An Elegy for Robert Creeley

1
I remember when I first read a line of poetry by Robert Creeley. I was staying in a city, any city, but one in which I could not speak the local dialect nor make anything useful out of the signs, at the house of a friend's friend who was out of town for a month. I was curious about my host in his empty house, and so even in his absence walked around his living room looking at the paintings on the walls, the musical instruments and their particular wear, and the shelves brimming with books. I didn't have much time to linger, but I pulled one volume from his shelf at random and opened to a page at random and randomly read a few lines of poetry:

My face is my own, I thought.
But you have seen it
turn into a thousand years.
I watched you cry.

I would turn this stanza over and over in my mind for the next month as I went though the city as a stranger, vacillating between conception and mystery, hearing these words as I would see a prism, turning over and over, not finishing any thoughts or leading to any conclusions, merely redirecting them, into unpredictable ways, or springing them out from the "surface of pedestrian fact." The redirection would be recalled for me much later as I read through Creeley's later works, as the light of the sun leftover in the eyes of another as you are looking into them.
The book, I saw, was an anthology called Naked Poetry featuring poets of the beat generation. The author was Robert Creeley, and the picture of him showed a dark, lank man winking ominously, I thought, at the camera as he sat next to a wooden raven.
This image would remain in my mind as the defining image of him, just as his mantra could be most handily and simply that "form is never more than an extension of content." As Creeley himself has pointed out in interviews, his own emphasis is on the phrase which echoes Poe's raven; nevermore; "never more than." This emphasis on his part is noticeable in the brevity of his line lengths. This principle played such a key part of the Projectivist theory of Charles Olsen that of three main points he makes, this comprises the second one in its entirety. The first point Olson describes as the "kinetic of the thing," and a particular poem called They echoes the Olson essay:

No field
but they walk
in it. No place

without them, any
discretion is useless.

Of this assertion that any discretion is useless, he also plants the seed of Olson's third point, the "process of the thing," which much like the action-painting of Jackson Pollock, whom Creeley nearly fought in a bar before knowing who he was, depicts process, spontaneous process, as the heart of both aesthetic and inspiration. This was a move away from American Realism, toward a more dynamic and abstract art which valued the energy of the artist and worked toward realizing the direct inspiration via materials to the audience. While Pollock flung his paint at the canvas evoking a passion not yet seen by the public, Creeley worked at forming the American lexicon with his own passions, creating poems that, as William Carlos Williams famously said, contained the "subtlest feeling for rhythm I encounter anywhere except Pound."
The rhythms in Creeley's poems, with some exception, leave aside heavy handed end rhyme for complex interlockings of syllables. Many seem utterly devoid of any rhythm or conscious organization, but allow the ear to fix on something more complex.

Locate I
love you some-
where in

teeth and
eyes, bite
it but

take care not
to hurt, you
want so

much so
little.

Creeley's poetry was signifigantly influenced, as was Olson's by the work of precursors such as William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound and Louis Zukofsky. Williams in particular was imbortant in redefining the possibility of form for American poetry. While his triadic stanza was his most well known, his experimentation with form marked the beginning of free-verse in poetry. He was conscious of the term's paradox nature. Rather than envisioning a verse free from structure, he sought a verse free from the strictures placed on poetry before him viz. traditional form. This did not stop him from establishing forms of his own, or from his followers, such as Zukofsky, to write such complex and anachronistic forms as the sestina. Zukofsky has acknowledged that Williams did open the forms of poetry available and proposed a new measure, but also criticizes him forhis essays concerning what the new measure was capable of, citing Pound as a more thorough writer in this regard. Williams' famous dictum "no ideas but in things" is a touchstone for his theory, which reevaluated what assumptions one works with when composing a poem;

we know nothing and can know nothing
but
the dance, dance but a measure
contrapunctally,
satyrically, the tragic foot.

