07 Jan “To Say It” by Robert Creeley
the light’s caught the north
side of the trees next
door, the extensive
lawn to the sea’s
edge where the marsh grass
seems a yellowish
green haze in late
afternoon. Above the clouds
move over, storm’s edge
passes in bunches of fluffy
soft dark-centered blobs,
all going or gone
as the wind freshens
from the land, blowing out
to sea. Now by the edge
of the window glass at the level
of the floor the grass
has become particularized
in the late light, each
edge of grass stalk
a tenacious fact of being there,
not words only, but only words,
only these words, to say it.
If, as in a bottle, the message
has been placed, if air, water
and earth try to say so with
human agency, no matter the imperfect,
useless gesture, all that is lost,
or mistaken, the arrogance
of trying to, the light comes again,
comes here, after brief darkness is still here.
About the Poet
Robert White Creeley (1926-2005) is widely recognized as one of the most important and influential American poets of the twentieth century. Most often associated with the Black Mountain School, Creeley’s work formed a bridge between the modernist poets of the early 20th century and the several generations of innovative poets and poetics that followed him.
Creeley joined the faculty at the University at Buffalo at the invitation of Charles Olson in 1967 at a time when SUNY-Buffalo’s English Department had already defined itself as a bastion for poets, writers, and critics rather than traditional academic literary scholars. Creeley furthered the UB English Department’s international reputation in co-founding the Poetics Program in 1991 with Charles Bernstein, Susan Howe, Raymond Federman, and Dennis Tedlock.
Creeley published more than sixty books of poetry, fiction, and criticism in the United States and abroad, including If I Were Writing This (New Directions, 2003); Just in Time: Poems 1984–1994 (New Directions, 2001); Life & Death (New Directions, 1998); Echoes (New Directions, 1994); Selected Poems 1945–1990 (University of California Press, 1991); Memory Gardens (Marion Boyars Publishing, 1986); Mirrors (New Directions, 1983); The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1945–1975 (University of California Press, 1982); Later (New Directions, 1979); The Finger (Black Sparrow Press, 1968); and For Love: Poems 1950–1960 (Scribner, 1962).
Creeley’s honors include the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award, the Frost Medal, the Shelley Memorial Award, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Rockefeller Foundation grant, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation. In 1999, Yale University awarded Creeley its biennial Bollingen Prize in recognition of his lifetime achievement in American Poetry.
Creeley served as New York state poet laureate from 1989 to 1991 and as the Samuel P. Capen Professor of Poetry and Humanities at the State University of New York, Buffalo. He was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 1999.
His contributions to the wider Western New York community are incalculable. Though never officially named Buffalo’s Poet Laureate, Creeley was a defining voice in the Buffalo writing community for nearly forty years. In fact, one could easily say that Just Buffalo Literary Center would not exist were it not for Robert Creeley’s poetry.
This poem originally appeared in his 1983 collection Mirrors published by New Directions Press.
The Poem of the Week feature is curated by literary legacy awardee R.D. Pohl.