Robert Creeley (1926–2005)

My face is my own, I thought.
But you have seen it
turn into a thousand years.
I watched you cry.

I have known stress as of late. It rents my slumber. It distracts my reading eye. I only want malty Oktoberfest and Godard. I settle for pizza. Compromise. Sated. Sad.

There's a scarred security in this collection. Friendships and warm contact are a currency in a vague, steeled world of toil. There's still something possibly American at play, a tattered optimism.

Time is ever elusive. There's a show more posture to be pursued, a wind-tousled hilltop tree or a violin concerto on an alarm clock radio. show less

Impulses stir
To write a review
Using
The clipped,
Broken

What use is such unfinished verse, what does matter with coffee breath, a taillight out and a strange dream about a girl once dated?

Bobbie--take me away, perhaps to Indiana. Jon just read these poems, purchased last week in Syracuse. The elegy for the author's mother bruised me. I can't admit to similar damage elsewhere in the collection. Somehow this Bobbie onetime muse of Creeley eases into the sidelong, a refrain echoes rainfall and show more a tossed comment bleeds detail. The reader is free to ponder and unlace. show less

He tried the sweet,
the gentle, the "oh,
let's hold hands together "
and it was awful,
dull, brutally inconsequential.

Terse flickers, fading images grasped momentarily on a crazy warm Sunday morning. I was looking for a torque but found instead a respectable patience. Very William Carlos Williams.

This is probably not the best introduction to Robert Creeley's poetry, as I gather he was at the height of his influence 30 or 40 years ago. But he was clearly still alive and kicking in the 90s, when these poems were written. (He died in 2005.) There are a couple of interview transcripts at the front of the book, which cast very little light for readers such as I. The interviewer is very impressed, for example, that one of Creeley's poems 'is not sayable'; over here on the cultural margins, show more we like the idea of poetry as musical speech, eminently sayable, even at times singable. Just the same there are enough lines, and enough whole poems, that do speak with power and feeling, to make me want more.
I'm sure the last stanza of "Oh" will echo in my head during nursing home visits for ages to come. show less