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Number 294 & 295
Summer/Fall 2005
Hold Still, Lion!
Robert Creeley, American Poet, 1926-2005
C. D. WRIGHT
Copyright © 2005 Poetry
Flash
What you do is how you get along.
What you did is all it ever means.
 from
“Place to Be,” If I were writing this (2003)
By
the time I knew the poet Robert Creeley well enough to call him
my friend, he had long been poetry’s emblem of bonhomie.
A mundane sandwich with Robert, who died on March 30, would prompt
a swift e-mail: “Thanks again for the good company and the
soul-securing lunch.” In his company I felt poetry’s
sturdiness and purpose. The solid barns and stone walls of New
England come to mind. He was where we gathered to get warm. He
was a great provider is the phrase once used of a man who
brought home the money, or bacon, as it was carnivorously
called. Robert provided in the world’s largest sense: not
only for his family but for his company, and he was concerned
that his provisions be adequate—meaning he cared for
what he cared about—his family, the human family,
and poetry, the family of poetry. No one asked him to assume such
a role, but no one else took it on, and he stepped up. He stepped
up.
The
years in which I spent the most time with him were the last ones.
When a young man, he acquired a reputation equally for his intellect,
his talking, his humor, his temper, and for all the other uncrubed
excesses of a nervous, cerebral, alienated individual. In the
last large third of his life, he was otherwise occupied. Now,
he wanted to do the right thing. He wanted to get it all right:
Hold still lion! / I am trying / to paint you / while there’s
time to. This ageless poet became as central a voice of age
as Yeats:
…The seeming fractures of a self
grow ominous, like peaks of old
mountains remembered but faint
in the obscuring fog. Time to push off, do
some push-ups perhaps, take a walk with
the neighbors I haven’t spoken to in years.
(from
If I were writing this, 2003)
And the essential poet of the final passage:
When it comes
it loses edge
has nothing around it,
no place now present
but impluse not one’s own,
and so empties into a river
which will flow on
into a white cloud
and be gone.
(from
Life & Death, 1998)
When
I wrote to poet Rosmarie Waldrop regarding Robert Creeley’s
death, she responded, “It is the end of a world.”
In
post-World War II America there were several loosely affiliated,
overlapping strands of poets who began publishing— poets
who rejected the epistemological and Anglophile models of W.H.
Auden and T.S. Eliot for something more concretely American. They
were known variously as the New York School, the San Francisco
Renaissance, the Beats, and the Black Mountain poets. They came
up on the heels of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, and
along the spur of the Objectivists, who included Louis Zukofksy,
Charles Reznifoff, George Oppen and Lorine Niedecker. Robert Creeley
was the bridge. He distributed the differences and sounded parallel
concerns. He began corresponding with Pound and Williams in 1949.
He and John Ashbery were seated two desks apart at Harvard. In
Mallorca, his Divers Press published Robert Duncan and Paul Blackburn.
He typed Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl”, which was
then mimeographed in an edition of twenty-five.
Born
May 21, 1926, in Arlington, Massachusetts, Creeley, whose doctor
father died when he was four, grew up on a farm in West Acton.
He went briefly to Harvard before leaving to work for the American
Field Service in Burma and India. He returned but left again,
a few credits short of graduating. At the legendary and now gone
Black Mountain College, he studied with Charles Olson and earned
his successorship. There Creeley edited the Black Mountain
Review and picked up the degree he had managed not to complete
at Harvard. (He also earned a master’s at the University
of New Mexico.) Over the years he would edit works of Charles
Olson and George Oppen (and Robert Burns and Walt Whitman), as
well as anthologies of new American writing. His correspondence
was carried on at a rate and level not to be believed. The Olson/Creeley
letters alone consume ten volumes. He wrote tense stories and
a superb short novel along with scores of word-perfect essays.
He published around seventy books. Search for his name on Amazon.com
and 223 titles come up. His collaborations with such artists as
Francesco Clemente, Elsa Dorfman, Sol LeWitt, R.B. Kitaj, and
Susan Rothenberg were the occasion of fine-edition volumes and
traveling exhibitions. His work with musicians such as Steve Lacy
and Steve Swallow was performed for packed, hip audiences and
often recorded. He could—and did—fill London’s
Royal Albert Hall, yet he had no qualms about reading to a gathering
of four. He was just as willing to talk extemporaneously in lieu
of giving a promoted reading. He was not there to accommodate
anyone’s expectations—he was there to discover the
direction of his own thinking. And in that, as he often said,
quoting William Carlos Williams, lay the profundity.
