It
may be impossible to overstate Robert Creeley’s influence on American writing.
When the New American poets came of age in the early 1950s, they were intervening
into a world in which American verse was as close to moribund as it had been
since the Andrew Jackson administration in the 1820s. The Objectivists were out
of print & several were on extended leave between poems. The modernists
were dead or in Europe, save for the notable exception of Pound & he was in a psychiatric hospital,
still eligible at that point to be tried for treason, the death penalty a
distinct option. Otherwise, there was Williams & the School of Quietude
(SoQ). I know that’s overstating the circumstance a little, but really only a
little. Williams’ rather desperate affirmation in “The Desert Music” –
I am a poet! I
am. I am. I am a poet. I reaffirmed, ashamed.
–
speaks to the circumstance. That last word rings out: to be a poet in 1950 was
a hard claim to make. The number who were writing well in America at the time
could be counted on your fingers. After an
industrial accident.
The
New Americans changed all that. The Beats got most of the press, combining as
they did their open return to romanticism with a lifestyle antithetical to the
“man in a gray flannel suit.” & the Allen anthology itself may only have
been the tip of an iceberg by the time it arrived a decade hence. But the
gauntlet flung down by Ginsberg in “Howl,” as by Olson in “Projective Verse,”
to reimagine poetry’s meaning & place in the world, was a challenge taken
up by literally dozens of writers intent on disentangling the nets of being
that the SoQ had thrown over the possibility of vision & action in the
poem.
Of
the New Americans, nobody promoted good writing by example more clearly or
passionately than did Robert Creeley. The relation of the clean, spare poems of
his early books, gathered into For Love, to
the whole of New American poetry was not dissimilar from that of imagism two
generations earlier to the larger landscape that was modernism. Yet Creeley’s
spare, often rhymed verses were not simply a demonstration of the elimination
of any extraneous matter – tho I think sometimes these poems were taken as
such, especially by SoQ types who wanted to bring him in as their token New
American when discussing their blinkered view of American verse. In fact, if
you read Creeley’s fiction, which he wrote quite a lot of during the 1950s, you
see the very same logic that operates in the poetry to create such “clean”
effects extend in prose & come across as something far more modular &
convoluted. In each what is being tracked is the sensuality of thinking. In his
work, it’s a physical, almost erotic presence, even when created entirely out
of grammar & voiced hesitation.
Words, Creeley’s next large
collection from Scribners, proved more controversial
for the simplest of reasons: the poems were longer, even if the lines were
somewhat leaner. As the poems extended themselves, it became hard not to notice
how, like in his fiction, Creeley’s process followed thinking as a physical process. The disembodiment of
pure exposition was of no interest to him.
Pieces, which followed close on Words, demonstrated once & for all
how profoundly radical Creeley was as a poet – more so, actually, than any of
his fellow projectivists. If Words can
be said to reflect the visible influence of Louis Zukofsky, Pieces reflected two influences new to
Creeley, Ted Berrigan & Gertrude Stein. Further, they were entering into
his work in a different way, not simply as surface color. Instead, Creeley
seemed to be distilling the underlying principles of their poetry & casting
them into his own work in ways that I don’t think could have been anticipated
by either writer. Perhaps even more important, in looking to Berrigan’s use of
linked verse (which Ted in turn had taken from John Ashbery’s “Europe,”
transforming it into something more supple), Creeley was demonstrating an
ability to look to & take seriously the lessons of younger poets, an
exceptionally rare quality among major poets.* Pieces proved as radical to the New American Poetry** as that literary phenomenon had been
to the somnambulant scene of the 1940s.
