23 May Remembering Robert Creeley: Onward #6

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.

Bob was a gifted poet and a very generous man. On several occasions,in Waldoboro and at Naropa he was was generous enough to spend time with me, doing an interview with me for my quarterly poetry journal,THE CAFE REVIEW.
He was very patient with me!

—Steve Luttrell

I was fortunate to have Bob as a professor in both undergrad and graduate school. He and his work made a lasting impression.
I specifically remember one class in American poetry where his frustration with our silent class of undergraduates led to a scathing poem. Oh, we so deserved it.

—Anne Pluto

Creeley: His Metric
The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1945_75
previously published in 20th Century Pleasures, Ecco Press, 1984

Someone tells the story that when Robert Creeley was at Har­vard m the forties and began reading William Carlos Williams at a time when there was no professor to tell one how to read William Carlos Williams, he simply assumed that all of Wil­liams’ lines were end-stopped, so that when he began to write his own poems in the one genuinely original verbal music in the English language in the second half of the twentieth cen­tury, it was with a patient sense of apprenticeship. Which of course all writi􀁈g. is, so the story has a wonderful rightness, though I doubt It IS true. Creeley is a very subtle and conscious artist; he saw something in that work that no one else had seen.

When Williams broke his lines in odd places, when he wrote

It’s all in
the sound. A song.
Seldom a song. It should

be a song-made of
particulars, wasps,
a gentian-something
immediate, open

scissors, a lady’s
eyes …

it is reasonably certain that those line breaks in awkward places where words are most riveted together were intended to speed up the movement. The break between in and the was so, unnatural that it hurried you from one line to the next and, in doing so, imitated the swiftness of perception. At the same time, it roughened the poem visually, gave it the kind of un­gainliness that Williams found beautiful. When he wanted a slow, grave line, he gave you the elements of the perception in neat, syntactical units with natural pauses at the line end:

Or the tree’s leaves

that are not the tree
but mass to shape it

Creeley, the young man reading those poems in the time of the ascendancy of Eliot’s prose, of a reawakened interest in the tetrameters of the old man Yeats, knew what everyone knows, that in a line of poetry the last position is emphatic, and whether by cunning or mistake, he read Williams accordingly, giving each line a full pause at the end. Try reading Williams that way, with a full stop at the end of the line. It syncopates the rhythm and throws an odd emphasis on the last word in the line:

It’s all in
the sound. A song.
Seldom a song. It should

be a song-made of
particulars, wasps,
a gentian-something
immediate, open

scissors, a lady’s
eyes …

What becomes visible is the strangeness of the struggle to articulate the fact of the sentence. Creeley was reading about how to make a song, all right, but with a completely new and equal attention to the operation the mind has to perform in order to do so.

It was a while before the rest of the world would be similarly struck. I remember when it happened to me, partly because I had just heard Creeley read at a poetry festival in England. I was lying on a beach in Cornwall in the early spring; it was unseasonably hot and, in the variability of that weather, one large dark cloud which seemed to be coming straight out of France passed over us and let fall two or three minutes of gentle snow. One of my friends, who was in London studying to be an analyst, had been reading to us from another new arrival to the Anglo-American shore, Jacques Lacan’s Ecrits. Lacan seemed to be proposing that because the resolution of the Oedipus complex and the acquisition of language occurred around the same time, they were the same thing. The non of you-can’t-have-your-mother and the nom of the father and his access to mastery of the world through symbols were identical, so that the laws of language were the very form of consciousness and they carried its freight of loss and guilt and symbolic power. The idea was fascinating-it made the simplest of lan­guage gestures explosive and puzzling-and very French-the bourgeois gentilhomme discovering this time that prose spoke him-but not really funny; all the spiritual loneliness of the twentieth century was in it.

It should

be a song, made of
particulars, wasps,
a gentian, something
immediate …

Should be, of particulars: the disjunctions make us feel, if not understand, the almost unformed, prehensile yearning that lurks inside every preposition. Inside, I found myself thinking, the prepositional disposition of the human mind and its fictions of location.

