<!DOCTYPE html>
<html dir='ltr' xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml' xmlns:b='http://www.google.com/2005/gml/b' xmlns:data='http://www.google.com/2005/gml/data' xmlns:expr='http://www.google.com/2005/gml/expr'>
<head>
<link href='https://www.blogger.com/static/v1/widgets/2549344219-widget_css_bundle.css' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'/>
<meta content='text/html; charset=UTF-8' http-equiv='Content-Type'/>
<meta content='blogger' name='generator'/>
<link href='https://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/favicon.ico' rel='icon' type='image/x-icon'/>
<link href='https://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/search/label/Robert%20Creeley?updated-max=2008-01-21T04:06:00-08:00&amp;max-results=20&amp;start=9&amp;by-date=false' rel='canonical'/>
<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="Silliman&#39;s Blog - Atom" href="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default" />
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Silliman&#39;s Blog - RSS" href="https://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss" />
<link rel="service.post" type="application/atom+xml" title="Silliman&#39;s Blog - Atom" href="https://www.blogger.com/feeds/3738579/posts/default" />
<!--Can't find substitution for tag [blog.ieCssRetrofitLinks]-->
<meta content='https://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/search/label/Robert%20Creeley?updated-max=2008-01-21T04:06:00-08:00&amp;max-results=20&amp;start=9&amp;by-date=false' property='og:url'/>
<meta content='Silliman&#39;s Blog' property='og:title'/>
<meta content='A weblog focused on contemporary poetry and poetics.' property='og:description'/>
<!--[if IE]> <script> (function() { var html5 = ("abbr,article,aside,audio,canvas,datalist,details," + "figure,footer,header,hgroup,mark,menu,meter,nav,output," + "progress,section,time,video").split(','); for (var i = 0; i < html5.length; i++) { document.createElement(html5[i]); } try { document.execCommand('BackgroundImageCache', false, true); } catch(e) {} })(); </script> <![endif]-->
<title>Silliman's Blog: Robert Creeley</title>
<style id='page-skin-1' type='text/css'><!--
/*
* Blogger Template Style
*
* Sand Dollar
* by Jason Sutter
* Updated by Blogger Team
*/
/* Variable definitions
====================
<Variable name="textcolor" description="Text Color"
type="color" default="#000">
<Variable name="bgcolor" description="Page Background Color"
type="color" default="#f6f6f6">
<Variable name="pagetitlecolor" description="Blog Title Color"
type="color" default="#F5DEB3">
<Variable name="pagetitlebgcolor" description="Blog Title Background Color"
type="color" default="#DE7008">
<Variable name="descriptionColor" description="Blog Description Color"
type="color" default="#9E5205" />
<Variable name="descbgcolor" description="Description Background Color"
type="color" default="#F5E39e">
<Variable name="titlecolor" description="Post Title Color"
type="color" default="#9E5205">
<Variable name="datecolor" description="Date Header Color"
type="color" default="#777777">
<Variable name="footercolor" description="Post Footer Color"
type="color" default="#444444">
<Variable name="linkcolor" description="Link Color"
type="color" default="#DE7008">
<Variable name="footerlinkcolor" description="Post Footer Link Color"
type="color" default="#968a0a">
<Variable name="visitedlinkcolor" description="Visited Link Color"
type="color" default="#DE7008">
<Variable name="sidebarcolor" description="Sidebar Title Color"
type="color" default="#B8A80D">
<Variable name="sidebarlinkcolor" description="Sidebar Link Color"
type="color" default="#999999">
<Variable name="bordercolor" description="Border Color"
type="color" default="#e0ad12">
<Variable name="bodyfont" description="Text Font"
type="font"
default="normal normal 100% 'Trebuchet MS',Trebuchet,Verdana,Sans-Serif">
<Variable name="headerfont" description="Sidebar Title Font"
type="font"
default="normal bold 150% Verdana,Sans-serif">
<Variable name="dateHeaderFont" description="Date Header Font"
type="font"
default="normal bold 105% 'Trebuchet MS',Trebuchet,Verdana,Sans-serif">
<Variable name="pagetitlefont" description="Blog Title Font"
type="font" default="normal bold 300% Verdana,Sans-Serif">
<Variable name="titlefont" description="Post Title Font"
type="font" default="normal bold 160% Verdana,Sans-Serif">
<Variable name="startSide" description="Start side in blog language"
type="automatic" default="left">
<Variable name="endSide" description="End side in blog language"
type="automatic" default="right">
*/
body {
margin:0px;
padding:0px;
background:#ffffff;
color:#000000;
font-size: small;
}
#outer-wrapper {
font:normal normal 12px Arial, sans-serif;
}
a {
color:#666666;
}
a:hover {
color:#9E5205;
}
a img {
border-width: 0;
}
#content-wrapper {
padding-top: 0;
padding-right: 1em;
padding-bottom: 0;
padding-left: 1em;
}
@media all  {
div#main {
float:right;
width:66%;
padding-top:30px;
padding-right:0;
padding-bottom:10px;
padding-left:1em;
border-left:dotted 1px #e0ad12;
word-wrap: break-word; /* fix for long text breaking sidebar float in IE */
overflow: hidden;     /* fix for long non-text content breaking IE sidebar float */
}
div#sidebar {
margin-top:20px;
margin-right:0px;
margin-bottom:0px;
margin-left:0;
padding:0px;
text-align:left;
float: left;
width: 31%;
word-wrap: break-word; /* fix for long text breaking sidebar float in IE */
overflow: hidden;     /* fix for long non-text content breaking IE sidebar float */
}
}
@media handheld  {
div#main {
float:none;
width:90%;
}
div#sidebar {
padding-top:30px;
padding-right:7%;
padding-bottom:10px;
padding-left:3%;
}
}
#header {
padding-top:0px;
padding-right:0px;
padding-bottom:0px;
padding-left:0px;
margin-top:0px;
margin-right:0px;
margin-bottom:0px;
margin-left:0px;
border-bottom:dotted 1px #e0ad12;
background:#000000;
}
h1 a:link  {
text-decoration:none;
color:#ffffff
}
h1 a:visited  {
text-decoration:none;
color:#ffffff
}
h1,h2,h3 {
margin: 0;
}
h1 {
padding-top:25px;
padding-right:0px;
padding-bottom:10px;
padding-left:5%;
color:#ffffff;
background:#940f04;
font:normal bold 80px Verdana,Sans-Serif;
letter-spacing:-2px;
}
h3.post-title {
color:#9E5205;
font:normal bold 150% Arial, sans-serif;
letter-spacing:-1px;
}
h3.post-title a,
h3.post-title a:visited {
color: #9E5205;
}
h2.date-header  {
margin-top:10px;
margin-right:0px;
margin-bottom:0px;
margin-left:0px;
color:#ffffff;
font: normal bold 104% 'Trebuchet MS',Trebuchet,Verdana,Sans-serif;
}
h4 {
color:#aa0033;
}
#sidebar h2 {
color:#cc0000;
margin:0px;
padding:0px;
font:normal bold 120% Arial, sans-serif;
}
#sidebar .widget {
margin-top:0px;
margin-right:0px;
margin-bottom:33px;
margin-left:0px;
padding-top:0px;
padding-right:0px;
padding-bottom:0px;
padding-left:0px;
font-size:120%;
}
#sidebar ul {
list-style-type:none;
padding-left: 0;
margin-top: 0;
}
#sidebar li {
margin-top:0px;
margin-right:0px;
margin-bottom:0px;
margin-left:0px;
padding-top:0px;
padding-right:0px;
padding-bottom:0px;
padding-left:0px;
list-style-type:none;
font-size:95%;
}
.description {
padding:0px;
margin-top:7px;
margin-right:12%;
margin-bottom:7px;
margin-left:5%;
color:#cc0000;
background:transparent;
font:bold 100% Verdana,Sans-Serif;
}
.post {
margin-top:0px;
margin-right:0px;
margin-bottom:30px;
margin-left:0px;
}
.post strong {
color:#000000;
font-weight:bold;
}
pre,code {
color:#000000;
}
strike {
color:#000000;
}
.post-footer  {
padding:0px;
margin:0px;
color:#ffffff;
font-size:80%;
}
.post-footer a {
border:none;
color:#968a0a;
text-decoration:none;
}
.post-footer a:hover {
text-decoration:underline;
}
#comments {
padding:0px;
font-size:110%;
font-weight:bold;
}
.comment-author {
margin-top: 10px;
}
.comment-body {
font-size:100%;
font-weight:normal;
color:black;
}
.comment-footer {
padding-bottom:20px;
color:#ffffff;
font-size:80%;
font-weight:normal;
display:inline;
margin-right:10px
}
.deleted-comment  {
font-style:italic;
color:gray;
}
.comment-link  {
margin-left:.6em;
}
.profile-textblock {
clear: both;
margin-left: 0;
}
.profile-img {
float: left;
margin-top: 0;
margin-right: 5px;
margin-bottom: 5px;
margin-left: 0;
border: 2px solid #940f04;
}
#sidebar a:link  {
color:#000000;
text-decoration:none;
}
#sidebar a:active  {
color:#ff0000;
text-decoration:none;
}
#sidebar a:visited  {
color:sidebarlinkcolor;
text-decoration:none;
}
#sidebar a:hover {
color:#cc0000;
text-decoration:none;
}
.feed-links {
clear: both;
line-height: 2.5em;
}
#blog-pager-newer-link {
float: left;
}
#blog-pager-older-link {
float: right;
}
#blog-pager {
text-align: center;
}
.clear {
clear: both;
}
.widget-content {
margin-top: 0.5em;
}
/** Tweaks for layout editor preview */
body#layout #outer-wrapper {
margin-top: 0;
}
body#layout #main,
body#layout #sidebar {
margin-top: 10px;
padding-top: 0;
}

--></style>
<link href='https://www.blogger.com/dyn-css/authorization.css?targetBlogID=3738579&amp;zx=a1164a5b-94f7-434c-afab-b49aa5a29e3f' media='none' onload='if(media!=&#39;all&#39;)media=&#39;all&#39;' rel='stylesheet'/><noscript><link href='https://www.blogger.com/dyn-css/authorization.css?targetBlogID=3738579&amp;zx=a1164a5b-94f7-434c-afab-b49aa5a29e3f' rel='stylesheet'/></noscript>

</head>
<body>
<div class='navbar section' id='navbar'><div class='widget Navbar' data-version='1' id='Navbar1'><script type="text/javascript">
    function setAttributeOnload(object, attribute, val) {
      if(window.addEventListener) {
        window.addEventListener('load',
          function(){ object[attribute] = val; }, false);
      } else {
        window.attachEvent('onload', function(){ object[attribute] = val; });
      }
    }
  </script>
<div id="navbar-iframe-container"></div>
<script type="text/javascript" src="https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
      gapi.load("gapi.iframes:gapi.iframes.style.bubble", function() {
        if (gapi.iframes && gapi.iframes.getContext) {
          gapi.iframes.getContext().openChild({
              url: 'https://www.blogger.com/navbar.g?targetBlogID\x3d3738579\x26blogName\x3dSilliman\x27s+Blog\x26publishMode\x3dPUBLISH_MODE_BLOGSPOT\x26navbarType\x3dBLUE\x26layoutType\x3dLAYOUTS\x26searchRoot\x3dhttps://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/search\x26blogLocale\x3den\x26v\x3d2\x26homepageUrl\x3dhttps://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/\x26vt\x3d-6983219020609693114',
              where: document.getElementById("navbar-iframe-container"),
              id: "navbar-iframe"
          });
        }
      });
    </script><script type="text/javascript">
(function() {
var script = document.createElement('script');
script.type = 'text/javascript';
script.src = '//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/google_top_exp.js';
var head = document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0];
if (head) {
head.appendChild(script);
}})();
</script>
</div></div>
<div id='outer-wrapper'><div id='wrap2'>
<!-- skip links for text browsers -->
<span id='skiplinks' style='display:none;'>
<a href='#main'>skip to main </a> |
      <a href='#sidebar'>skip to sidebar</a>
</span>
<div id='header-wrapper'>
<div class='header section' id='header'><div class='widget Header' data-version='1' id='Header1'>
<div id='header-inner'>
<div class='titlewrapper'>
<h1 class='title'>
<a href='https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/'>
Silliman's Blog
</a>
</h1>
</div>
<div class='descriptionwrapper'>
<p class='description'><span>A weblog focused on contemporary poetry and poetics.</span></p>
</div>
</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<div id='content-wrapper'>
<div id='crosscol-wrapper' style='text-align:center'>
<div class='crosscol no-items section' id='crosscol'></div>
</div>
<div id='main-wrapper'>
<div class='main section' id='main'><div class='widget Blog' data-version='1' id='Blog1'>
<div class='blog-posts hfeed'>
<div class='status-msg-wrap'>
<div class='status-msg-body'>
Showing posts with label <b>Robert Creeley</b>. <a href="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/">Show all posts</a>
</div>
<div class='status-msg-border'>
<div class='status-msg-bg'>
<div class='status-msg-hidden'>Showing posts with label <b>Robert Creeley</b>. <a href="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/">Show all posts</a></div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div style='clear: both;'></div>