The tragic foot is of the satyr, mortal Greek creatures which are famous for drunkeness, carousing, and causing panic in men. He acknowledges the temporal, beastly nature in something even so sublime as poetry, and declares his openness and indebtedness to it. The tragedy and tawniness of his dance describe the nature of imagination and its possibility. It is this attention to liminal forces which opens his poetry to a wide variety of cultural topics by creating a form in which these forces could be addressed. It is for this reason race theorists, feminists, marxists, beats, environmentalists, and many other politically-motivated ideologies have found his poetry both accessible and useful in finding a context. While Projectivists tended to steer away from overtly political topics, there is a strong undercurrent of politics in many of the writing which remain relevant and important today as when they were written.
What was changed with Williams was not only concerning openness to form, traditional or non-traditional, but rather the openness to invention, which he saw as a positive and particularly American emphasis. William's goal was nothing short of reinventing the language, alhthough he often sites James Joyce as an inspiration for this goal as someone who had the critical intelligence to accomplish such a thing.
What Williams worked toward, an American poetry distinguished from a European poetry, marks a signifigant factor in the work of Olson and Creeley as well. The point of view of the poet becomes all encompassing fact of WCW's work, which recognizes the particular, exploratory nature of observation:

One by one objects are defined--
It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf.

The humanism of European poetry is distinctly absent from these lines. Rather than establishing a hierarchy, with the assumptions which underlie the query of the artist, he establishes an amoral point of view, the quality of which is measured by, as Creeley wrote in the introduction to Olson's selected works, "the test--which is the reality of one's quite literal being--[which] denies any investment of reality prior to its fact." In this sense Projectivism is defined apart from Existentialism, which Creeley does admit have an "apparent closeness of sympathies." Olson wrote that such an analysis as the exisistentialist "accomplishes a description." What description cannot accomplish is a distrust for assumptions which exist prior to its fact, and hide what nakedness activates "the eye and soul/ as though it had never happened before." What is seen then can accomplish what categorization cannot; confrontation with the character as it is self-representing, particular, and subsequently relevant, since the nakedness of the thing, once said, is "what one means," and is the accomplishment of art. There is an absence of existential despair in Projectivism since language's shortcoming is not the matter, but rather the return of language to its "place in experience, neither more nor less than any other fact." The close physical examination of objects, what Burton Hatlen has called a "poetics of presence" was carried out by Zukovsky:

To my wash stand
in which I wash
my left hand
and my right hand

The key difference between physical description and poetry, however, is only a musicality which Pound described as the "dance of the intellect," and Creeley as "Who/ Am I--/identity/ singing," which is not an intellect superimposed upon an object, however numinous, but rather:

...a song of
water from the the right faucet and the left
my left and my
right hand mixing hot and cold.

Zukovsky's acknowledgment of music, itself much influenced by WCW, finds an echo in Creeley's poem Water Music:

The words are beautiful music.
The words bounce in like water.

Water music,
loud in the clearing

off the boats,
birds, leaves...

A list of the qualities Creeley describes as important of the medium of poetry does well to describe his work; "constant, simple, elusive, specific. It costs so little and so much. It occupies a life, yet can only find one in living. It is a music, a playful construct of feeling, a last word and communion." Communication was a central motif in his life, marked by his spirited volubility, which he felt to be "the intimate, familiar, localising, detailing, speculative, emotional, unending talking that has given my life a way of thinking of itself in the very fact and feeling of existence. God knows one wants no end to that ever." I have always admired Creeley's sense of mission, that he was never daunted but rather stimulated by the challenge that lay in valuing both the desire for endless talk and to be unpretensious, to have the discretion of knowing that it is "cruel to explain what there is no reason to explain." What is left to say. In The Answer, he writes:

Will we speak to each other
making grass bend as if
a wind were before us, will our

way to be graceful, as
substantial as the movement
of something moving so gently.

The insistent rhythm of these lines display willful angularity, moving out from a point of view that informs the piece. Creeley tends to use deep feeling as a point of embarkment to encounter language as phenomena both a part of himself and apart, both tied to and out of his control but to what degree we can only know by engaging it, projecting it. The art was not an imposition upon language as a material, but rather a "manifest directly of the energy inherent in the materials." His encounters then describe the feeling and images often as a sensual patchwork which commits feedback on itself which works to create dissonance even as parts slip into focus:

Da. Da. Da da.
Where is the song.
What's wrong
with life

ever. More?
Or less--
days, nights,
these

days. What's gone
is gone forever
every time, old friend's
voice here.

