Between his New Direction volumes, Robert Creeley has developed a pattern of issuing one or more small chapbooks in the interim – they engage his long-standing commitment to the small press scene and are often a relief against the bland uniform packaging that is the ND trademark. None of these chapbooks has been simpler, nor more elegant or delightful than Yesterdays, Creeley’s latest from Chax Press. Charles Alexander, who learned the book arts directly from Walter Hamady, the Yoda of fine press printing, is himself a master craftsman with a rare sense of just when to assert himself in the process. With Yesterdays, Alexander has taken the lowest key approach, letting Creeley’s text do all the heavy lifting.

 

As well it does. These pieces are among the very best of Creeley’s recent work, which means that as a reader I’m virtually hopping up & down with excitement at each new poem. Viz:

 

As I rode out one morning

just at break of day

a pain came upon me

unexpectedly –

 

As I thought one day

not to think anymore,

I thought again,

caught, and could not stop –

 

Were I the horse I rode,

were I the bridge I crossed,

were I a tree

unable to move,

 

the lake would have

no reflections,

the sweet, soft air

no sounds.

 

So I hear, I see,

tell still the echoing story

of all that lives in a forest,

all that surrounds me.

 

Like John Ashbery – the other poet forced to put up with “greatest living poet” expectations – Creeley has sometimes been criticized in recent years for failing to continue to revolutionize poetry in all the ways he did during his first 30 years of publishing. As I’ve noted with regard to Ashbery, I think this is a bum rap, in that it makes his writing about us, rather than seeing it for what it is, his writing. Spicer’s model of the poem as a tool for investigation for the poet is exactly on point here. Having spent 30 or so years creating a space in which to do his work – a process that just incidentally revolutionized poetry – Creeley continues to demonstrate the extraordinary agility & acuity with which he still explores this terrain.

 

The poem above, the tenth section of a sequence entitled “Pictures,” makes the point perfectly. Like his old Black Mountain colleague, Robert Duncan, Creeley in many ways is the most traditional of poets – he continues to hear the suppleness available to traditional form, more so than most so-called formalists. He sets up the quatrain in this work with the precision of a heart surgeon – the off-rhyme between the second & fourth lines of the first stanza are just clear enough to set the measure of these lines, so that one hears the following ones as if they rhymed when in fact they never do.

 

All of which sets up the remarkable effect of the last line, when the mind waits in anticipation to hear the rhyme of the previous stanza’s sounds only to discover that it turns up embedded in the next-to-last word surrounds, which either recedes if the reader hears the line as a whole or else bumps noisily onto that final disruptive me. Yet this is in fact exactly the self-involved, compulsive process that is described with great care in the second stanza of the poem. Far from slamming the door of the poem shut with the total closure of a terminal rhyme, Creeley has set the form up as a lesson to us all, that it doesn’t close & that it never ends.

 

The poem at one level is a little Zen parable. At another, being brought to self-perception through a sudden pain – common enough experience that that is – is virtually the definition of proprioception, a term with extraordinary history & implications for Projectivist poetics. I find myself thinking – as so often I do when confronting Creeley’s texts* -- how does he do that much & make it look so simple? I’m simply grateful that he has.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

* Oddly enough, I first really connected with Creeley’s poetry not through the Allen anthology, nor even the Kelly-Leary Controversy of Poets, though by then I owned both books, but rather through a single poem of his that was used both as epigraph & for a title in Jeremy Larner’s ‘60s campus novel, Drive, He Said. The simplicity of Creeley’s poetry can be quite deceptive &, at first, I was among the deceived.