          <div class="date-outer">
        
<h2 class='date-header'><span>Tuesday, October 23, 2007</span></h2>

          <div class="date-posts">
        
<div class='post-outer'>
<div class='post hentry uncustomized-post-template' itemprop='blogPost' itemscope='itemscope' itemtype='http://schema.org/BlogPosting'>
<meta content='http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/graphics/simic_charles2.gif' itemprop='image_url'/>
<meta content='3738579' itemprop='blogId'/>
<meta content='6148270101200446908' itemprop='postId'/>
<a name='6148270101200446908'></a>
<div class='post-header'>
<div class='post-header-line-1'></div>
</div>
<div class='post-body entry-content' id='post-body-6148270101200446908' itemprop='description articleBody'>
<p class=MsoNormal align=right style='margin-bottom:12.0pt;text-align:right'><img height="301" id="_x0000_i1025" src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh4.googleusercontent.com/proxy/M8w46tiVBdC6KI6bAK5Gx1D2iu0OfFxQm9RU-aE6Nvef5JE94n4M3eZg5HLrHuWgjT212cxaaM1B0T5rwwFMrRhefFD8xnC0rwNWUAhCm3C5sw%3Ds0-d" width="200"></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>In recent years, different Poets Laureate of the </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>United States</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> &#8211; a position Donald Hall transforms into the acronym PLOTUS &#8211; have seen and used their tenure very differently. Robert Hass, in many ways the first of the contemporary holders of the office, used his tenure to actively promote poetry, which Robert Pinsky did also &#8211; he continues to write the &#8220;Poet&#8217;s Choice&#8221; column in the <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Washington Post </i>every Sunday. You can argue about Pinsky&#8217;s choices, but he almost always tries to show what he likes in a positive light &amp; to explain for a mass audience why he does. Donald Hall has done much the same, on a smaller scale, just by going around, giving readings and interviews during his year. Just giving interviews was quite enough work for Stanley Kunitz as he neared his 100<sup>th</sup> birthday. Billy Collins and especially Ted Kooser used their stints in the post to try and dumb poetry down &#8211; they want a verse that is accessible to people who don&#8217;t read poetry, or at least don&#8217;t much like it. That&#8217;s a debatable, but not unimaginable, goal. Indeed, of the recent laureates only Louise <span class=SpellE>Gluck</span> essentially did nothing with the post. Her term passed quickly and all but silently, perhaps fitting for a job that has never actually gone to anyone not already a member in good standing of the  </span><st1:place><st1:PlaceType><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>School</span></st1:PlaceType><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> of </span><st1:PlaceName><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Quietude</span></st1:PlaceName></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Charles Simic, it would seem, has a different idea. He wants to use his term as PLOTUS to enhance his newly self-appointed role as the enforcer of neophobe literary values. Simic has been given, it would seem, a big stick and he plans to use it. His role as the chair of the most embarrassing set of National Book Award nominees in recent history is one item and he already shares the poetry editing responsibilities at the moribund <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://www.parisreview.org/"><span style='color:black'>Paris Review</span><span style='color:black;font-style:normal'>.</span></a></i> His <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/article-preview?article_id=20698"><span style='color:black'>article on Robert Creeley</span></a> in the October 25<sup>th</sup> issue of the <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>New York Review of Books </i>represents an even clearer instance of this agenda, and it&#8217;s worth looking more closely at what the article says and why. Simic&#8217;s article has been controversial since it first appeared in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>NYRB, </i>a journal founded in part of Robert Lowell &amp; his wife Elizabeth Hardwick that was important in the 1960s for its presumption that public intellectuals were, by definition, tenured. One poet &#8211; who has read publicly with Simic since the article appeared &#8211; told me that reading it made them &#8220;want to throw up in my mouth.&#8221; Other reactions have hardly been more tempered.<o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>I&#8217;ve read Simic for decades. He&#8217;s never been my cup of tea, but that&#8217;s true for all of the soft surrealists who grew up around James Tate in the 1960s.&#185; I could never distinguish a poem of Simic&#8217;s from any unsigned translation of the work of Vasko Popa and I still can&#8217;t. The time George Quasha brought Simic by my little </span><st1:place><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>North Oakland</span></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> cottage in the summer of <span class=GramE>1970,</span> Simic struck me as a man with an accent that would have been fabulous to process through the careful oral annotation that was at the heart of Charles Olson&#8217;s projective methodology. Could one actually capture that lilt in which English, French &amp; Serbian all perceptibly <span class=GramE>cohabit</span> each sentence &amp; every phrase? I always thought that his impact on American letters would have been far greater &amp; more lasting if he had. Instead, he has written in a way that seems calculated to efface any trace of the Other. A true neophobe, the last thing Simic wants to represent is the new &#8211; soft surrealism itself is about packaging such disquieting phenomena in ways that are always already understood. It is, in this sense, the antithesis not just of the original surrealist movement, but even of more recent surrealist practitioners, from Bly &amp; Wright to Joseph Ceravolo or David Shapiro. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>It should be noted, however, that Simic&#8217;s assault on Creeley isn&#8217;t exactly that. Instead, he uses Creeley to make a larger &#8211; and much more pernicious &#8211; argument. His real target is the post-avant.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Simic&#8217;s essay begins by bemoaning &#8220;the large number of collected poems appearing in the last few years . . . as if there was a huge, untapped market for every poem ever written by every dead and living American poet.&#8221; This &#8220;challenge of sheer quantity&#8221; should not be unfamiliar to anyone who has read the critical writing, say, of Hilton Kramer over the past twenty years, bemoaning the fact that critical writing no longer serves a hypothetical role as gate-keeper. Simic pretends not to recognize that a collected poems serves a different social function, say, than a City Lights Pocket Poets volume that &#8220;one can comfortably read to oneself on a park bench or to a lover in bed,&#8221; and asserts &#8220;there are not many poets, even among our best ones, who are likely to have more than eighty pages worth reading.&#8221; That is the sort of blanket assertion that readers of this blog might be more apt to expect from one of the loose canons of the comments stream, but it is particularly disturbing coming from our Poet Laureate. The implicit argument, of course, is that if there are only 80 pages of, say, Charles Simic worth reading, then the control of literature properly belongs to those who select those 80 pages &#8211; critics and editors. In this sense, Simic&#8217;s goal is exactly the opposite of his predecessors Hass &amp; Pinsky &#8211; whereas they sought to broaden the audience for poetry, of all kinds really, Simic wants to reassert its containment. The appropriate attitude toward any writer&#8217;s collected poems, thus, is &#8220;both curiosity and dread.&#8221; <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>It&#8217;s worth meditating on that  word <b style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'>dread</b> awhile. Even if we actually believe that a reader as sophisticated as Simic really doesn&#8217;t grasp the difference between a collected &amp; an 80-page selection in terms of its social function as published object, the idea of dreading poetry is worth contemplating. It&#8217;s in little moments like this that a writer such as Simic, who likes to suggest that he has no theory, tells us precisely what his theory is. He&#8217;s willing to make exceptions to his dictum that nobody has more than 80 pages worth reading &#8211; only one of his four examples, Frost, is likewise a neophobe&#8211; but not many. The others (Whitman, Dickinson, Stevens) either belong to the non-phobic tradition that is ever open to the different, such as Whitman &amp; Dickinson, or at the least willing to play the two traditions off one another, as with Stevens. The image of poetry this suggests &#8211; fewer poets, slimmer volumes &#8211; just happens to look a lot like poetry circa 1954, a time when Allen Ginsberg had not yet upset the apple cart with his poem &#8220;Howl.&#8221; In a world of 10,000 publishing English-language poets, one can only imagine what &#8220;the challenge of sheer quantity&#8221; might mean to someone committed to returning us back to the days in which literature could be contained &amp; upstarts like the Objectivists virtually disappeared.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>It&#8217;s at this point in his essay that Simic finally introduces Creeley, characterizing him as having once been &#8220;a cult figure.&#8221; That&#8217;s an interesting phrase, every bit as dubious as the assertion about collected books. The definition of &#8220;cult&#8221; given &#8211; that Creeley had nearly as many readers as Ginsberg or Lowell &#8211; doesn&#8217;t say <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>why </i>this should be a cult phenomenon <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>unless Creeley for some reason did not deserve that many readers. </i>If anything, the poet among the three whom more properly fits the traditional dictionary definition of a cult would be </span><st1:City><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Lowell</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>, a poet raised high by a sect whose influence dwindles rapidly south of </span><st1:City><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Manhattan</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> or west of </span><st1:City><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Amherst</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> and whose reputation has declined even more rapidly than T.S. Eliot&#8217;s. It&#8217;s worth checking off these assertions that are arguable if not patently false. It&#8217;s not that Charles Simic isn&#8217;t allowed to have his opinions, even when they&#8217;re silly, but rather a pattern of coercive frames inserted into this essay that underscore the degree to which Simic&#8217;s actively trying to resurrect the gate-keeping role he imagines (wrongly) serious neophobe poet-critics once had. He&#8217;s not done with these misstatements. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Waving the charged term <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>cult</i> does serve at least one function &#8211; as a prophylactic against a critique such as this one, since any nay-<span class=SpellE>sayer</span> arguably might be a member of the Creeley &#8220;cult.&#8221; It should be noted, as I have done <a href="http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2006/10/if-you-were-only-going-to-own-two.html"><span style='color:black'>on this blog</span></a><span class=GramE>, that</span> the distinction between early Creeley &#8211; the volumes largely gathered in the first volume of his <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Collected Poems</i> &#8211; and late Creeley is not imaginary. There has long been a discussion, sometimes heated, among Creeley&#8217;s most devoted readers, as to the arc of his career &#8211; should the later work be read as a falling off of his talents or as a shift away from the constant push toward innovation that characterized his early books, having finally arrived at the poetry he personally needed? This is, I suspect, one of those unsolvable puzzles, tho one can take (and fiercely hold) one side or the other. This debate is Simic&#8217;s frame, but not his ultimate focus. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Simic spends two paragraphs introducing Creeley generally:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>His poems seemed both adventurous and old-fashioned&#8230;. They were almost all about love&#8230;. A member of the little-understood but already fabled circle of poets that included Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov, Paul Blackburn, and Ed Dorn, he came across as both a poet and an intellectual. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>This almost sounds like praise, and bits of it actually are. <span class=GramE>Soon enough we will discover that Simic wants to trim this wild writer of a two-volume collected down to a topiary he thinks of as Creeley the love poet, and he&#8217;s carefully laying out the grounds for  his move.</span> We will see before the essay is over that <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>old-fashioned </i>is higher praise than <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>adventurous </i>and that <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>intellectual </i>is no praise at all. After all, the result of being an intellectual is that your work may end up little understood even if already fabled. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Simic now shifts gears and gives us a biographical background that is as long as this introductory movement. For the most part, this is what you could get out of Wikipedia. It also serves the important function of introducing Charles Olson, and with Olson the ideas associated with Projective Verse. Here is Simic&#8217;s representation of those core ideas: <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>[Olson] argued for &#8220;open form poetry&#8221; in which traditional ideas of form would be replaced by poems in which form would depend on the content. In other words, the right form for a poem trying to describe a red wheelbarrow next to a couple of white chickens, or one about staring into a bathroom mirror at midnight, is to be found in the experience itself and is not to imposed mechanically from outside. So understood, form is not what Shakespeare and Keats thought it was, but the property of the content and the language of everyday experience.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>This is an especially weird <span class=GramE>interpretation,</span> particularly insofar as Olson&#8217;s major accomplishment prior to the publication of &#8220;Projective Verse&#8221; was a study of the profound &amp; positive impact of Shakespeare on Melville. Olson specifically names Chaucer&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Troilus </i>and &#8220;S&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Lear&#8221; </i>as examples of what ought to be emulated. Simic is committing the third of his ungrounded assertions, presuming that  Projective Verse&#8221; is aimed at countering everything that has come before in poetry, rather than making choices, inserting the bard &amp; Keats where Tennyson or <span class=SpellE>Housman</span> would have been far more to the point. Simic also is conflating history by invoking a poem of the 1920s, Williams&#8217; &#8220;Red Wheelbarrow,&#8221; as a demonstration of a method not developed for nearly another 30 years. Olson&#8217;s actual proposition is so muddied that it&#8217;s hard to tell if Simic is satirizing him. There is also ample evidence, particularly in Creeley&#8217;s writing &#8211; some of it as early as 1953 &#8211; to suggest that Simic&#8217;s content-centric reading of &#8220;form is nothing more than an extension of content&#8221; is a profound misinterpretation and that the dynamics between the signifier &amp; signified in a poem are infinitely more complicated than represented by the paragraph above. If you didn&#8217;t know anything about Projective Verse before you read Simic&#8217;s account, everything you knew about after those three sentences would be wrong. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Simic appears to want to separate out Olson&#8217;s stance from Creeley&#8217;s:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Like Pound, Olson saw the role of a poet as a teacher, someone who makes new ideas available to his readers. Creeley thought that what defines our poetry is the prototypical American proclivity since Whitman and Dickinson for speaking in the name of an extraordinary single self, which nevertheless feels <span class=GramE>itself</span> to be representative.<o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Those aren&#8217;t mutually exclusive ideas, but Simic appears to want to use the latter sentence not just as a wedge against Olson &amp; the poetry of ideas, but also as a foretaste of his account of Creeley the love poet. We will later see the word "teacher" used as a pejorative again, which is eyebrow-raising coming from a retired teacher. The bridge between this passage and that account is a one-paragraph history of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Black Mountain Review, </i>the journal Creeley edited. For Simic, the important thing about the <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Review </i>is that it<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span class=GramE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>was almost impossible to get hold of except in a few little bookstores around the country.</span></span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'> Still, it circulated among poets and was exciting to read since it had poems and essays by Olson, Duncan, Levertov, and Creeley, whose ideas and work were far more intriguing than what one usually encountered in university quarterlies. Not until 1962, when Scribner brought out Creeley&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>For Love: Poems 1950-1960, </i>was it possible to have some sense of what his poetry was like unless one happened to come across one of his small-press books published in Spain or North Carolina. <o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>This account, it&#8217;s worth noting, directly contradicts Anselm <span class=SpellE>Hollo&#8217;s</span> report that one of the great things about the 1950s &#8211; when far fewer poets were trying to publish in any format &#8211; was that, as a BBC reporter in London, he could easily get <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>any </i>American small press volume at virtually any decent local bookshop. The pyramid between, say, FSG and the humblest of small presses was not nearly so pronounced in an environment in which there were, at most, ten thousand titles of all kinds being published each year, and the present in which there just under 200,000 titles reach print annually. A good-sized bookshop in the 1950s, with maybe 50,000 different titles on its shelves, could pretty much stock five years of everything. That same store today is apt to have far fewer titles, even though 50,000 would represent only what was issued over the past three months. Further, Creeley had been published in 1960 in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The New American Poetry, </i>the best selling poetry anthology of all time, where his contribution of 14 poems was exceeded only by Frank O&#8217;Hara, and where only he and Charles Olson were permitted two separate statements on poetics. Creeley was hardly the hidden flower of this portrait. My point is not that Simic&#8217;s picture of Creeley&#8217;s marginality prior to <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>For Love </i>is, to say the least, overblown, but rather that we are seeing another plank in Simic&#8217;s theoretical platform set into place: <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>only trade publishing is real, because it aims at a &#8220;non-specialist&#8221; audience. </i>By &#8220;</span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Spain</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> and </span><st1:State><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>North Carolina</span></st1:place></st1:State><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>,&#8221; what Simic means is &#8220;not </span><st1:City><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Boston</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> or </span><st1:State><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>New York</span></st1:place></st1:State><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>.&#8221;<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>At this point, something very interesting happens. Simic&#8217;s tone changes &#8211; not entirely, but substantially &#8211; for several pages. Simic now proceeds to close read four poems from early Creeley, and for the most part  does so enthusiastically if not brilliantly. He refers to &#8220;I Know a Man&#8221; as &#8220;such a little poem,&#8221; but does a credible job reading it, noting that, as &#8220;in a number of other Creeley poems, the conflict here is between two sides of the self.&#8221; He discusses spelling, line breaks &amp; prosody and does so without misrepresenting the object of his study. Simic&#8217;s reading of these four poems may not be my own, but they&#8217;re certainly within the range of reasonable. After the loopy start, I almost wondered if he hadn&#8217;t actually approached <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>NYRB </i>with a pitch that went something like this &#8211; &#8220;You know, Creeley&#8217;s a great love poet, but not enough people appreciate that about him. Let me write about that.&#8221; &#8211; and had done so, only to insert it into this polemical superstructure. At least for the first three poems, Simic appears to genuinely like and feel sympathy of Creeley&#8217;s project. It starts to turn, though, with the fourth, entitled &#8220;The Language&#8221;:<o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:1.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Locate <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>I<br>
