keeping off this car crashed into mountains a walk out beneath open skies could not die without you in spite of what the birds sing snows inside will keep us warm you will forget I am here words move remove unclothe her back to me she turns to the wall JS