20 May Remembering Robert Creeley: Onward #2

At Just Buffalo Literary Center we’re proud to present this ongoing collection of community remembrances honoring Robert Creeley’s life & legacy in Western New York and beyond.
Thank you to everyone who has shared your memory, reflection, or personal story.

Breath / for Creeley

As in, will it carry?
As in, does it hold up behind

the frame of it, before
meaning, in the way

the chest rises, and falling
puts out the soul? As in

Ellington’s Swing, Lorca’s
duende, does the breath

fit the body, does it
convey not less

or more a sound’s fill
but enough, specifically

enough to slip from talk
to poetry and back

to silence where it doesn’t matter
whether it’s poetry

or not? Breath
is the work left

to all of us here, to find, specifically,
enough. (Breath.) Dig.

From Points of Departures (White Pine Press, 2008)
—Paul T Hogan

“I worked at the Courier-Express — Buffalo’s morning newspaper for quite a while — where Robert Creeley was highly regarded in the newsroom. On a website — www.nyshistoricnewspapers.org — run by the Empire State Library Network, digital copies of the newspaper are searchable. Below is an image containing a story about Mr. Creeley. To find it on the web, go to this link”
—Mitch Gerber

“I did not live in Buffalo while Creeley lived here, but I admired him from afar. So after I moved back and began producing the Niagara Frontier Heritage Moments for WBFO, I jumped at the chance to do one about Creeley. The obvious choice would be to center the episode on “Drive, He Said”, but the episode had to be about Buffalo… and that’s when I found “Buffalo Evening”, a sublime poem that captures all the melancholy—and the beauty—of this northern city in a single, chilly scene of winter. To recite it, I found another Buffalo bard, Joey Giambra, who gave it a lovely brooding, moody reading. But great as Joey’s reading was, there’s something about Creeley’s own reading—formal, the emphasis on the odd line breaks—that grounds it in structure while, paradoxically, making it soar emotionally…. How lucky we are to have had Robert Creeley here, living among us. Listen to “Heritage Moments: ‘Time, to Think of It All’ — Robert Creeley in Buffalo”
—Jeff Z. Klein

Words for Robert Creeley

As real as thinking
wonders created
by the possibility—

forms.

[Pieces, 3]

I was given to read Pieces again this year——lucky hours in amazement of work I lived with and lived by in my early twenties. The book’s opening stanza, in excess of itself, would merit a separate volume to properly discern what those lines manage to condense, triangulated as they are between the material conditions of sight and sound, words open to amplitude and speculation, and the enabling changes that a thought-form makes possible. As in so much of his work, throughout Pieces and in “Numbers (for Robert Indiana),” Creeley succeeded in so upending the habits, conditions, and interests that otherwise pass for common sense as to sharpen the edges of perception: “This point of so-called / consciousness is forever / a word making up / this world of more / or less than it is.”

Although he was no longer teaching, he gave heartily of his time to meet in person when in my thirties I studied at SUNY Buffalo (1999-2003). Those were conversations that could begin by recalling his days lived in Mexico (reflected in the final sequence of Pieces, “MAZATLÁN: SEA”). It could range as well to include a recent engagement with the visual arts as a restless verbal act in relation to the seeable, echoing patterns of thought akin to those in “Presences: A Text for Marisol,” and extending that insight into the aesthetic and personal currencies of contemporary artists and writers; all the while demonstrating——in what endured for me as a lifelong lesson——how the qualities of disquiet, uncertainty, ferocity of mind, and self-possession are mutually constitutive of all and any undertaking.

What do you do,
what do you say,
what do you think,
what do you know.

[Pieces, 81]
—Roberto Tejada

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Do you have a Robert Creeley memory or tribute to share? Let us know! Through this community remembrance project, your words will join others across time & place to honor the life that Robert Creeley lived here, among us.

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