love you </i>some-<br>
where in<br>
<br>
teeth and<br>
eyes, bite<br>
it but<br>
<br>
take care not<br>
to hurt, you<br>
want so<br>
<br>
much so<br>
little. Words<br>
say everything.<br>
<br>
<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>I<br>
love you<br>
</i>again<span class=GramE>,</span><br>
<br>
then what<br>
is emptiness<br>
for. To<br>
<br>
fill, fill.<br>
I heard words<br>
and words full<br>
<br>
of holes<br>
aching. Speech<br>
is a mouth.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>&#8220;Words are holes,&#8221; Simic begins, immediately misstating the very lines he has just quoted. This is quite different from Creeley&#8217;s proposition here, which could be stated as &#8220;Words <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>have </i>holes.&#8221; No wonder Simic concludes that what Creeley<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>ends up espousing is a form of solipsism which holds that the primary reality for the self if the mind and the sole truth is the immediate and unshared experience that occurs there. <o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>With a single word, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>solipsism, </i>Simic dismisses the broader phenomenological tradition into which Creeley&#8217;s work fits. For what it&#8217;s worth, <span class=SpellE>Husserl</span>, Heidegger and <span class=SpellE>Merleau-Ponty</span> all refuted this same equation (their point being that phenomenology doesn&#8217;t cancel out descriptive objectivity, but rather fixes depiction very close to the observer) but it&#8217;s a position that continues to pop up in the literature. But Simic&#8217;s not really focusing on Creeley as intellectual here, so much as trying to spell out what  he sees as a serious epistemological shift in Creeley&#8217;s work, one that he hopes to demolish. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>&#8220;By broad agreement, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>For Love </i>is Creeley&#8217;s best book,&#8221; Simic begins &#8211; yet another dubious assertion. Presuming that Simic has read the secondary literature on Creeley, he has to know of the cancellation by Scribners of Creeley&#8217;s first <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Selected Poems</i>, edited by Robert Grenier, which in fact gave just 44 pages to the early poems of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>For Love </i>and <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Charm, </i>centering itself &#8211; 91 pages worth &#8211; on <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Words </i>and <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Pieces. </i>The emphasis is even more <span class=GramE>clear</span> when you realize that these two volumes were much shorter than <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>For Love </i>and are thus much more deeply represented. You can find this easily enough in the Creeley issue of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>boundary 2, </i>Spring/Fall 1978, right there on pages 426-429. Scribners&#8217; interest in poetry was waning &#8211; the imprint survives today as a brand of the Thomson Gale house, a reference publisher &#8211; and with it Creeley&#8217;s own relationship with the press. The cancellation precipitated Creeley&#8217;s move to New Directions, where Robert Duncan, another Scribners author, had already preceded him. <o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>What Simic is actually doing here is a variation on an old School of Quietude attempt to co-opt Ezra Pound by professing to love the old fascist&#8217;s early work gathered in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Personae, </i>rejecting the innovative structure of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Cantos, </i>even tho those are the very poems &#8211; particularly the early ones in which he articulated his mature method and the much later <span class=SpellE><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Pisan</i></span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> Cantos </i>&#8211; which gave rise to the whole Pound-Williams-Zukofsky tradition in contemporary poetics. <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>&#8220;Words,</i>&#8221; Simic writes, &#8220;is an uneven book.&#8221; Simic notes that there are &#8220;several powerful poems&#8221; in it, but finds that Creeley is moving away from descriptive or narrative lyrics. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Such specifics are rare in his work. Ordinarily, his lovers, friends, and the places he travels are not shown in any detail. Poetry denies its end in any descriptive act, Creeley has insisted, since it leaves the attention outside the poem. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>This last sentence may be the focal point for Simic&#8217;s entire essay. He needs to deconstruct this position to make his case. He thus quotes Creeley from an interview with Linda Wagner, giving what essentially is a characterization of contemporary verse that sounds very much like the verbal equivalent of action painting, the version of abstract expressionist art favored, say, by Jackson Pollock:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Poetry seems to be written <span class=SpellE>momently</span> &#8211; that is, it occupies a moment of time&#8230;. I seem to be given to work in some intense moment of whatever possibility, and if I manage to gain the articulation necessary <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>in </i>that moment, then happily there is the poem.<o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Simic is open enough in his disagreement: &#8220;If this is true &#8211; and it is not true for most poets &#8211; all we can expect from Creeley&#8217;s poetry will be jottings, words and phrases about his state of mind which will rely on his knack for colloquial speech to conceal the paucity of content.&#8221; Simic can&#8217;t bring himself to use the term <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>reference </i>here, for to do so would force him to admit that there is every bit as much content in these poetics as in his own. But it is evident from such phrasings as &#8220;all we can expect,&#8221; &#8220;jottings,&#8221; and &#8220;paucity&#8221; where Simic stands. This analysis also suffers from the minor inconvenience that its first assertion - that it is not true for most poets - fails to acknowledge that it has been true for many for well over three decades now.  <o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>So the real target of this piece turns out to be Creeley&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Pieces. </i>&#8220;Pieces&#8230;,&#8221; Simic writes, &#8220;is all about such poetry.&#8221; He goes after the book with the tenacity of a pit bull. &#8220;Having convinced himself&#8221; of these poetics &#8211; the implication being that this is some sort of delusion &#8211; &#8220;Creeley eschews even the beginnings and endings of poems.&#8221; He quotes, almost arbitrarily, the first half of &#8220;A Step,&#8221; concluding that &#8220;even this much ought to be enough to show the slightness of such poetry.&#8221; Acknowledging that he likes &#8220;Numbers,&#8221; <span class=GramE>a collaboration</span> with painter Robert Indiana and that there &#8220;are a few good poems in his earlier manner in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Pieces, </i>but the rest of the book doesn&#8217;t amount to much,&#8221; Simic sums up his dismissal: &#8220;Creeley confused ideas about poetry with poetry itself&#8230; Creeley had ceased to be a lyric poet and become a teacher-preacher type giving us classroom demonstrations of how poetry, written according to a particular theory of poetry, works.&#8221; Of course, Simic in this essay has shown us <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>his theory </i>by which I suppose we can now dismiss his own writing out of hand. <o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>What Simic is not saying here is what <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Pieces </i>actually does as writing &#8211; he could have found much more provocative examples of what he doesn&#8217;t like. And he fails to put the book into any sort of larger context &#8211; notably absent in this essay are the two names Ted Berrigan and Louis Zukofsky &#8211; since Simic seems to want this to appear to be Creeley&#8217;s deviation &#8211; the phrase &#8220;teacher-preacher&#8221; may intend to recall Olson &#8211; rather than a broader movement in the arts. The latter, of course, would patently negate this argument.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>But, in fact, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Pieces </i>was read by a generation of younger poets for the revolutionary work that it is. Its most important review was Grenier&#8217;s amid his famous critical statements at the back of the first issue of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>This, </i>which declares in its second sentence (and in Grenier&#8217;s distinct style):<o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal align=center style='margin-bottom:12.0pt;text-align:center'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>&#8220;PROJECTIVE VERSE&#8221; is <b style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'>PIECES </b>ON<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>The statement centered on the page so that you cannot miss its importance, and Grenier&#8217;s claim that the same Projective Verse essay that Olson had published some dozen years earlier &#8211; Simic himself notes that the manifesto is &#8220;famous&#8221; and that the &#8220;ideas and work were far more intriguing&#8221; than the squat neophobe stanzas of the 1950s &#8211; has now moved beyond the point of prolepsis, speaking as tho the future were the present, and that <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Pieces </i>represents the first fully manifested instance of actual projective writing.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>This, we should note, is the onset of the revolution in writing that is most often associated with the term Language Poetry, a phrase Simic does not use and whose practitioners he never mentions. From this point forward in the essay, however, it is clear that what Simic is trying to accomplish is to strike from the record everything that has been written in the post-avant tradition from <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Pieces </i>onward. He quotes both Allen Ginsberg and Robert Duncan to the effect that the new poetry should be intellectually inclusive and move away from the sentimental frameworks of neophobe writing and comments<o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>The most charitable interpretation of these two awful pieces of advice is that Ginsberg was pulling his leg and </span><st1:City><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Duncan</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'> meant something else.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Actually, the more charitable one is that Simic himself isn&#8217;t intellectually capable of following a serious discussion of the arts. He&#8217;s like the jazz fan who likes Miles Davis&#8217; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Sketches of Spain </i>or <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Kind of Blue, </i>or Coltrane&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Giant Steps, </i>only to freak out at their later work because it demands more from him as a listener, let alone the music of Anthony Braxton, Steve Lacy et al, musicians who come along later and take this new material as a given. It confounds him that Creeley doesn&#8217;t at least fill his poems with &#8220;nicely observed details and memorable stories.&#8221; In what I suspect Simic must think of as the crowning touch of this supposed demolition, he writes<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>The aesthetic theory &#8211; and there is always a theory behind such reductive views &#8211; may sound persuasive, but it was foolish on Creeley&#8217;s part to believe that it could ever validate a poem. If poetics were like cooking and one could write down a recipe for all of one&#8217;s future <span class=GramE>poems, that</span> would be true. However, great cooks rarely bother to consult cookbooks.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>What should be obvious to the reader by now is that the theory-ridden poet here is not Creeley, but Simic. And it is a true enough conclusion about Simic&#8217;s own poetry, but not a terribly accurate one about Creeley. If anything, the problem of Creeley&#8217;s later writing is not that it adheres to the poetics of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Pieces, </i>but that it steps back from the boldness of that volume. (I ran my own review of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Pieces </i><a href="http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2004/02/it-may-be-impossible-to-overstate.html"><span style='color:black'>here</span></a> three years ago) <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Simic continues his essay by reading a couple of the works from the last 30 years which he likes because they contain &#8220;comic touches and sharply observed details.&#8221; He concludes with the critical equivalent of crocodile tears: &#8220;It&#8217;s a pity that he felt the need to remain faithful to ideas about composition long after it became clear that they not only were limiting him but were a dead end.&#8221; That is, however, a misreading of Creeley &#8211; hardly a surprise given how imaginary this figure is in every previous stage in Simic&#8217;s hands &#8211; and a statement that far more accurately describes Simic&#8217;s own writing. He has, at this point, been firing bullets so long that he fails to notice the degree to which his primary opponent is the man in the mirror. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Overall, Simic&#8217;s assault wants to be strategic &#8211; if Creeley&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Pieces </i>is the linchpin for all of the poetry that has passed him by for the past 35 years, then taking it down would solve ever so many problems. But to do so would actually require reading the book, closely even, noting the degree to which any phenomenological account of poetics has to confront the materials at hand, and that what he terms &#8220;slightness&#8221; is in fact the very opposite, the magnification of minute particulars to an almost gargantuan focus. That Simic isn&#8217;t intellectually capable of handling this task &#8211; presuming for a moment that it were possible &#8211; is palpable from the fact that he let slide many moments in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Pieces </i>that, as is the case with all minimalism, can be extracted from context for ridicule by any Babbitt who comes along. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:6.0pt;margin-left:2.0in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>ONE THING<br>
done, the<br>
rest follows<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:6.0pt;margin-left:2.0in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'><span style='mso-tab-count:1'>          </span>*<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:6.0pt;margin-left:2.0in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Not from not<br> 
but in <span class=SpellE>in</span>.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:6.0pt;margin-left:2.0in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'><span style='mso-tab-count:1'>          </span>*<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:2.0in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana; mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Here <span class=SpellE>here</span><br>
here. Here.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial'>&#185; If the surrealism of Robert Bly &amp; James Wright was a conscious rebellion against the Boston Brahmin scene around </span><st1:City><st1:place><span   style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Lowell</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial'>, the soft surrealists &#8211; who emerged after Tate&#8217;s sublime first volume, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Lost Pilot </i>&#8211; represented a kind of rapprochement. The three who matter are Tate, Simic &amp; Bill Knott, tho one can detect its influence to this day in the work of, say, Dean Young. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<div style='clear: both;'></div>
</div>
<div class='post-footer'>
<div class='post-footer-line post-footer-line-1'>
<span class='post-author vcard'>
Posted by
<span class='fn' itemprop='author' itemscope='itemscope' itemtype='http://schema.org/Person'>
<span itemprop='name'>Ron</span>
</span>
</span>
<span class='post-timestamp'>
at
<meta content='https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2007/10/in-recent-years-different-poets.html' itemprop='url'/>
<a class='timestamp-link' href='https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2007/10/in-recent-years-different-poets.html' rel='bookmark' title='permanent link'><abbr class='published' itemprop='datePublished' title='2007-10-23T08:34:00-04:00'>Tuesday, October 23, 2007</abbr></a>
</span>
<span class='reaction-buttons'>
</span>
<span class='post-comment-link'>
</span>
<span class='post-backlinks post-comment-link'>
</span>
<span class='post-icons'>
<span class='item-action'>
<a href='https://www.blogger.com/email-post.g?blogID=3738579&postID=6148270101200446908' title='Email Post'>
<img alt='' class='icon-action' height='13' src='https://resources.blogblog.com/img/icon18_email.gif' width='18'/>
</a>
</span>
</span>
<div class='post-share-buttons goog-inline-block'>
</div>
</div>
<div class='post-footer-line post-footer-line-2'>
<span class='post-labels'>
Labels:
<a href='https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/search/label/Charles%2520Simic' rel='tag'>Charles Simic</a>,
<a href='https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/search/label/Robert%2520Creeley' rel='tag'>Robert Creeley</a>,
<a href='https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/search/label/Schools%2520of%2520poetry' rel='tag'>Schools of poetry</a>
</span>
</div>
<div class='post-footer-line post-footer-line-3'>
<span class='post-location'>
</span>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>