With
the 1962 publication of For Love, Creeley became a world
poet, an icon, albeit in the American grain. “I was reading
Robert Creeley to girls pretty much from the getgo,” writes
poet Jeffrey Skillings. So, on long night drives, my husband often
recited “The Rain” to me, most winningly. Creeley’s
line break, which marked his rhythm, provokes sudden recognition.
Readers routinely recall their first hearing of a poem. A poet
from Missouri describes how, when a nineteen-year-old soldier
in Vietnam, he indolently fished a Creeley title form the bottom
of the mailroom’s book box: Binh Dinh province, 1968, discovering
Creeley. “I know a man” is surely one of a handful
of the most quoted and recited short poems of the twentieth century,
along with Pound’s “In a Station at the Metro,”
Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow,” Wallace Stevens’s
“Anecdote of the Jar,” and Landston Hughes’s
“Harlem.” A current graduate student told me that
when a high school teacher first read the poem before her, it
registered as a moment when she felt her hair being blown straight
back.
The
Creeley line inevitably alerts and pleases our motor impulses.
Creeley attributed the delay in his line to Charlie Parker. He
also credited the musician for his active treatment of silences.
I liken the poet’s jarring line to stepping off an unseen
curb and righting oneself midair. His prose syntax had the formal
air of a previous era, yet it held to the same hard definition
as his poetry—nothing superfluous. The complex he called
poems simple made their moves faster. The writing staying with
the experience, stayed with the making. It was autobiographical,
of course, but in the sense that “writing could be an intensely
specific revelation of one’s own content.” The seriousness
of his project kept to a continuum. He lived, he lives, his life
in words, “bringing all the world to one instant of otherwise
meaningless ‘time.’”
Robert
Creeley taught for thirty-seven years at SUNY Buffalo before joining
Brown’s faculty in 2003. He also taught on a finca
in Guatemala, at an academy in New Mexico, and at San Francisco
State, the University of British Columbia , and other schools.
His abbreviated résumé lists more than thirty countries
in which he read, and he averaged fifty readings and lectures
a year. Famous for crisscrossing borders, he lived in Massachusetts,
France, Mallorca, Finland, Germany, Guatemala, British Columbia,
North Carolina, New York, New Mexico, California, New Hampshire,
and Rhode Island. He married three times and is survived by eight
children.
On
March 19 he served on a panel on Whitman and read at the Virginia
Festival of the Book in Charlottesville, receiving a standing
ovation. He had earlier completed a residency in Wilmington, where
he became ill with pneumonia, and began a two-month residency
in Texas, returning east for the Virginia Festival. On March 25,
after he was back in Texas, I phoned him to get a straightforward
sense of his condition. The prognosis was discouraging, but it
was not yet evident that death was imminent. I e-mailed him simply
that I loved him. The next morning, again by e-mail, came, “Thanks
for that reassuring information! One quick question, do you guys
know a simple lawyer there in the ‘Providence area’?
We need to make a new will, since we’ve changed residence
from NY to RI. Always something to do! Love you all.” Bob
famously loved the Internet. Small wonder. Finally some thing
actually existed that could facilitate his wonderful rapid-fire
mind and keep up with his ever-widening affections. At his death
from pneumonia in Odessa, Texas, five days later, his beloved
Penelope and their children, William and Hannah, were at his side.
The
reading he was to give this spring for Harvard’s Phi Beta
Kappa Awards was delivered in his name by the critic and scholar
Helen Vendler. The prize he was to be given in June in Modena,
Italy was awarded, death notwithstanding. The memorials began
almost immediately and a host of eulogies and elegies were posted
on Web sites and blogs to the ends of the literate world, which
is the end of a world. So there. With the deaths
of his original mentors and so many of his dearest peers, he felt
“the company,” as he called the body politic of poetry,
getting smaller. “Now no one seems there anymore.”
In the instance of Robert Creeley, the company was still growing.
We
poets are also his company, and his persistent voice made us and
has kept us so. Embarrassed, as many are, by the designation of
poet, he became one “by virtue of the act of writing.”
And for him, it became not only “a place to be” or
“a consistently present reality,” but the
place, the reality. He did not play at being a poet—though
pleasure was central to his preoccupation—he worked at it,
locating himself altogether in words. He was a man of his words.
He was given to write poems.
C. D. Wright is the Israel J. Kapstein Professor of English
at Brown University where Robert Creeley taught, as well, for
the last two years of his life. She’s a unique combination
of gritty, humorous Southern folksiness with experimental streamline
and astonishment. One of America’s best loved, most respected
poets, her two newest books are Stealing Away, Selected and
New Poems and Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil.
This essay was originally published in Brown Alumni Magazine,
and is reprinted here with their permission
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