Creeley’s
later poetry coincides with his association with New Directions. Its defining
feature over the years – and, realistically, this has been the actual bulk of
Creeley’s production as a poet – has been a more relaxed torque to the syntax
& a contentment in general with the lyric form (tho not always deployed to
traditional lyric uses). At a point when most projectivists had thoroughly
bought into the idea that one works toward that Major Poem – for Olson Maximus, for Duncan Passages – the third major figure of the Black Mountain Three went
in a completely different direction.***
With
Pieces (& its prose cousins of
that period, Mabel & A Day Book), Creeley could claim to have
changed poetry twice in his lifetime, something only John Ashbery among his
peers could honestly have been said to have done as well.+ Which is to say that
Creeley had written in such a way as to expand the possibilities of poetry for
all writers, not just him alone. One consequence of this, it’s worth noting,
has been that he has been held to a different, harder standard than almost any
other poet or his or any generation. I’ve heard, far too often, that Creeley’s
poetry has been in some form or other deficient in recent decades, when
objectively I don’t think that’s the case at all. Rather, having changed poetry
twice, his work since the mid-1970s has been a part of poetry rather than a
radical overturning, extending, or undermining of what’s already there. In that
regard, he’s been like almost every other major or minor poet. But, having set
an expectation that any given book of his might, in fact, change the world,
books that fall short of that particular goal are seen as being not his best
work. This almost feels like some kind of curse, in the general “no good deed
will go unpunished” category.
So
it’s worth noting that the poetry in If I were
writing this – note the particular uses of capitalization here++
– is changing. These poems, composed over the past half dozen years, seem more
insistent on audible increments of form than much of Creeley’s poetry over the
previous twenty years. Consider this stanza, the first in an elegy for Allen
Ginsberg,
A bitter twitter,
flitter,
of birds
in evening’s
settling,
a reckoning
beckoning,
someone’s getting
some sad news,
the birds gone to nest,
to roost
in the darkness,
asking no improvident questions,
none singing,
no hark,
no lark,
nothing in the quiet dark.
Ten
commas, 17 lines, a welter of sound patterns cascading through it, the primary
structural elements of this 42-word sentence come down to just five tucked well
into its center: someone’s getting / some
sad news. It’s as if the generality of these lines is accentuated, as if to
say that’s not what this is about. Indeed,
I would argue that this poem is, in fact, about all the other stuff here – the
sound particularly, so insistently reiterative that it works against what one
might think of as rhyme’s zero degree of harmony – here it comes across as
plaintive, even despairing. Indeed, with six of the lines ending on -ing, the use
of sound in the remainder of the lines is magnified. I might be willing to
argue, in fact, that the most important word in the stanza doesn’t appear here
at all – rest. We anticipate it after
nest & the alternative roost calls it further to mind (as its
present/absent rhyme magnifies the -es in darkness). The absence is an interesting
instance of what form can do to/with philosophy & vice versa. The whole
power of the word roost lies not in
the physicality of birds settling, but by the degree that our mind has to move
from expectation to actuality. That palpability of absence mimics of course the
elegiac experience itself. These are hardly the characteristics of a poet
lightening up or coasting. If anything, one might argue that there’s a renewed
intensity in these poems.
Many
of these works have appeared previously, a fact that New Directions carefully
avoids acknowledging on the verso. Readers, tho, who have acquired Creeley’s
collaboration with Archie Rand, Drawn & Quartered, or with the great
photographer Elsa Dorfman, En Famille, already own a substantial
fraction of this new volume. But I’m one reader who thinks that you need a both/and strategy when it comes to the
works of Robert Creeley, not an either/or.
All my life, he’s been the closest thing we have had to a dean of American
poetry, and our world has been & is the richer for it.
*
Perhaps because it so clearly violates all three laws of Personal Literary
Teleology:
1.
“The history of literature leads directly to me”
2.
“The history of literature reaches its apotheosis with me”
3.
“After me, literature has no need to evolve further”
** Note to self: write blog on how the New
Americans evolved beyond the New
American poetry. Viz. Dorn’s ‘Slinger, Baraka’s
renunciation, Ginsberg’s harmonium, etc.
*** Note to self again (related project):
contrast Maximus & Passages to ‘Slinger & Paul Blackburn’s Journals
as alternate models of the longpoem.
+ First with The
Tennis Court Oath, second with Three
Poems.
++ Not to mention the implied presumption that maybe I’m not writing this.