          </div></div>
        

          <div class="date-outer">
        
<h2 class='date-header'><span>Friday, May 04, 2007</span></h2>

          <div class="date-posts">
        
<div class='post-outer'>
<div class='post hentry uncustomized-post-template' itemprop='blogPost' itemscope='itemscope' itemtype='http://schema.org/BlogPosting'>
<meta content='http://farm1.static.flickr.com/55/160022745_24b76e016a.jpg' itemprop='image_url'/>
<meta content='3738579' itemprop='blogId'/>
<meta content='8138728951939469575' itemprop='postId'/>
<a name='8138728951939469575'></a>
<div class='post-header'>
<div class='post-header-line-1'></div>
</div>
<div class='post-body entry-content' id='post-body-8138728951939469575' itemprop='description articleBody'>
<p class=MsoNormal align=right style='margin-bottom:12.0pt;text-align:right'><img height="306" id="_x0000_i1025" src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh5.googleusercontent.com/proxy/LJFIL_gO4eNR7duUOeZbHPqu97Mx1nFyiDqHUGtDX3UO-yYcUKM03UOI4tzhfxolr6dcHzbWZUSqSiJimVLAhEJAgXzRKHd8QWZp0BZC%3Ds0-d" width="408"><br>
<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial'>photo by Tom Raworth<o:p></o:p></span></i></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>We are no doubt going to see a fair number of books quite like Mark Jay Mirsky&#8217;s memoir, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Creeley, </i>published as a chapbook by Pressed Wafer of Boston. When someone who is important to a lot of people dies, the survivors stand around and tell stories &#8211; in eulogies, over drinks at wakes &amp; later in memoirs. The stories <span class=GramE>are loving</span> &amp; a few of them might even be scandalous, as their point isn&#8217;t to discuss the poet&#8217;s oeuvre or career, but  rather the person. And hardly anything humanizes an individual more than their flaws. Many of the New American Poets have been the subject of terrific memoirs, most notably Charles Olson, Frank O&#8217;Hara &amp; Ted Berrigan. Creeley, who functioned more or less as the dean of American poetry for close to 40 years, is certain to have his. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>The novelist <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Jay_Mirsky"><span style='color:black'>Mark Jay Mirsky</span></a> isn&#8217;t necessarily the person you would expect to be the first one out of the chute with such a venture, perhaps because his aesthetics don&#8217;t seem especially Creeley-<span class=SpellE>esque</span>, or because he seems such a quintessential New York guy, or just because he&#8217;s 13 years younger than his subject, young enough so that Bob was always going to be the Elder in that relationship. Elder brother, as it happens &#8211; Mirsky seems to have turned to Creeley as much for life lessons as for those concerning writing, and &#8211; like so many other younger writers &#8211; discovered a remarkably open &amp; generous person, willing pretty much to share anything. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>So we see Creeley very much in the mode that will be familiar to so many younger writers &#8211; and at 60, I&#8217;d include myself and anyone in my own age group there as well. Creeley was born the same year as my own mother, one ahead of my father, which means that he went through his life tasks pretty much at the same time as did they, although my own dad got through his three marriages much faster than Bob. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>But we also get to see Creeley the drunk &amp; Creeley the brawler, even more so than in <span class=SpellE>Ekbert</span> <span class=SpellE>Faas</span>&#8217; abortive bio. This is a side of Creeley that I never saw personally, tho it was impossible not to hear about it in the 1960s. I recall one discussion among young poets in the 1970s as people tried to guess just how much Creeley spent on alcohol each month &#8211; the final consensus was something like $300. Mirsky&#8217;s take on this actually is much less lurid  than the tales one heard &#8211; he describes Creeley&#8217;s friends in Bolinas getting out of his way at the bar as he tried to take on anyone who would fight, Creeley literally falling against the pool table, blackening his one good eye &amp; only the next day discovering that nobody had clocked him one in legitimate combat. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>For such a short book &#8211; just 24 pages &#8211; Mirsky is quite a rambler. Some episodes are here not because they&#8217;re about Creeley so much as the fact that they&#8217;re simply good stories. The best example of this is a tale involving the British novelist <a href="http://www.centerforbookculture.org/dalkey/bio_quin.html"><span style='color:black'>Ann <span class=SpellE>Quin</span></span></a>:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.5in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>Bob was reading with Ted Hughes and, I think, Auden, at that grand theatre by the </span><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>Thames</span></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>, Festival Hall, during that season&#8217;s poetry festival. Ann and I for some reason came late. In the massive lobby, bewhiskered guards in costume &#8211; were they wearing the distinctive medieval costumes of the </span><st1:place><st1:PlaceType><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>Tower</span></st1:PlaceType><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'> of </span><st1:PlaceName><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>London</span></st1:PlaceName></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'> &#8211; did they have pikes or am I imagining it? I remember uniforms and rows of military medals. <span class=GramE>Very imposing.</span> The reading had begun and one of the guards, a handsome, strapping, paternal figure, motioned us into a small foyer between the main lobby and the vaulting hall itself. We were asked not to push into the hall until applause signaled that one of the poets had concluded and another was about to begin. Three were two huge gleaming nickel chrome cuspidors filled with sand, of a kind that mostly harbored cigarette butts but were originally spittoons. As the foyer&#8217;s leather doors, studded with brass nails, closed leaving us alone, Ann suddenly hoisted herself up on one of these spittoons, lifted her dress and &#8220;went to the bathroom.&#8221; I looked away &#8211; afraid we were going to be hauled off to the Tower. The applause broke out before anyone else joined us and we pushed into the hall to hear Bob read. As I glanced back, I saw two long <span class=SpellE>turds</span> sitting in the sand.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in;text-indent:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>Some years later, Ann walked into the sea.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Creeley may be the occasion for this tale, but it&#8217;s hardly about him. We never learn what he read, nor how he comported <span class=GramE>himself alongside such hobnobs</span> of British conservatism as Auden or Hughes, nor functionally anything else about this reading. Indeed, not only is this not a book about Creeley the writer, but I&#8217;ve virtually never come across a memoir that shed less ink on that side of a poet&#8217;s life. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>One area where Mirsky does cast new light concerns something I&#8217;d never thought of in quite this way before &#8211; the breach between the New Americans and the Boston Brahmins that was so central to the division between post-avant &amp; </span><st1:place><st1:PlaceType><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>School</span></st1:PlaceType><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> of </span><st1:PlaceName><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Quietude</span></st1:PlaceName></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> poetics over the past half century. Mirsky cites Roger <span class=SpellE>Angell</span> &#8211;<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>the quintessential Harvard man of a certain period, hair meticulously combed, suit and tie with the touch of modesty that bespeaks the glass of fashion<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>&#8211; being genuinely vicious about the country bumpkin Creeley. Creeley&#8217;s father had been a doctor, but had died when Bob was quite young, leaving the family pretty much in poverty with only the mother&#8217;s inadequate salary as a nurse to sustain them. Olson&#8217;s father had been a mailman. Indeed, hardly anyone among the </span><st1:place><st1:PlaceName><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Black</span></st1:PlaceName><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> </span><st1:PlaceType><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Mountain</span></st1:PlaceType></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> crowd came from &#8220;money&#8221; when compared to the likes of Lowell or <span class=SpellE>Angell</span> or Sexton. When you think about it, it makes sense that the School of Quietude has a class orientation &#8211; it&#8217;s precisely their relationship to <span class=SpellE>Olde</span> Money that links them to the trade presses &#8211; and it explains why some people can go to Harvard or Yale &amp; come out with just an education, while somebody else gets fast-tracked through <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Slate, The New Yorker </i>&amp; the <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Paris Review, </i>&amp; has their first book out from FSG at 31. <span class=SpellE>Angell</span>, an editor at <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The New Yorker </i>as well as the most over-rated sports writer of all time, is the quintessential figure. Creeley, like Olson or even Frank O&#8217;Hara, never had his Pygmalion moment, never got straight which fork goes where in the place setting. Mirsky contrasts <span class=SpellE>Angell&#8217;s</span> breathless idealizations of athletes with Creeley&#8217;s own last mention of a baseball game, having the mustard spilled all over him. (Mirsky could have added George <span class=SpellE>Plympton&#8217;s</span> arch-rich kid stunts as a faux athlete while editing <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Paris Review </i>to this contrast as well.) The anglophilia of the Brahmins fits this context like a glove, a white glove or perhaps one for riding. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>So Mirsky&#8217;s Creeley isn&#8217;t the whole of the man &amp; doesn&#8217;t even approach the writing, as such. But it&#8217;s a useful &#8211; and voyeuristically enjoyable &#8211; road in to thinking about one of the two or three most influential poets of the past half century, and the elements that went into making him the particular poet he became. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<div style='clear: both;'></div>
</div>
<div class='post-footer'>
<div class='post-footer-line post-footer-line-1'>
<span class='post-author vcard'>
Posted by
<span class='fn' itemprop='author' itemscope='itemscope' itemtype='http://schema.org/Person'>
<span itemprop='name'>Ron</span>
</span>
</span>
<span class='post-timestamp'>
at
<meta content='https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2007/05/photo-by-tom-raworth-we-are-no-doubt.html' itemprop='url'/>
<a class='timestamp-link' href='https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2007/05/photo-by-tom-raworth-we-are-no-doubt.html' rel='bookmark' title='permanent link'><abbr class='published' itemprop='datePublished' title='2007-05-04T05:50:00-04:00'>Friday, May 04, 2007</abbr></a>
</span>
<span class='reaction-buttons'>
</span>
<span class='post-comment-link'>
</span>
<span class='post-backlinks post-comment-link'>
</span>
<span class='post-icons'>
<span class='item-action'>
<a href='https://www.blogger.com/email-post.g?blogID=3738579&postID=8138728951939469575' title='Email Post'>
<img alt='' class='icon-action' height='13' src='https://resources.blogblog.com/img/icon18_email.gif' width='18'/>
</a>
</span>
</span>
<div class='post-share-buttons goog-inline-block'>
</div>
</div>
<div class='post-footer-line post-footer-line-2'>
<span class='post-labels'>
Labels:
<a href='https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/search/label/Mark%2520Jay%2520Mirsky' rel='tag'>Mark Jay Mirsky</a>,
<a href='https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/search/label/memoir' rel='tag'>memoir</a>,
<a href='https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/search/label/Robert%2520Creeley' rel='tag'>Robert Creeley</a>
</span>
</div>
<div class='post-footer-line post-footer-line-3'>
<span class='post-location'>
</span>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>

