Robert Creeley

[Jozanny]

I logged back on about 30 minutes ago because I wanted to contend with JBI over Creeley's short and mature pieces as being "not very good". Since the Masters of the Universe abolished that discussion, I decided to start a new one, because I was taught a few things about Dr. Creeley's shorter poems which might prove insightful, and might amend the reaction against their lack of formal conceit in the mode of Frost, or Roethke, who we looked at in the poetry book club.

First, a snippet from those wonderful summaries at Poets.org


Through the Black Mountain Review and his own critical writings, Creeley helped to define an emerging counter-tradition to the literary establishment—a postwar poetry originating with Pound, Williams, and Zukofsky and expanding through the lives and works of Olson, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, Denise Levertov, Edward Dorn, and others.
***
In a review of Life & Death, Forrest Gander writes: "Robert Creeley has forged a signature style in American poetry, an idiosyncratic, highly elliptical, syntactical compression by which the character of his mind's concentrated and stumbling proposals might be expressed ... Reading his poems, we experience the gnash of arriving through feeling at thought and word."

The poem I have selected to discuss is Water Music (http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15704).

His opening couplet leads off leading the reader to suspect that we are in for a romantic treat. How often has the word been compared to beautiful music in a body of water wherein the soul can lose sense of self for awhile, or even in the space of reading a poem? Doesn't the "bounce" recall the refractive playfulness of waves words might be? But then that bounce encounters civilization and wildlife, (boats, birds) at the same time, caught in a tautology, looking for substance, which the poet defies in the last two couplets with a deafening thud.

Robert is always looking for ways to explore the solidness of silence in his minimalism--to me it works if you give it a chance. This is not confessionalism, but a fracturing defiance.

[JBI]

That poem is better than the other one - the other poem was rather silly. This one is better, though I am not convinced of it as something spectacular.

[Jozanny]

That poem is better than the other one - the other poem was rather silly. This one is better, though I am not convinced of it as something spectacular.

Methinks this community suffers between extremes of grandiosity and commercial-baiting, and leaves little room for anything else--that said, maybe it is because I'm closing in on 50, maybe because the influences of my youth came from the Beat academics, but spectacular isn't what the fellow is after, mon ami.

I am going to go finish watching the Phillies finally make destiny, but I will come at this a few times more, in a bit.

[_Shannon_]

I *heart* Creeley. I would say that his poetry, along with Williams are the two biggest influences on both how I read and how I write poetry.

However, for me, some of what I love is completely tied up with being American. I feel that Creeley really takes up the torch of Williams and Olson in creating an American tradition- completely distinct from that of Europe. Creeley comes out of the deconstructionist-esque(how's that for a made up word!) tradition of post war America. I find Creeley's poems to really hone in on Pound's idea that only emotion endures-better perhpas than any other English language poet.

Poetry uses words, but it isn't about words...it's about emotion-or at least so argues Pound.

[blp]

I heart Creeley too. In fact, he's the author of one of my all-time favourite poems, though it's not really typical of his work as a whole:

If You

If you were going to get a pet
what kind of animal would you get.

A soft-bodied dog, a hen
Feathers and fur to begin it again.

At the end of the day, when it gets dark,
I saw an animal in the park.

Bring it home to give to you
I have seen animals break in two.

You were hoping for something soft
and loyal and clean and wondrously careful.

A form of otherwise vicious habit
Can have long ears and be called a rabbit.

Dead, died, will die, want,
Morning, midnight, I asked you

If you were going to get a pet
What kind of animal would you get.



One of those things you just know you'll never quite equal. I've typed it out from memory as I can't find it online, but I think it's all correct, right down to the absence of question marks at the end of the questions.