Creeley delivers his poems in a nearly stuttered, defensive tone which brings attention to the words like a fistfull of cold water when spoken, rather than, for example, lulling the reader with the warmth and roundness of a more pastoral tone. This, at his worst, makes Creeley sound like a paranoid version of WCW. At his best and most often the focus upon words used to address meaning viz. our collective lack of meaning, the insistence that breaks them apart as they are habits, and undermines the walls we have built to move words around in, store them up in, lock them out of, is a quality of Creeley's voice which makes him inimitable.

2
Robert was born in the spring of 1926. His family lived on a farm. As an infant he was involved in car accident: his father was driving and he was in the passenger seat. The windshield shattered, and a tiny sliver flew into Robert's left eye, blinding him and necessitating the eye's removal. His father died when he was very young, which would have a significant impact on the relationships he would have with older men later in life, and he continued to grow up with his mother on the farm in Massachusetts. He became increasingly violent in school and would attack classmates who teased him about his eye with frightening ferocity, once slamming a boy's head into the ground over and over and over.
After receiving a scholarship to the Holderness Academy, he excelled in studies and rhetorical debate. Other students called him "governor" due to his loquacity. He met a young woman named Ann MacKinnon near the end of his years there. She was his first lover, and first wife, although years would fall between the two estates. He attended Harvard. He wrote a poem which was published by a Harvard literary quarterly. He recalls being fascinated with Walt Whitman despite Whitman's unpopularity with his professors and fellow classsmates, and his disenfranchisement with the academic paradigm which strongly favored the formalistic "New Criticism," the same basic disenfranchisement that later became strongly associated with the beat "movement." He was kicked out of school for some stunt that involved stealing a door. He didn't work much.
With his leering intense look, his dark goatee and stringy dark hair, people often reacted strongly to him, some saying he looked like "satan." The dark side of Williams' satyr wrestled in his head. He drank too much and too often, but writing, and had become attached to an older poet who he would drink with. He decided to join the field service and went to India as an ambulance driver like E.E.Cummings. Se la guerre. He worked, he returned. Around this time he married Ann, still drank too much, but returned to Harvard, only to quit a month before his graduation. He lived on a Turkey farm in New Hampshire and for several years in France with Ann and their children. As he was in France, approaching his mid-twenties, he began corresponding with Charles Olson. Their intellectual bond became the firmament of a new poetics, with which Olson is more directly affiliated, spelled out in his essay Projective Verse. Their correspondence has been collected and makes for fascinating reading. Both men were uniquely brilliant, very serious, and inspired by their raw creative potential. Also common was an existential sense of the absurd, as in Creeley's much anthologized I Know a Man, and in a piece entitled Oh No:

If you wander far enough
you will come to it
and when you get there
they will give you a place to sit

for yourself only, in a nice chair,
and all your friends will be there
with smiles on their faces
and they will likewise have their places.

The energy meeting at both ends of their correspondence strikes like lightning over volumes of pages, an energy sometimes propitiating multiple letters in a single day. This inspiration provided the support both men needed for Creeley to write many of the poems that would appear in his first volume, For Love, and for Olson to carry on with his Maximus project.
In the early period of Creeley's work and particularly in Words there is an attention to anger and insecurity which would have made WCW's poetry more appealing than Pound's. While Pound's poetry is full of a righteous sort of anger, there is little room for insecurity. Out of Creeley's attention to his own failings comes a voice sympathetic with a modern masculinity. One poem in particular deals with the way the mind flagellates itself, noticing that the quality of meaning which cannot be translated into another medium proportionatly painful; "...I was/ lonely, I yelled...beside me, she put// her hand on/ my back, for which act// I think to say this/ wrongly."
Perhaps more valuable is his poem Anger, a poem which could have been written only by Creeley which summons the forces which drove him to throttle classmates when he was a child. Like The Whip, the poem transpires during a night when the speaker is in bed with a spouse, particularly vulnerable and most literally naked. What he finds in himself is imbalance, an inability to reconcile himself with his surroundings. Even his wife, reposed in sleep, is "not enough there."
Anger, he finds, is a "hole," a vacancy which is self-absorbing, endless in its hunger, conjuring the Inferno of Dante. Not wholly given to anger, he is in a position to observe it, even as he is drawn into it. The forces splitting him at this juncture, "him-/ self between them,/ stands empty and// holding out his/ hands to both," force him to acknowledge he cannot deal with anger by will alone, that forcing directed thinking at the issue does not solve it, or free himself from anger. The face which he knows to be his own is held up against the distortion of the the "face/ which is rage." WCW wrote that "if it is not art it is crime," and Creeley finds himself at the very edge of these two possiblities. If there were no crime, then would there be art? Without malformation would there be beauty? Of course not, and so what the poet can do is open oneself to both, with the body as crossroads, which is here viscerally evoked, as "each finger/ twisted/ from its shape until it broke,// and you screamed too/ with the other, in pleasure."
Locating the words "rage," "hatred" and "anger" Creeley finds a closing, an attempt to fill the vacancy of, a desire to end. What the end is, he "cannot give," because it is beyond his grasp, and to try and do so would be the end of the form of the split "him-/self." Coming to this conclusion, he reaches an ability to dislocate the end, which takes place at the end of part four of poem. Part five begins "After, what/ is it...It was/ another life, a/ day, some/ time gone..." The "real end of you," evoking apocalypse, is put off, cannot be experienced in the poem or in life, but is waited for and modeled upon, through broken measures of verse or breathe.