My wife was trying to learn to do group therapy from a Greek psychiatrist at a hospital near Cambridge. Her training thus far had consisted of listening to him trying to get the middle-class English trainees to say I instead of one. “I feel, I feel, I feel,” he would scream in frustration. And an unruffled student replied, “But sometimes one means one, doesn’t one?” It had seemed an amusing story about English reticence, but Lacan made you wonder if the American I was any more per­sonal, any less a matter of pure acculturation. Creeley had written:

As soon as
I speak, I
speaks. It

wants to
be free but
impassive lies

in the direction
of its

words…

It, Bruno Bettelheim has reminded us is what Freud called the unconscious. Lacan seemed to be saying that all of language and all of the cultural assumptions that we inherit when we acquire language are the I, by virtue of which it had become inaccessible. I remember feeling disoriented by the idea. My friend, for reasons I still don’t understand, seemed delighted. The weather passed over, heading west, and we were in sun again. “Freak snow,” somebody said, “The guy is freak snow.”

This explains something about Creeley’s popularity in the sixties, which had puzzled me. How could a poet whom I found so austere and demanding attract such a wide and en­thusiastic audience? I had sat with his poems so long before they yielded their meaning that it was dismaying to go into a college lounge jammed with people sitting on the floor, nod­ding their heads in profound sympathy and agreement with some poem they had only heard once. They weren’t faking; the answer had to lie elsewhere, in the difference between what Susan Sontag has usefully called erotics and herme­neutics.

At the State University of New York at Buffalo, in the salad days of that amazing institution, I got a clue one day during a massive seminar on popular culture. The year must have been 1969; the room was packed with students and faculty dressed, as the style was, to their archetypes: Indians, buffalo hunters, yogin, metaphysical hoboes, rednecks, lumberjacks, Mandingo princes, lions, tigers, hawks, and bears. Everything the Ameri­can middle class had repressed lounged in that room listening to speaker after speaker with beatific attention. Which took some doing. I remember in particular a graduate student from the Progressive Labor Party who read an exceedingly long essay on the parallels between Bob Dylan’s career and the growth of political theory in the New Left. “John Wesley Harding,” I think, corresponded to a reawakening of working-­class consciousness among students and intellectuals. When he finished, Edgar Friedenburg, the sociologist, rose to speak. He is a dapper man and he wore a light gray suit with a striped broadcloth Brooks Brothers shirt. His glasses sat low on his nose, his hair was tousled, and he looked amused. He only managed one sentence: “I have been reflecting this afternoon that we are patient beings, and that, though popular culture deserves our most urgent attention, it requires from us a good deal less credence and more clearwater.” Some of the audience laughed; and a student in front stood up, jabbed a finger forward, and said, “Friedenburg, it took twenty fucking years of repressive fucking education for you to learn to talk like that.”

No wonder Creeley packed the halls. His audiences were extraordinarily sensitive to language and they did not distrust it, but they distrusted deeply the assumption of it. Beyond the issues in any particular poem, they heard that attitude shared and worked through when Creeley read:

One more day gone,
done, found in
the form of days.

It began, it
ended-was
forward, backward,

slow, fast, a
sun shone, clouds,
high in the air I was

for awhile with others,
then came down
on the ground again.

No moon. A room in
a hotel-to begin
again

In the assumption of language, people get on airplanes at Ken­nedy, have good or bad flights, are reminded of various things such a passage might symbolize, land at Heathrow, take a black cab into London, and arrive at a little hotel just off Something or other Square, the whole experience thick with names and an inherence of literary and historical associations, all welded together by the grammatical assurance of the ex­periencing subject. That is not what this poem renders; it is just not that comforted or comforting. It renders, below these twentieth-century pleasures, what the mind must, slowly, in love and fear, perform to locate itself again, previous to any other discourse.

The erotics of language: the stunned, lovely, slow insistence on accuracy that the mind is, in language. I don’t know what other rhythms could render this more movingly:

It began, it
ended-was
forward, backward,

slow, fast, a
sun shone, clouds,
high in the air I was

for awhile with others …

“The organization of poetry,” Creeley said in an interview in 1965, “has moved to a further articulation in which the rhythmic and sound structure now become not only evident but a primary coherence in the total organization of what’s being experienced.” And this: ” … words are returned to an almost primal circumstance, by a technique that makes use of feedback, that is, a repetitive relocation of phrasing where words are returned to an almost objective state of presence so that they speak rather than someone speaking through them.”