My favourite bit of the one you posted, Jozanny, is 'They look for a place to sit and eat.' Not sure about the last couplet. I almost like the sentiment, which isn't necessarily as nihilist as it sounds, but maybe it's too pat within the kind of zenny Black Mountain context he comes out of. I sometimes feel like that general desire for lessness ended up painting some of these guys into a corner - and Creeley is possibly the lessnessest of all. How do you feel he compares to Lorinne Neidecker? I think there's a tightness and care about her condensations, even when they feel casual and colloquial (or perhaps especially) that just slightly gives her the edge.

[blp]

Jozanny, where or what was the other Creeley poem that started you off on this. Can't find it.

[quasimodo1]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=1509

[stlukesguild]

JoZ... I'd be quite hard-put to discuss Creeley... not having read much... and little of what I did not having impressed me one way or the other. I quite like Water Music... it certainly does have a certain Zen nature to it... which was quite common to the Black Mountain poets as well as the West Coast school. I don't think that JBI's not having been particularly blown away by such a poem suggests a preference for bombast and grandiosity. I think it would be hard to champion any poet upon a single simple lyric... be it Tu Fu, Li Po, Verlaine, Sapho, or Creeley.

[quasimodo1]

YESTERDAYS


Sixty-two, sixty-three, I most remember
As time W. C. Williams dies and we are
Back from a hard two years in Guatemala
Where the meager provision of being
Schoolmaster for the kids of the patrones
Of two coffee plantations has managed
Neither a life nor money. Leslie dies in
Horror of bank giving way as she and her
Sister and their friends tunnel in to make
A cubby. We live in an old cement brick
Farmhouse already inside the city limits
Of Albuquerque. Or that has all really
Happened and we go to Vancouver where,
Thanks to friends Warren and Ellen Tallman,
I get a job teaching at the University of British
Columbia. It’s all a curious dream, a rush
To get out of the country before the sad
Invasion of the Bay of Pigs, that bleak use
Of power. One of my British colleagues
Has converted the assets of himself and
His wife to gold bullion and keeps the
Ingots in a sturdy suitcase pushed under
Their bed. I love the young, at least I
Think I do, in their freshness, their attempt
To find ways into Canada from the western
Reaches. Otherwise the local country seems
Like a faded Edwardian sitcom. A stunned
Stoned woman runs one Saturday night up
And down the floors of the Hydro Electric
Building on Pender with the RCMP in hot
Pursuit where otherwise we stood in long
Patient lines, extending often several blocks
Up the street. We were waiting to get our
Hands stamped and to be given a 12 pack
Of Molson’s. I think, I dream, I write the
Final few chapters of The Island, the despairs
Gathering at the end. I read Richard Brautigan’s
Trout Fishing In America but am too uptight
To enjoy his quiet, bright wit. Then that
Summer there is the great Vancouver Poetry
Festival, .....
{excerpt}

Robert Creeley, "Yesterdays" from If I Were Writing This. Copyright © 2003 by Robert Creeley. Reprinted with the permission of New Directions Publishing Company, www.wwnorton.com/nd/welcome.htm.


Pasted from <http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=171579>

[Jozanny]

JoZ... I'd be quite hard-put to discuss Creeley... not having read much... and little of what I did not having impressed me one way or the other. I quite like Water Music... it certainly does have a certain Zen nature to it... which was quite common to the Black Mountain poets as well as the West Coast school. I don't think that JBI's not having been particularly blown away by such a poem suggests a preference for bombast and grandiosity. I think it would be hard to champion any poet upon a single simple lyric... be it Tu Fu, Li Po, Verlaine, Sapho, or Creeley.

No, but Robert is, generally, not about transcendent mastery, and he is one of the few out of Black Mountain whom I don't need to be. JBI misses the point, as Robert is referencing transcendence with an internal irony. One needs to be aware of what Robert is pushing back against to appreciate the compression, and the least possible expressiveness, in the best of his smaller pieces.

In some of his longer and earlier ones the irony doesn't quite hold, but it does work if you over lay what he's doing onto American Romanticism, etc. For a poet like myself, there is appreciation in the contrast.