3

Creeley can be identified with a larger cultural stamp of the nineteen fifties from poems such as Wicker basket and Ode to Jack [Kerouac], as well as the hipsterisms that he spoke throughout his life, but also importantly in the sense that he both demonstrated and professed to the heavy influence of jazz, particularly post-swing bop and free jazz on his work. He mentions this in several interviews, usually name dropping Charlie Parker or Thelonius Monk. What he took away is a fluidity, a suspension and stretching out of time that allowed him to think in this new sounding rhythm;

The sun's
sky in
form of
blue sky
that

water will
never make
even
in
reflecton.

Sing, song,
mind's form
feeling
if
mistaken,

shaken,
broken water's
forms, love's
error
in water.

Had Creeley appreciated polka he might not be nearly so relevant today. As jazz remains a lively art form, and ideas of the Projective and the Avante Garde continue to reinvent themselves in such unlikely contemporaries as Jean Michel Basquiat and Lars Von Trier, Creeley's work is as successful now as it has been in the past, and before he passed away the record label Jagjaguwar, which also presses such indie acts as Oneida and Black Mountain, put out a CD of him performing his poetry. Despite his age, his death is a blow for active poetry in the United States. His voice specific and constant one, reminding us that poetry does matter in a time where people often need to be reminded, a time when up to sixty percent of the US population, according to some polls, do not read any books in the average year. Just a few years ago Creeley edited the "Best of the best" series which, in my opinion, was one of the better books of the series, and featured many young writers following the map he laid out for a progressive exploration of language and ideas. Morrissey said that an album is like a "friend that cannot be moved." I've felt that way about many authors and Robert was one of them.
He read a poem to celebrate the life of Allen Ginsberg after Allen passed in 1998, titled after a line from William Blake, which echoes WCW, his poem Numbers, and the poem written in memory of his mother, Genevieve Jules Creeley:

When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer...

A bitter twitter,
flitter,
of birds
in evening’s
settling,
a reckoning
beckoning,
someone’s getting
some sad news,
the birds gone to nest,
to roost
in the darkness,
asking no improvident questions,
none singing,
no hark,
no lark,
nothing in the quiet dark.

Begun with like hypothesis,
arms, head, shoulders,
with body state
better soon than late,
better not wait,
better not be late,
breathe ease,
fall to knees
in posture of compliance,
obeisance,
accommodation
a motivation.

All systems must be imagination
which works,
albeit have quirks.

Add by the one
or by the none,
make it by either
or or.
Or say that after you
I go.
Or say you
follow me.
See what comes after
or before,
what
you had thought.

Many’s a twenty?
A three?
Is twenty-three
plenty?

A call to reason
then
in due season,
a proposal of heaven
at seven
in the evening,
a cup of tea, a sense
of recompense
for anyone works for a living,
getting and giving.

Does it seem mind’s all?
What’s it mean
to be inside
a circle, to fly
in the sky, dear bird?

Words scattered,
tattered,
yet
said
make it
all evident,
manifest.
No contest.
One’s one again.
It’s done.

Hurry on, friend.
There is no end
to desire,
to Blake’s fire,
to Beckett’s mire,
to any such whatever.

Old friend’s dead
in bed.

Old friends die.
Goodbye!