          </div></div>
        

          <div class="date-outer">
        
<h2 class='date-header'><span>Monday, April 03, 2006</span></h2>

          <div class="date-posts">
        
<div class='post-outer'>
<div class='post hentry uncustomized-post-template' itemprop='blogPost' itemscope='itemscope' itemtype='http://schema.org/BlogPosting'>
<meta content='http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/creeley/images/Creeley-Kuszai-Providence-1-04.JPG' itemprop='image_url'/>
<meta content='3738579' itemprop='blogId'/>
<meta content='114406343073123431' itemprop='postId'/>
<a name='114406343073123431'></a>
<div class='post-header'>
<div class='post-header-line-1'></div>
</div>
<div class='post-body entry-content' id='post-body-114406343073123431' itemprop='description articleBody'>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'><img height="273" id="_x0000_i1025" src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh4.googleusercontent.com/proxy/7xEQvXDxa_u4YAc_nSz6-HME--7EjYDRam99IUMkDbfSUUMomCiUcFf7SWgOt-ZHrTdfYMgaYxPwyspc9Ne3hMcXv_4GYOynkP8E2OcGLSbYtmZ5hWtrBUqMoq5Bc1lhJsk0LQ%3Ds0-d" width="364"><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Thursday, when I got back from </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Boston</span></st1:place></st1:City><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>, among of the stack of books that had come in the mail while I&#8217;d been traveling was <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/10613.html"><span style='color:black'>On Earth: Last Poems and an Essay</span></a>, </i>by <a href="http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/creeley/"><span style='color:black'>Robert Creeley</span></a>. It wasn&#8217;t until the next day that I realized that Thursday also had been the first anniversary of Robert&#8217;s passing. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Reading &#8211; devouring, really &#8211; these last few poems, less than three dozen in all, virtually all in the characteristic halting gait of Creeley&#8217;s late poems, not all that different from a sense of line &amp; stanza that evolved from the late 1940s up to the early &#8216;70s, after which it seemed content to serve almost as a homing device. One thinks in one&#8217;s poems &amp; never is that reality more evident than in Bob&#8217;s work, but Creeley&#8217;s line, so identifiable he could have patented it, seems finally not so much <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>how </i>as it is <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>who </i>is thinking:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><b style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>Here</span></b><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'><br>
<br>
Up a hill and down again.<br>
Around and in &#8211;<br>
<br>
Out was what it was all about<br>
but now it&#8217;s done.<br>
<br>
At the end was the beginning<span class=GramE>,</span><br>
just like it said or someone did.<br>
<br>
Keep looking, keep looking<span class=GramE>,</span><br>
keep looking.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>One might argue, with some justification, that this is a poem that Creeley has written before, and yet it seems clearly so beside the point. Approaching this work, possibly <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>any </i>work, with an air of judgment ultimately will tell you so very little about what is going on when there is so much more to be gained by not doing so, by reading through that old nagging sense, getting beyond it to see what the poet was sensing, was after. I find this poem, as I do several others here, absolutely compelling, memorable in ways that forced me to commit so many of the poems in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>For Love, </i>the first of Bob&#8217;s books I owned some 40 years ago, to memory. Is this a great poem? I don&#8217;t care &#8211; it certainly for me will be a touchstone of what I personally love about poetry going forward. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>The concerns of the poem are not a young person&#8217;s, and this is a book filled with elegies, with saying goodbye, recalling regrets:<o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><b style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>Paul</span></b><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'><br> 
<br>
I&#8217;ll never forgive myself for the<br>
violence propelled me at sad Paul<br>
Blackburn, pushed in turn by both<br>
our hopeless wives who were spitting<br>
venom at one another in the heaven<br>
we&#8217;d got ourselves to, Mallorca, mid-fifties,<br>
where one could live for peanuts while<br>
writing great works and looking at the<br>
constant blue sea, etc. Why did I fight such<br>
surrogate battles of existence with such<br>
a specific friend as he was for sure?<br>
Our first meeting NYC 1960 we talked two<br>
and a half days straight without leaving the<br>
apartment. He knew Auden and Yeats<br>
by heart and had begun on Pound&#8217;s lead<br>
translating the Provençal poets, and was<br>
studying with Moses <span class=SpellE>Hadas</span> at NYU. How<br>
sweet this thoughtful beleaguered vulnerable<br>
person whose childhood was full of </span><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>New<br>
England</span></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'> abusive confusion, his mother the too<br>
often absent poet, Frances Frost! I wish<br>
he were here now, we could go on talking,<br>
I&#8217;d have company my own age in this<br>
drab burned out trashed dump we call the<br>
phenomenal world where he once walked<br>
the wondrous earth and knew its pleasures.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Four of the 26 lines here break on the word <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>the, </i>an enjambment that calls up Robert&#8217;s familiar rasping voice immediately to mind, yet the stanza that is so often a defining pulse in his writing has been set aside for the wealth of detail about Blackburn, aspects that might seem odd to us now &#8211; who recalls the poetry of Frances Frost, best known to poets of my generation for her work as editor of the children&#8217;s book edition of <span class=SpellE>Gian</span> Carlo Menotti&#8217;s <span class=SpellE><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Amahl</i></span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> and the Night Visitors</i>, a commonplace in the 1950s? <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>The last few times I saw Bob read, he invariably spoke openly about the approach of death, concerned more with the loss of others, particularly of his own generation, who were going ahead of him. No more than a dozen of the poets in the Allen anthology are still living, fewer still who continue to write. Even the essay that concludes <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>On Earth</i>, ostensibly on Whitman but wide-ranging ultimately, focuses on the questions of age:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>I could go on quoting. Age wants no one to leave. Things close down in age, like stores, like lights going off, like a world disappearing in a vacancy one had no thought might happen. It&#8217;s no fun, no victory, no reward, <span class=GramE>no</span> direction. One sits and waits, most usually for the doctor. So one goes inside oneself, as it were, looks out from that &#8220;height&#8221; with only imagination to give prospect.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Given all this, it is not surprising, I suppose, that the poems in this book, perhaps to a degree not seen in Creeley&#8217;s earlier books, have a harder time closing &#8211; the last line of the poem for Blackburn, which feels forced, is a case in point. Similarly, the longish (five pages, even tho these pages, at 4.5 by 7 inches, are small) anti-war poem &#8220;Help!,&#8221; and even the final &#8220;Valentine for You,&#8221; one last echo of Zukofsky, seem not so much to finish as to be turned, finally, aside. What else, after all, is there to do but <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>keep looking, keep looking</i>?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<div style='clear: both;'></div>
</div>
<div class='post-footer'>
<div class='post-footer-line post-footer-line-1'>
<span class='post-author vcard'>
Posted by
<span class='fn' itemprop='author' itemscope='itemscope' itemtype='http://schema.org/Person'>
<span itemprop='name'>Ron</span>
</span>
</span>
<span class='post-timestamp'>
at
<meta content='https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2006/04/thursday-when-i-got-back-from-boston.html' itemprop='url'/>
<a class='timestamp-link' href='https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2006/04/thursday-when-i-got-back-from-boston.html' rel='bookmark' title='permanent link'><abbr class='published' itemprop='datePublished' title='2006-04-03T07:18:00-04:00'>Monday, April 03, 2006</abbr></a>
</span>
<span class='reaction-buttons'>
</span>
<span class='post-comment-link'>
</span>
<span class='post-backlinks post-comment-link'>
</span>
<span class='post-icons'>
<span class='item-action'>
<a href='https://www.blogger.com/email-post.g?blogID=3738579&postID=114406343073123431' title='Email Post'>
<img alt='' class='icon-action' height='13' src='https://resources.blogblog.com/img/icon18_email.gif' width='18'/>
</a>
</span>
</span>
<div class='post-share-buttons goog-inline-block'>
</div>
</div>
<div class='post-footer-line post-footer-line-2'>
<span class='post-labels'>
Labels:
<a href='https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/search/label/review' rel='tag'>review</a>,
<a href='https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/search/label/Robert%2520Creeley' rel='tag'>Robert Creeley</a>
</span>
</div>
<div class='post-footer-line post-footer-line-3'>
<span class='post-location'>
</span>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>

