[New-Poetry] kleinzahler on Creeley

[Halvard Johnson]

The NYT online seems to have taken to lowercasing the last names of
its writers when they appear below their pieces. What's going on with
that?

Halvard johnson
================
halvard at earthlink.net
http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard/index.html
http://entropyandme.blogspot.com
http://imageswithoutwords.blogspot.com
http://www.hamiltonstone.org
http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard/vidalocabooks.html

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February 24, 2008
What Is Left Out

By AUGUST KLEINZAHLER
ROBERT CREELEY

Selected Poems, 1945-2005.

Edited by Benjamin Friedlander.

338 pp. University of California Press. Cloth, $55; paper, $21.95.

Robert Creeley (1926-2005) was one of the darker poets of his  
generation, and also one of the best. He experienced hardship early  
on, losing his father, and also his left eye from an accident, by the  
time he was 5. The death of his father, a doctor, straitened the  
family?s circumstances. But the character of his darkness probably has  
more to do with New England ? Hawthorne?s ?grave and dark-clad  
company? ? than anything else. It?s a severity of outlook that  
underpins the work of Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost, as well.

In Creeley?s poetry the bleakness often finds its expression in a  
tortured self-regard, an almost panicked need for engaging experience,  
usually interior experience, by enacting it in language, syllable by  
syllable, line by line. One often feels while reading his work that if  
there is any misstep, any syllable or stress put wrong, not only the  
poem but its maker will either go up in flames or disappear down a  
black crevasse. This is the drama of Creeley?s defining work, and that  
drama never feels calculated or inauthentic.

Creeley?s best work came early. This is not unusual. For example:  
Stevens?s ?Harmonium,? Crane?s ?White Buildings,? Frost?s ?North of  
Boston,? Pound?s ?Personae,? Eliot?s ?Waste Land.? Creeley found his  
mature style by his mid-20s. His first significant collection, ?For  
Love: Poems 1950-1960,? was published in 1962 by Scribner when Creeley  
was 36. It was, and remains, an extraordinary book; much of the poetry  
in the collection feels as bristling and nervy today as it must have  
felt 46 years ago. Up to that point, Creeley had been living what  
seems to have been a frantically peripatetic and shambolic existence.  
He moved back and forth between New Hampshire, where he worked on a  
chicken farm; Albuquerque; Black Mountain College; Majorca; Lambesc in  
the South of France; San Francisco; and Guatemala, scrambling for  
money, one wife or another and children in tow. He would presently be  
famous, at least among poets and readers of poetry. ?For Love? sold  
some 47,000 copies, a figure almost unheard of for a serious book of  
poems, and challenging poems at that.

No American poet was more influential or imitated over the next  
quarter-century, an influence that was not entirely benign. What can  
sometimes seem offhand, slight and casually improvised in Creeley?s  
work is not at all what it appears to be. But these are the qualities  
and attendant sense of permission that lesser writers fastened on.  
Creeley, as with many masters, whether in sport or literature, made it  
look easy.

The poems of the ?50s and ?60s, and many thereafter, tend to be small,  
stripped-down affairs, as bare-boned as Beckett. They are  
asymmetrical, highly tensile constructions. The voice is anonymous,  
agitated, distressed. The movement of a typical Creeley poem is  
halting, and jittery, with the lines turning nervously back on  
themselves, particular words or phrases served up over and over in  
different syntactical contexts, the poet worrying them for meaning.  
Here is a bit of ?The Rain?:

even the hardness,
of rain falling
will have for me

something other than this,
something not so insistent ?
and I to be locked in this
final uneasiness.

Love, if you love me,
lie next to me.
Be for me, like rain,
the getting out

of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi-
lust of intentional indifference.
Be wet
with a decent happiness.

Among the many influences at work in Creeley?s poetry, William Carlos  
Williams seems to be foremost, most evidently in the unusual weight  
Creeley gives to enjambment in his lines. It is through this device  
that the poet creates his signature set of tensions. Few other poets,  
including Williams, make such telling events of their line breaks. But  
also in the mix from Williams is the plain diction and conversational  
tone. Both poets were fascinated with the cadences of ordinary  
American talk. Also, both poets steer clear of metaphor and simile.  
And if Williams is wary of adjectives, Creeley seems to have a real  
abhorrence of them.

 From Ezra Pound as well as Williams, Creeley learned concision. The  
silences and what is left out of any given Creeley poem carry equal  
weight with what is written down, and it is impossible to read Creeley  
intelligently without taking this into account, much as one has to do  
with traditional Chinese or Japanese poetry. Also, it was through  
Pound that Creeley was introduced to the poetry of Thomas Campion and  
other Jacobeans, whose music and use of rhyme he found compatible with  
his own poetic enterprise. Creeley, when using rhyme, employs it at  
unpredictable intervals and as a form of emphasis. The poet was also  
clearly drawn to the Elizabethan and Jacobean anonymity of voice and  
form of address, usually to a woman ? in which case the site of  
address is likely to be the bedroom ? or himself. Creeley has no equal  
among modern love poets writing in English, even if love for Creeley  
is characteristically an occasion for turmoil and rather grim  
business. Here is ?The Warning? in its entirety:

For love ? I would
split open your head and put
a candle in
behind the eyes.

Love is dead in us
if we forget
the virtues of an amulet
and quick surprise.

For readers coming to Creeley?s work for the first time, the format of  
a ?Selected Poems? is the best way in, and this new ?Selected,?  
supplanting a 1991 edition, is well chosen by Benjamin Friedlander. It  
includes a number of moving later poems not included in the earlier  
volume, many on the subject of aging, most notably the poem ?When I  
Think? from Creeley?s final collection, ?On Earth.?

Creeley wrote and published a great deal over a lengthy career. Once  
into the ?70s, the distinctive early style seemed to harden into  
mannerism. Creeley was casting about during these years. Always a risk- 
taker, always restless, he had become impatient with his earlier  
method. ?I grew inexorably bored with the tidy containment of clusters  
of words on single pieces of paper called ?poems? ? ?this will really  
get them, wrap it up. ...? I could see nothing in my life nor those of  
others adjacent that supported this single hits theory,? Creeley wrote  
in 1974. Like the painters and musicians he admired and liked to  
collaborate with, Robert Creeley was one of those artists who refused  
to let himself be bored by his own art. The reader will find very  
little to be bored by in this brilliant, essential volume.

August kleinzahler is the author of ?Cutty, One Rock.? A new  
collection of his poems, ?Sleeping It Off in Rapid City: Poems New &  
Selected,? will be published in the spring.