Poetics, for the last seventy years, has assumed the existence of a dialectical tension between conscious and unconscious thought. The system of analogies derived from Levi-Strauss and Lacan and Derrida seems to assert that consciousness carries with it its own displaced and completely symbolic unconscious, that is, the structures of language by which con­sciousness is constituted; and this unconscious is to conscious­ness what language-“the collective, structural, unconscious system of differential relationships which constitute the pos­sibility of any individual speech act”-is to particular acts of speech. This is what Creeley’ s mode and the attractiveness of his mode have to do with, at least much of the time; it is a poetics which addresses the tension between speaking and being spoken through language; and he makes a brilliant and unnerving music out of it.

It is a truism that the person who believes that consciousness is sufficient and in control is, by definition, out of control. Any­one who thinks of language merely as a tool used to perform a particular speech act is in the same condition. For the student in that audience, Professor Frieden burg’s syntax was an illusion of mastery in a world manifestly and wildly out of control. I thought there was in it as well a good deal of resentment toward the forms of mastery that are possible. The confronta­tion was a stand-off. It interested me because the place where they stopped was precisely Robert Creeley’s point of depar­ture: the fact, as Lacan has innocently insisted, that there is in the nature of our use of language “something more meant than what we say.”

A more familiar way to talk about this matter is to evoke the exposure scene in The Wizard of Oz, where the two visions of language are also two visions of mastery and power in general. I am thinking of the scene in which the wizard, a stern face on a huge screen, booms out his mighty definition of himself: I AM OZ; and Dorothy’s little dog Toto, the only creature in the room not scared witless by the impressiveness of it all, trots up to the curtain and pulls it back, revealing a nervous man fiddling desperately at a control panel and speaking into a microphone. Language has such power that poets are always both the image on the screen and the figure at the controls who tries to act as a medium for that powerful projection. Creeley has dealt with this problem by always writing from the point of view of the man behind the curtain. In doing so, he arriveFor Love, which must be one of the most widely admired books published since 1945, retains its intimacy and its sting. Words, which is central to the issue I’ve described, is work of painful, sometimes luminous auster­ity. Pieces is, among other things, a meditation on time, on temporality as the condition of consciousness and of art. It is imagistic in method, but its images are to the traditional image what an X-ray is to a photograph. It is also the book that began to irritate critics. It is full of small, wry musings like this:

Thinking-and coincident
experience of the situation.

“I think he’ll hit me.”
He does. Etc.

and

People
were walking
by

He wants that by to suggest all of time even as it catches the comedy of the fact that people go for walks partly to walk by things, to do a leisurely imitation of mortality, to, as Creeley would say, etc. These small, quick dances of the mind do not always work, but for me at least they are never without inter­est. There is a lot here that is playful, verbal equivalents of those Jim Dine drawings which try to discover the difference between pencil scribbles and pubic hair. The exhilaration of them, of this body of work, is the sense of an artist for whom the rhythms of any articulation are a possible poetry. “Who comes,” he says elsewhere, “comes on time.” Also, “What do you want with the phone / if you won’t answer it.” What else have I left out? He is a love poet above all. And a poet of dark wit and irritability and friendship. Sometimes his poems can rip you open and then turn ironically aside. The worst re­proach that can be made against his work is that some of it seems begun by Francis Bacon and finished by David Hock­ney. That can be dismaying, but the root of the impulse is also his great strength; it is a loathing for eloquence as a form of delusion and self-importance. If you go to Creeley as you go to some other poets, for love of the social power or the trans­forming grandeur of language, you are likely to find him either frightening or incomprehensible. His way has been to take the ordinary, threadbare phrases and sentences by which we locate ourselves and to put them under the immense pressure of the rhythms of poetry and to make out of that what dance or music there can be. In the end, his tradition is the New England one of Puritan self-examination which extends from Edward Taylor through Emily Dickinson to Robert Lowell. None of these writers is his own particular master, and he departs from them in making the impulses of his own speech the object of scrutiny. In any case, he is a master, one of the handful at work in America in any art.

—Robert Hass

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