          </div></div>
        

          <div class="date-outer">
        
<h2 class='date-header'><span>Tuesday, October 29, 2002</span></h2>

          <div class="date-posts">
        
<div class='post-outer'>
<div class='post hentry uncustomized-post-template' itemprop='blogPost' itemscope='itemscope' itemtype='http://schema.org/BlogPosting'>
<meta content='3738579' itemprop='blogId'/>
<meta content='83711808' itemprop='postId'/>
<a name='83711808'></a>
<div class='post-header'>
<div class='post-header-line-1'></div>
</div>
<div class='post-body entry-content' id='post-body-83711808' itemprop='description articleBody'>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">At his reading Sunday with
Chris McCreary and <span class="SpellE">Rosmarie</span> Waldrop at the Painted Bride,
Lewis Warsh referred to the stories in his Singing Horse Press book <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Touch of the Whip</i> as poems, then stopped
&amp; corrected himself. Perhaps he shouldn&#8217;t have.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Poets&#8217; prose is a glorious
&amp; little understood jumble. The genre(s) can be traced back through
Burroughs, Stein &amp; Joyce at the very least to Baudelaire &amp; Aloysius
Bertrand*, to the origin of the prose poem. I would invoke Melville&#8217;s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Moby Dick</i> not only as a further
instance, but as a superb example of the ways in which poets&#8217; fiction almost
invariably move beyond the tidy constraints of what is normatively fictive
(which I might then trace back, at least in the U.S., to Twain). Let me map out
what I see as six distinct tributaries of this phenomenon.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">First is the prose poem
itself. It by itself has multiple manifestations. One is the closed, one page
or less prose piece that can be traced back to Max Jacob, but which in the </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">United States</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="font-family: Arial;"> comes heavily through the pernicious influence of
Robert <span class="SpellE">Bly&#8217;s</span> journal(s), <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Fifties </i>and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Sixties,</i>
abetted by George Hitchcock&#8217;s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Kayak</i>
and the numerous books of Russell <span class="SpellE">Edson</span>. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">The second, far more
interesting mode is the lengthier poet&#8217;s prose that remains clearly poetry,
which begins in American English with Stein &amp; then Williams&#8217; <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Kora in Hell</i>, but which really takes off
after John Ashbery&#8217;s<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> Three Poems, </i>Clark
Coolidge&#8217;s &#8220;Weathers&#8221; &amp; Robert Creeley&#8217;s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Mabel</i>. This tendency has important French cousins in the work of
St.-John <span class="SpellE">Perse</span> and Francis Ponge. This is where I
would put Lyn Hejinian&#8217;s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">My Life,</i> or
Beverly Dahlen&#8217;s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A Reading</i> or even
Jack Spicer&#8217;s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Heads of the Town Up to the
<span class="SpellE">Aether</span>. </i>Questions of the serial poem and the epic
will eventually expand this category even further.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">After the prose poem comes a
mode of poetic fiction that would include Warsh&#8217;s marvelous <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Touch of the Whip, </i>much of the writing
by </span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">Carla Harryman</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">, Creeley&#8217;s stories, the short fiction of Gil <span class="SpellE">Ott</span>, the narratives of Bobbie Louise Hawkins. <span class="GramE">And Samuel Beckett most of all.</span> These are all writers
clearly interested in the traditions and devices of fiction itself, but written
with a poet&#8217;s sense of literary value. There are few (if any) moments where,
say, character or <span class="GramE">plot, which may in fact be both present
&amp; pertinent, are</span> more important than the pleasures &amp;
problematics of the words immediately on the page in front of the reader. I
think that these may be the most difficult works of all for people to gauge,
because they truly transcend either of their source genres. Where I think you
can test my own work as poetry, and, say, Paul <span class="SpellE">Auster&#8217;s</span>
as fiction, these writers clearly are <span class="GramE">on their own</span>.
This thus may be the bravest prose of all. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">A close cousin to this
intergenre prose is more truly what I would call poet&#8217;s fiction, works by poets
that genuinely aim for the goals of fiction, but often employing many of the
devices (&amp; pleasures) of their home form: Gilbert Sorrentino &amp; Toby
Olson would be good examples. So would almost all the writing of the so-called
new narrative: Dodie Bellamy, </span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">Kevin Killian</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">,
Robert <span class="SpellE">Gluck</span>, Bruce Boone, <span class="GramE">Michael</span>
<span class="SpellE">Amnasan</span>. I would place Harry Mathews here, although
I&#8217;d put the bulk of <span class="SpellE">Oulipo</span> fiction into the next
category.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">These would be those fiction
writers who clearly identify as such, but who write as though their readers
were going to be, if not poets per se, at least the readers of poetry. This is
where Burroughs &amp; Kerouac fit in (&amp; Melville at his best also). Kathy
Acker, Walter <span class="SpellE">Abish</span>, Lydia Davis, Sarah Schulman,
Samuel R. <span class="SpellE">Delany</span>, Julio <span class="SpellE">Cortázar</span>,
<span class="SpellE">Italo</span> <span class="SpellE">Calvino</span>, <span class="GramE">Joyce</span> of course; one could make a case for W.G. Sebald, as
for Carole <span class="SpellE">Maso</span>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Finally there are poets who
work hard to make a transition all the way to the values of fiction &#8211; the
problematics of plot-centric narrative, for example &#8211; but whose prose still
retains some surface features of their past as poets. Auster fits <span class="GramE">here,</span> as I think does the later work Michael Ondaatje (tho
his first works fit closer to the poet&#8217;s fiction category). <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">There are of course many
other kinds of creative prose &amp; fiction. These are merely the types that
touch on poetry as a genre &amp; tradition. None of this has to do with quality
per se, but I do think that it has to do with certain questions of literary
judgment. It&#8217;s a mistake, for example, to compare the prose of Lewis Warsh with
the novels, say, of Paul Auster, or with the prose poetry of Clark Coolidge.
Rather I suspect that over time, as we have more readers &amp; writers and more
works in each of these tributaries of excellence, we will eventually have a
cleaving between the various categories far more decisively than we have today.
In 2002, it is still possible to call <span class="GramE">both Russell</span> <span class="SpellE">Edson</span> &amp; Lyn Hejinian prose poets, </span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">Carla Harryman</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;"> &amp; Michael Ondaatje fiction writers. Fifty years
from now, such clusterings will simply seem like nonsense.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">* When is
somebody going to publish Merrill <span class="SpellE">Gilfillan&#8217;s</span> superb
collection of translations from Bertrand&#8217;s <span class="SpellE"><span class="GramE"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Gaspard</i></span></span><span class="GramE"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>de</i></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> la <span class="SpellE">Nuit</span></i>? <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style='clear: both;'></div>
</div>
<div class='post-footer'>
<div class='post-footer-line post-footer-line-1'>
<span class='post-author vcard'>
Posted by
<span class='fn' itemprop='author' itemscope='itemscope' itemtype='http://schema.org/Person'>
<span itemprop='name'>Ron</span>
</span>
</span>
<span class='post-timestamp'>
at
<meta content='https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2002/10/at-his-reading-sunday-with-chris.html' itemprop='url'/>
<a class='timestamp-link' href='https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2002/10/at-his-reading-sunday-with-chris.html' rel='bookmark' title='permanent link'><abbr class='published' itemprop='datePublished' title='2002-10-29T06:35:00-05:00'>Tuesday, October 29, 2002</abbr></a>
</span>
<span class='reaction-buttons'>
</span>
<span class='post-comment-link'>
</span>
<span class='post-backlinks post-comment-link'>
</span>
<span class='post-icons'>
<span class='item-action'>
<a href='https://www.blogger.com/email-post.g?blogID=3738579&postID=83711808' title='Email Post'>
<img alt='' class='icon-action' height='13' src='https://resources.blogblog.com/img/icon18_email.gif' width='18'/>
</a>
</span>
</span>
<div class='post-share-buttons goog-inline-block'>
</div>
</div>
<div class='post-footer-line post-footer-line-2'>
<span class='post-labels'>
Labels:
<a href='https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/search/label/Classic%2520American%2520Poetry' rel='tag'>Classic American Poetry</a>,
<a href='https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/search/label/Fiction' rel='tag'>Fiction</a>,
<a href='https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/search/label/Herman%2520Melville' rel='tag'>Herman Melville</a>,
<a href='https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/search/label/Italo%2520Calvino' rel='tag'>Italo Calvino</a>,
<a href='https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/search/label/Poets%2520Prose' rel='tag'>Poets Prose</a>,
<a href='https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/search/label/Robert%2520Creeley' rel='tag'>Robert Creeley</a>
</span>
</div>
<div class='post-footer-line post-footer-line-3'>
<span class='post-location'>
</span>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>

          </div></div>
        

          <div class="date-outer">
        
<h2 class='date-header'><span>Thursday, September 26, 2002</span></h2>

          <div class="date-posts">
        
<div class='post-outer'>
<div class='post hentry uncustomized-post-template' itemprop='blogPost' itemscope='itemscope' itemtype='http://schema.org/BlogPosting'>
<meta content='3738579' itemprop='blogId'/>
<meta content='82138907' itemprop='postId'/>
<a name='82138907'></a>
<div class='post-header'>
<div class='post-header-line-1'></div>
</div>
<div class='post-body entry-content' id='post-body-82138907' itemprop='description articleBody'>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Patrick Herron writes to ask
about my comment that &#8220;irresolvable conflict is the primary <span class="SpellE">Spicerian</span>
theme.&#8221; It seemed to me, as I wrote that comment a week ago, thumbing through
my dog-eared (indeed, nearly dissolving with use) copy of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Collected Books</i> obvious enough &#8211; it
hadn&#8217;t occurred to me that the observation might be in any way unusual. I had
been skimming through the baseball poems from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Book of Magazine Verse</i>, especially the second one &#8211; they&#8217;re love
poems, of course, but love poems that presume the impossibility of any
successful relationship. It&#8217;s a position that Spicer held with remarkable
consistency throughout his life. About god: &#8220;If there isn&#8217;t / A God don&#8217;t
believe in Him.&#8221; About human relations: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">They
say &#8220;he need (present) enemy (plural)&#8221;<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">I
am not them. This is the first transformation.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">About poetry: &#8220;No / <span class="GramE">One</span> listens to poetry.&#8221;<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Spicer is quintessentially a
poet of emotion precisely because that is the surfeit left unassimilated
whenever impossible forces meet. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Not that Spicer is
necessarily all that different in this &#8211; think of the underlying bitterness and
anger implicit in so many of Creeley&#8217;s early love poems, as in The Warning:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">For
love &#8211; I would<br />
split open your head and put<br />
a candle in<br />
behind the eyes.<br />
<br />
Love is dead in us<br />
if we forget<br />
the virtues of an amulet<br />
and quick surprise.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Indeed, one of the secrets
of Creeley&#8217;s early poems is the association it consistently makes between rhyme
and violence, as though rhyme itself were an expression of force.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Conflict is the fundamental
narrative engine &#8211; it is the element that insists, even in a still life, that
something will have to give &amp; that change is inevitable.* In his excellent
ethnography, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">&#8220;Peaks of Yemen I Summon&#8221;:
Poetry as Cultural Practice in a North Yemeni Tribe </i>(University of
California, 1990), Steven Caton repeatedly notes how many ways in which poetry
functions among the al-<span class="SpellE">Yamāniyatēn</span> of <span class="SpellE">Khawlān</span> at-<span class="SpellE">Tiyāl</span> as a
ritualized surrogate for combat. Our own earliest texts, such as Beowulf, are
replete with blood and gore. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">I think about <span class="SpellE">Caton&#8217;s</span> book, which suggests without ever quite saying so
that poetry itself is a kind of blood sport, whenever one of the several poetry
listserv discussion groups dissolves into petty verbal warfare. If nothing
else, <span class="SpellE">Caton&#8217;s</span> thesis suggests the normalcy of the
problem. Indeed, it implies that if there were not combative &#8220;camps&#8221; in
contemporary poetry, we might be forced to invent them.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">This of course is not an
optimistic view of human behavior or <span class="GramE">its</span> potential.
Right now with the political situation being what it is &#8211; as an illegitimate
President crawfishes over from an unavoidable war against al-Qaeda into a
nebulous &#8220;war on terrorism,&#8221; a metaphor that can &amp; does extend outward in
all directions, enabling the Administration to simply sweep away Constitutional
protections of individual liberty, &amp; also to an unrelated threatened
assault on Iraq aimed at instilling a Pax Americana on the entire Middle East &#8211;
the question of conflict is in no way abstract. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">While it is not evident what
Spicer would have made of all this, it seems likely that he would not have been
surprised. I imagine that there might have been a serial poem about the
crusades. If ever we had a poet in touch with the infinite sense of hurt that accompanies
people who believe they are still suffering from battles waged hundreds or even
thousands of years ago, for whom the logic of Kosovo, Chechnya, Kurdistan and
the Left Bank exposes its lethal gears as if to a watchmaker, it was this
cantankerous alcoholic linguist who once identified himself as a member of the
&#8220;California Republican Army.&#8221; <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">* Think of
Edward Hopper&#8217;s paintings, for example. This is why figurative paintings are
often characterized as narrative.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style='clear: both;'></div>
</div>
<div class='post-footer'>
<div class='post-footer-line post-footer-line-1'>
<span class='post-author vcard'>
Posted by
<span class='fn' itemprop='author' itemscope='itemscope' itemtype='http://schema.org/Person'>
<span itemprop='name'>Ron</span>
</span>
</span>
<span class='post-timestamp'>
at
<meta content='https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2002/09/patrick-herron-writes-to-ask-about-my.html' itemprop='url'/>
<a class='timestamp-link' href='https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2002/09/patrick-herron-writes-to-ask-about-my.html' rel='bookmark' title='permanent link'><abbr class='published' itemprop='datePublished' title='2002-09-26T06:10:00-04:00'>Thursday, September 26, 2002</abbr></a>
</span>
<span class='reaction-buttons'>
</span>
<span class='post-comment-link'>
</span>
<span class='post-backlinks post-comment-link'>
</span>
<span class='post-icons'>
<span class='item-action'>
<a href='https://www.blogger.com/email-post.g?blogID=3738579&postID=82138907' title='Email Post'>
<img alt='' class='icon-action' height='13' src='https://resources.blogblog.com/img/icon18_email.gif' width='18'/>
</a>
</span>
</span>
<div class='post-share-buttons goog-inline-block'>
</div>
</div>
<div class='post-footer-line post-footer-line-2'>
<span class='post-labels'>
Labels:
<a href='https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/search/label/Jack%2520Spicer' rel='tag'>Jack Spicer</a>,
<a href='https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/search/label/Robert%2520Creeley' rel='tag'>Robert Creeley</a>
</span>
</div>
<div class='post-footer-line post-footer-line-3'>
<span class='post-location'>
</span>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>

          </div></div>
        

          <div class="date-outer">
        
<h2 class='date-header'><span>Sunday, September 08, 2002</span></h2>

          <div class="date-posts">
        
<div class='post-outer'>
<div class='post hentry uncustomized-post-template' itemprop='blogPost' itemscope='itemscope' itemtype='http://schema.org/BlogPosting'>
<meta content='3738579' itemprop='blogId'/>
<meta content='81312866' itemprop='postId'/>
<a name='81312866'></a>
<div class='post-header'>
<div class='post-header-line-1'></div>
</div>
<div class='post-body entry-content' id='post-body-81312866' itemprop='description articleBody'>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">One of the most interesting
inclusions in the ridiculously named <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Best American Poetry 2002</i> (Scribner), guest edited by Robert Creeley, is a
series of twenty-six fragments written by the late George Oppen, &#8220;scrawled on envelopes
and other small pieces of paper &#8211; posted to the walls of George Oppen&#8217;s study
and gathered after his death.&#8221; One in fact was written in pencil directly on
the wall itself. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">One that I find most
haunting is the second:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1.0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">I
find I am forgetting<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1.0in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">all</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;"> the
spoken<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>of<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1.0in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">and</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;"> the
numbers<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>(i.e.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1.0in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">how</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;"> to
form them<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1.0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1.0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">----------------------<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1.0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1.0in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">also</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;">
the numbers<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">George Oppen died of
Alzheimer&#8217;s disease, the debilitating degenerative condition against which he
struggled for many years. This fragment appears to directly address that
condition and, in doing so, recalls the furor that met the exhibition of Willem
de Kooning&#8217;s last paintings, also created by an artist well into the
irreversible dementia of the disease. Were the sweeping and majestic spaces of his
last canvases &#8211; more akin to a Diebenkorn (albeit one with no straight lines)
than to the intense and misogynistic paintings of de Kooning&#8217;s signature work &#8211;
the sign of an artist who had arrive at a new (and theoretically more peaceful)
stage in his evolution or an index of the degeneration of one of the great
minds in painting? Because poetry depends precisely on language and is so
intimately entangled with consciousness itself, Oppen&#8217;s last fragments
inevitably raise the same issues. I&#8217;ve heard at least one person wonder aloud
as to the </span><st1:state><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">wis</span></st1:place></st1:state><span style="font-family: Arial;">dom of printing these last unfinished pieces.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">I&#8217;m persuaded by the </span><st1:state><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">tex</span></st1:place></st1:state><span style="font-family: Arial;">t themselves. Although not all are anywhere near
Oppen&#8217;s best poetry, some &#8211; like the above &#8211; are quite fine. While George Oppen
is rightly included among the Objectivists in literary history, the bulk of his
writing occurred after 1960, a point beyond which it was impossible not to be
aware of the New Americans.* The projectivists in particular were clear about
using poetry to represent the movement of thought, although others as diverse
as Phil Whalen, Allen Ginsberg and Frank O&#8217;Hara could be said to have also
written what Whalen once characterized as a &#8220;continuous nerve movie.&#8221; <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Oppen seems quite clear, if
not about words &amp; numbers as such, about the importance of tracking his own
consciousness against this greatest of challenges, its own ineluctable
decomposition. These fragments, many of which repeat themselves, stalking the
same terrain over &amp; over, articulate a mind working through some of the
most elemental facts of poetry and life with an absolute sense of just how
little time remains.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">*</span> <span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">Oppen was an attentive reader. I had
the fortune of being present when Mark Linenthal first introduced Oppen to
Robert Duncan. Oppen&#8217;s first words were, &#8220;I want to talk with you about your
use of open vowels.&#8221;<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style='clear: both;'></div>
</div>
<div class='post-footer'>
<div class='post-footer-line post-footer-line-1'>
<span class='post-author vcard'>
Posted by
<span class='fn' itemprop='author' itemscope='itemscope' itemtype='http://schema.org/Person'>
<span itemprop='name'>Ron</span>
</span>
</span>
<span class='post-timestamp'>
at
<meta content='https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2002/09/one-of-most-interesting-inclusions-in.html' itemprop='url'/>
<a class='timestamp-link' href='https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2002/09/one-of-most-interesting-inclusions-in.html' rel='bookmark' title='permanent link'><abbr class='published' itemprop='datePublished' title='2002-09-08T09:34:00-04:00'>Sunday, September 08, 2002</abbr></a>
</span>
<span class='reaction-buttons'>
</span>
<span class='post-comment-link'>
</span>
<span class='post-backlinks post-comment-link'>
</span>
<span class='post-icons'>
<span class='item-action'>
<a href='https://www.blogger.com/email-post.g?blogID=3738579&postID=81312866' title='Email Post'>
<img alt='' class='icon-action' height='13' src='https://resources.blogblog.com/img/icon18_email.gif' width='18'/>
</a>
</span>
</span>
<div class='post-share-buttons goog-inline-block'>
</div>
</div>
<div class='post-footer-line post-footer-line-2'>
<span class='post-labels'>
Labels:
<a href='https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/search/label/George%2520Oppen' rel='tag'>George Oppen</a>,
<a href='https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/search/label/Projectivism' rel='tag'>Projectivism</a>,
<a href='https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/search/label/Robert%2520Creeley' rel='tag'>Robert Creeley</a>
</span>
</div>
<div class='post-footer-line post-footer-line-3'>
<span class='post-location'>
</span>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>

        </div></div>
      
</div>
<div class='blog-pager' id='blog-pager'>
<span id='blog-pager-newer-link'>
<a class='blog-pager-newer-link' href='https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/search/label/Robert%2520Creeley%3Fmax-results%3D20' id='Blog1_blog-pager-newer-link' title='Newer Posts'>Newer Posts</a>
</span>
<span id='blog-pager-older-link'>
<a class='blog-pager-older-link' href='https://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/search/label/Robert%20Creeley?updated-max=2002-09-08T09:34:00-04:00&amp;max-results=20&amp;start=29&amp;by-date=false' id='Blog1_blog-pager-older-link' title='Older Posts'>Older Posts</a>
</span>
<a class='home-link' href='https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/'>Home</a>
</div>
<div class='clear'></div>
<div class='blog-feeds'>
<div class='feed-links'>
Subscribe to:
<a class='feed-link' href='https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default' target='_blank' type='application/atom+xml'>Posts (Atom)</a>
</div>
</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<div id='sidebar-wrapper'>
<div class='sidebar section' id='sidebar'><div class='widget Text' data-version='1' id='Text4'>
<h2 class='title'>Upcoming</h2>
<div class='widget-content'>
<b>October</b><br /><br />Madrid<br />with Charles Bernstein & Susan Bee<br /><br />Barcelona<br /><div><br /><br />Saragossa?<br /><br /><b>November</b><br /><br />Rome?<div><br /></div><div><br /></div></div>
</div>
<div class='clear'></div>
<span class='widget-item-control'>
<span class='item-control blog-admin'>
<a class='quickedit' href='//www.blogger.com/rearrange?blogID=3738579&widgetType=Text&widgetId=Text4&action=editWidget&sectionId=sidebar' onclick='return _WidgetManager._PopupConfig(document.getElementById("Text4"));' rel='nofollow' target='configText4' title='Edit'>
<img alt='' height='18' src='https://resources.blogblog.com/img/icon18_wrench_allbkg.png' width='18'/>
</a>
</span>
</span>
<div class='clear'></div>
</div><div class='widget TextList' data-version='1' id='TextList1'>
<h2>Email</h2>
<div class='widget-content'>
<ul>
<li>silliman AT gmail DOT com</li>
</ul>
<div class='clear'></div>
<span class='widget-item-control'>
<span class='item-control blog-admin'>
<a class='quickedit' href='//www.blogger.com/rearrange?blogID=3738579&widgetType=TextList&widgetId=TextList1&action=editWidget&sectionId=sidebar' onclick='return _WidgetManager._PopupConfig(document.getElementById("TextList1"));' rel='nofollow' target='configTextList1' title='Edit'>
<img alt='' height='18' src='https://resources.blogblog.com/img/icon18_wrench_allbkg.png' width='18'/>
</a>
</span>
</span>
<div class='clear'></div>
</div>
</div><div class='widget LinkList' data-version='1' id='LinkList1'>
<h2>Silliman Sites</h2>
<div class='widget-content'>
<ul>
<li><a href='http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/1544'>Academy of American Poets</a></li>
<li><a href='http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/silliman'>Electronic Poetry Center</a></li>
<li><a href='http://www.facebook.com/ron.silliman'>Facebook</a></li>
<li><a href='http://www.goodreads.com/search/search%3Fsearch_type%3Dbooks%26search%5Bquery%5D%3Dron%2Bsilliman'>GoodReads</a></li>
<li><a href='http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/s_z/silliman/silliman.htm'>Modern American Poetry</a></li>
<li><a href='http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Silliman.php'>PennSound</a></li>
<li><a href='http://www.pcah.us/the-center/grants-awarded/grantees-1998-ron-silliman/'>Pew Fellowships in the Arts</a></li>
<li><a href='http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=6323'>Poetry Foundation</a></li>
<li><a href='http://ronsillimanbibliography.blogspot.com/'>Silliman's Bibliography</a></li>
<li><a href='http://www.spdbooks.org/Search/Default.aspx?AuthorName=Ron+Silliman'>Small Press Distribution</a></li>
<li><a href='http://eclipsearchive.org/projects/TOTTELS/'>Tottel's</a></li>
<li><a href='http://twitter.com/ronsilliman'>Twitter</a></li>
<li><a href='http://www.ubu.com/contemp/silliman/index.html'>Ubuweb</a></li>
<li><a href='https://library.ucsd.edu/speccoll/findingaids/mss0075.html'>UC San Diego Archives</a></li>
<li><a href='http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Silliman'>Wikipedia</a></li>
</ul>
<div class='clear'></div>
<span class='widget-item-control'>
<span class='item-control blog-admin'>
<a class='quickedit' href='//www.blogger.com/rearrange?blogID=3738579&widgetType=LinkList&widgetId=LinkList1&action=editWidget&sectionId=sidebar' onclick='return _WidgetManager._PopupConfig(document.getElementById("LinkList1"));' rel='nofollow' target='configLinkList1' title='Edit'>
<img alt='' height='18' src='https://resources.blogblog.com/img/icon18_wrench_allbkg.png' width='18'/>
</a>
</span>
</span>
<div class='clear'></div>
</div>
</div><div class='widget Text' data-version='1' id='Text1'>
<h2 class='title'>Ketjak</h2>
<div class='widget-content'>
<a href="http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/10742.php">I: The Age of Huts<br /><br /></a>             <a href="http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/10742.php"><img src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh6.googleusercontent.com/proxy/u_VsYLU9NS_tJXOrl6A4RM1Dne7QkuSslpBc0StgKSXXoIDStYoXqSwDo2tuxST00QD3ynVJH4yjAhcEzTWyM0F_RriCRx9yZdyygceY2wm-%3Ds0-d" /></a><br /><br /><br />II: Tjanting<br /><br /><a href="https://www.saltpublishing.com/products/tjanting-9781876857196"><img src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh4.googleusercontent.com/proxy/efy1lIcVIKeKSdy_WUDIxV8WLN0OJmA3f7enQ2XDwxwt7Bh5ssfQQAkW_o4oG6FqrB1RGf7CX-Rw-VQ4u36RIuwSsCMxWjjHFDP4c7CbW2d_%3Ds0-d" /></a><br /><br /><br /><a href="http://www.uapress.ua.edu/product/Alphabet,1897.aspx">III: The Alphabet<br /><br /></a><a href="http://www.uapress.ua.edu/product/Alphabet,1897.aspx"><img id="ctl00_MainContent_ProductInfo1_ctl00_PrimaryImage_PrimaryImage" onclick="javascript:window.open(&#39;http://www.uapress.ua.edu//images/temp/212-1897-Product_LargeToMediumImage.jpeg&#39;, 1, &#39;resizable=1, width=500, height=700&#39;)" src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh3.googleusercontent.com/proxy/OnaMjXm2h6XxneM04RgHx1Bkf2Wi9UE3a8c3o0NDvW5wXo7BK3MaM5VP9YfbEIpHYxAstTorwhNW4lhhkNuua5bDX7Ogr2UgZ1NMDDjeh-0bNnuo-WH-9pGHIR6lv-4-_UDHVNe36xB6%3Ds0-d" style="border: 1px solid Gray;" /></a><br /><div><br /></div><div>IV. from Universe</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>
</div>
<div class='clear'></div>
<span class='widget-item-control'>
<span class='item-control blog-admin'>
<a class='quickedit' href='//www.blogger.com/rearrange?blogID=3738579&widgetType=Text&widgetId=Text1&action=editWidget&sectionId=sidebar' onclick='return _WidgetManager._PopupConfig(document.getElementById("Text1"));' rel='nofollow' target='configText1' title='Edit'>
<img alt='' height='18' src='https://resources.blogblog.com/img/icon18_wrench_allbkg.png' width='18'/>
</a>
</span>
</span>
<div class='clear'></div>
</div><div class='widget Text' data-version='1' id='Text3'>
<h2 class='title'>Other Books in Print</h2>
<div class='widget-content'>
<span style="font-weight: bold;">MEMOIRS &amp; COLLABORATIONS</span><br /><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Leningrad-American-Writers-Soviet-Union/dp/1562790056">Leningrad</a><br /><a href="http://www.thegrandpiano.org/">The Grand Piano</a><br /><a href="https://www.saltpublishing.com/products/under-albany-9781844710515">Under Albany</a><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">CRITICISM</span><br /><a href="http://www.spdbooks.org/Producte/0937804207/the-new-sentence.aspx">The New Sentence</a><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">ANTHOLOGY</span><br /><a href="https://secure.touchnet.com/C22921_ustores/web/classic/product_detail.jsp?PRODUCTID=327&SINGLESTORE=true">In The American Tree</a><br /><br /><br /><br />
</div>
<div class='clear'></div>
<span class='widget-item-control'>
<span class='item-control blog-admin'>
<a class='quickedit' href='//www.blogger.com/rearrange?blogID=3738579&widgetType=Text&widgetId=Text3&action=editWidget&sectionId=sidebar' onclick='return _WidgetManager._PopupConfig(document.getElementById("Text3"));' rel='nofollow' target='configText3' title='Edit'>
<img alt='' height='18' src='https://resources.blogblog.com/img/icon18_wrench_allbkg.png' width='18'/>
</a>
</span>
</span>
<div class='clear'></div>
</div><div class='widget Image' data-version='1' id='Image1'>
<div class='widget-content'>
<img alt='' height='163' id='Image1_img' src='//3.bp.blogspot.com/_TEBx9oYcXio/S9oGYEaetqI/AAAAAAAABDs/UI7l5u8GwcA/S230/redron.jpg' width='230'/>
<br/>
</div>
<div class='clear'></div>
<span class='widget-item-control'>
<span class='item-control blog-admin'>
<a class='quickedit' href='//www.blogger.com/rearrange?blogID=3738579&widgetType=Image&widgetId=Image1&action=editWidget&sectionId=sidebar' onclick='return _WidgetManager._PopupConfig(document.getElementById("Image1"));' rel='nofollow' target='configImage1' title='Edit'>
<img alt='' height='18' src='https://resources.blogblog.com/img/icon18_wrench_allbkg.png' width='18'/>
</a>
</span>
</span>
<div class='clear'></div>
</div><div class='widget Text' data-version='1' id='Text2'>
<div class='widget-content'>
<br /><img alt="" src="file%3A///Users/Lynn/Desktop/silliman2a.jpg" / /><img alt="" src="file%3A///Users/Lynn/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems/moz-screenshot.png" / /><span style="color: #990000; font-weight: bold;">RON SILLIMAN</span> has written and edited 40 books, and had his poetry and criticism translated into 16 languages. Silliman was a 2012 Kelly Writers House Fellow, the 2010 recipient of the Levinson Prize from the Poetry Foundation, a 2003 Literary Fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts, a 2002 Fellow of the Pennsylvania Arts Council, and a 1998 Pew Fellow in the Arts. Silliman has a plaque in the walk dedicated to poetry in his home town of Berkeley and a sculpture in the Transit Center of Bury, Lancaster, a part of the Irwell Sculpture Trail. He lives in Chester County, Pennsylvania and teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />(c) 2002-2019 by Ron Silliman.
</div>
<div class='clear'></div>
<span class='widget-item-control'>
<span class='item-control blog-admin'>
<a class='quickedit' href='//www.blogger.com/rearrange?blogID=3738579&widgetType=Text&widgetId=Text2&action=editWidget&sectionId=sidebar' onclick='return _WidgetManager._PopupConfig(document.getElementById("Text2"));' rel='nofollow' target='configText2' title='Edit'>
<img alt='' height='18' src='https://resources.blogblog.com/img/icon18_wrench_allbkg.png' width='18'/>
</a>
</span>
</span>
<div class='clear'></div>
</div></div>
</div>
<!-- spacer for skins that want sidebar and main to be the same height-->
<div class='clear'>&#160;</div>
</div>
<!-- end content-wrapper -->
</div></div>
<!-- end outer-wrapper -->

<script type="text/javascript" src="https://www.blogger.com/static/v1/widgets/1068551213-widgets.js"></script>
<script type='text/javascript'>
window['__wavt'] = 'AOuZoY6koHd1jC2tksMOPm3EYiJFVlxfOg:1574707930074';_WidgetManager._Init('//www.blogger.com/rearrange?blogID\x3d3738579','//ronsilliman.blogspot.com/search/label/Robert%20Creeley?updated-max\x3d2008-01-21T04:06:00-08:00\x26max-results\x3d20\x26start\x3d9\x26by-date\x3dfalse','3738579');
_WidgetManager._SetDataContext([{'name': 'blog', 'data': {'blogId': '3738579', 'title': 'Silliman\x27s Blog', 'url': 'https://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/search/label/Robert%20Creeley?updated-max\x3d2008-01-21T04:06:00-08:00\x26max-results\x3d20\x26start\x3d9\x26by-date\x3dfalse', 'canonicalUrl': 'https://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/search/label/Robert%20Creeley?updated-max\x3d2008-01-21T04:06:00-08:00\x26max-results\x3d20\x26start\x3d9\x26by-date\x3dfalse', 'homepageUrl': 'https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/', 'searchUrl': 'https://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/search', 'canonicalHomepageUrl': 'https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/', 'blogspotFaviconUrl': 'https://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/favicon.ico', 'bloggerUrl': 'https://www.blogger.com', 'hasCustomDomain': false, 'httpsEnabled': true, 'enabledCommentProfileImages': true, 'gPlusViewType': 'FILTERED_POSTMOD', 'adultContent': false, 'analyticsAccountNumber': '', 'encoding': 'UTF-8', 'locale': 'en', 'localeUnderscoreDelimited': 'en', 'languageDirection': 'ltr', 'isPrivate': false, 'isMobile': false, 'isMobileRequest': false, 'mobileClass': '', 'isPrivateBlog': false, 'feedLinks': '\x3clink rel\x3d\x22alternate\x22 type\x3d\x22application/atom+xml\x22 title\x3d\x22Silliman\x26#39;s Blog - Atom\x22 href\x3d\x22https://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default\x22 /\x3e\n\x3clink rel\x3d\x22alternate\x22 type\x3d\x22application/rss+xml\x22 title\x3d\x22Silliman\x26#39;s Blog - RSS\x22 href\x3d\x22https://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt\x3drss\x22 /\x3e\n\x3clink rel\x3d\x22service.post\x22 type\x3d\x22application/atom+xml\x22 title\x3d\x22Silliman\x26#39;s Blog - Atom\x22 href\x3d\x22https://www.blogger.com/feeds/3738579/posts/default\x22 /\x3e\n', 'meTag': '', 'adsenseHostId': 'ca-host-pub-1556223355139109', 'adsenseHasAds': false, 'view': '', 'dynamicViewsCommentsSrc': '//www.blogblog.com/dynamicviews/4224c15c4e7c9321/js/comments.js', 'dynamicViewsScriptSrc': '//www.blogblog.com/dynamicviews/ac414222f14fdfa1', 'plusOneApiSrc': 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js', 'disableGComments': true, 'sharing': {'platforms': [{'name': 'Get link', 'key': 'link', 'shareMessage': 'Get link', 'target': ''}, {'name': 'Facebook', 'key': 'facebook', 'shareMessage': 'Share to Facebook', 'target': 'facebook'}, {'name': 'BlogThis!', 'key': 'blogThis', 'shareMessage': 'BlogThis!', 'target': 'blog'}, {'name': 'Twitter', 'key': 'twitter', 'shareMessage': 'Share to Twitter', 'target': 'twitter'}, {'name': 'Pinterest', 'key': 'pinterest', 'shareMessage': 'Share to Pinterest', 'target': 'pinterest'}, {'name': 'Email', 'key': 'email', 'shareMessage': 'Email', 'target': 'email'}], 'disableGooglePlus': true, 'googlePlusShareButtonWidth': 300, 'googlePlusBootstrap': '\x3cscript type\x3d\x22text/javascript\x22\x3ewindow.___gcfg \x3d {\x27lang\x27: \x27en\x27};\x3c/script\x3e'}, 'hasCustomJumpLinkMessage': false, 'jumpLinkMessage': 'Read more', 'pageType': 'index', 'searchLabel': 'Robert Creeley', 'pageName': 'Robert Creeley', 'pageTitle': 'Silliman\x27s Blog: Robert Creeley'}}, {'name': 'features', 'data': {'sharing_get_link_dialog': 'true', 'sharing_native': 'false'}}, {'name': 'messages', 'data': {'edit': 'Edit', 'linkCopiedToClipboard': 'Link copied to clipboard!', 'ok': 'Ok', 'postLink': 'Post Link'}}, {'name': 'template', 'data': {'name': 'custom', 'localizedName': 'Custom', 'isResponsive': false, 'isAlternateRendering': false, 'isCustom': true}}, {'name': 'view', 'data': {'classic': {'name': 'classic', 'url': '?view\x3dclassic'}, 'flipcard': {'name': 'flipcard', 'url': '?view\x3dflipcard'}, 'magazine': {'name': 'magazine', 'url': '?view\x3dmagazine'}, 'mosaic': {'name': 'mosaic', 'url': '?view\x3dmosaic'}, 'sidebar': {'name': 'sidebar', 'url': '?view\x3dsidebar'}, 'snapshot': {'name': 'snapshot', 'url': '?view\x3dsnapshot'}, 'timeslide': {'name': 'timeslide', 'url': '?view\x3dtimeslide'}, 'isMobile': false, 'title': 'Silliman\x27s Blog', 'description': 'A weblog focused on contemporary poetry and poetics.', 'url': 'https://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/search/label/Robert%20Creeley?updated-max\x3d2008-01-21T04:06:00-08:00\x26max-results\x3d20\x26start\x3d9\x26by-date\x3dfalse', 'type': 'feed', 'isSingleItem': false, 'isMultipleItems': true, 'isError': false, 'isPage': false, 'isPost': false, 'isHomepage': false, 'isArchive': false, 'isSearch': true, 'isLabelSearch': true, 'search': {'label': 'Robert Creeley', 'resultsMessage': 'Showing posts with the label Robert Creeley', 'resultsMessageHtml': 'Showing posts with the label \x3cspan class\x3d\x27search-label\x27\x3eRobert Creeley\x3c/span\x3e'}}}]);
_WidgetManager._RegisterWidget('_NavbarView', new _WidgetInfo('Navbar1', 'navbar', document.getElementById('Navbar1'), {}, 'displayModeFull'));
_WidgetManager._RegisterWidget('_HeaderView', new _WidgetInfo('Header1', 'header', document.getElementById('Header1'), {}, 'displayModeFull'));
_WidgetManager._RegisterWidget('_BlogView', new _WidgetInfo('Blog1', 'main', document.getElementById('Blog1'), {'cmtInteractionsEnabled': false, 'navMessage': 'Showing posts with label \x3cb\x3eRobert Creeley\x3c/b\x3e. \x3ca href\x3d\x22https://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/\x22\x3eShow all posts\x3c/a\x3e', 'lightboxEnabled': true, 'lightboxModuleUrl': 'https://www.blogger.com/static/v1/jsbin/4152225668-lbx.js', 'lightboxCssUrl': 'https://www.blogger.com/static/v1/v-css/368954415-lightbox_bundle.css'}, 'displayModeFull'));
_WidgetManager._RegisterWidget('_TextView', new _WidgetInfo('Text4', 'sidebar', document.getElementById('Text4'), {}, 'displayModeFull'));
_WidgetManager._RegisterWidget('_TextListView', new _WidgetInfo('TextList1', 'sidebar', document.getElementById('TextList1'), {}, 'displayModeFull'));
_WidgetManager._RegisterWidget('_LinkListView', new _WidgetInfo('LinkList1', 'sidebar', document.getElementById('LinkList1'), {}, 'displayModeFull'));
_WidgetManager._RegisterWidget('_TextView', new _WidgetInfo('Text1', 'sidebar', document.getElementById('Text1'), {}, 'displayModeFull'));
_WidgetManager._RegisterWidget('_TextView', new _WidgetInfo('Text3', 'sidebar', document.getElementById('Text3'), {}, 'displayModeFull'));
_WidgetManager._RegisterWidget('_ImageView', new _WidgetInfo('Image1', 'sidebar', document.getElementById('Image1'), {'resize': false}, 'displayModeFull'));
_WidgetManager._RegisterWidget('_TextView', new _WidgetInfo('Text2', 'sidebar', document.getElementById('Text2'), {}, 'displayModeFull'));
</script>
</body>
</html>