Robert Creeley (21/5/26 - 30/3/05) - Poet, a rich lasting legacy of simple wisdoms

Robert Creeley, was one of America's most celebrated and distinctive poets and writers and for more than half a century a leading figure in the literary avant-garde who I have admired for a while, many of his  collections on my bookshelves,  I was originally drawn to his work because of his associations with the Beat movement, but there is far more individual richness about him.
Born on  May 21 1926 in Arlington, Massachusetts, two weeks before the birth of Allen Ginsberg in Newark, New Jersey. He lost his father, and the use of his left eye, before he was 5, and was subsequently brought up on a farm in West Acton. A year with the American Field Service in India and Burma (1944/5)  followed, which interrupted his time at Harvard; on his return he married Ann McKinnon Creeley, left Harvard without graduating, and, in 1948, went to New Hampshire to try subsistence farming. His attempt two years later to launch his own magazine failed, but prompted a long correspondence with the poet Charles Olson and provided material for Cid Corman's journal, Origin. In search of a cheaper way of life,  after his marriage,,the Creeleys moved in 1951 to France and the following year to Mallorca, where they stayed until their divorce in 1955. There they set up the Divers Press and printed books by Creeley himself , Robert Duncan, Olson, and others. His only novel, "The Island" (1963), drew on his time their and his relationship with his wife.
At Olson's invitation Creeley taught at Black Mountain College (spring 1954 and autumn 1955) and founded and edited the  innovative literary journal Black Mountain Review (1954-7), a crucial gathering place for alternative senses of writing at that time. Through the Black Mountain Review and his own critical writings, Creeley helped to define an emerging counter-tradition to the literary establishment
After his divorce, he returned briefly to Black Mountain before moving to San Francisco, where he associated with Allen Ginsburg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jack Kerouac and other members of the Beat Generation of writers. His work appeared in the influential anthology "The New American Poetry: 1945-1960" (1960), edited by Donald Allen.
Creeley's poetry was predominantly concerned with love and the emotions attending intimate relationships. Among his strongest influences he listed not only poets, like Olson, William Carlos Williams, and Ginsberg, but also jazz musicians, like Charlie Parker and Miles Davis, jazz taught him, he once wrote, that ''you can write directly from that which you feel."
Creeley's poetry emphasized the personal, the lyric, the improvisatory. he developed a spare, minmalist style. Reacting against such poets as T.S. Eliot, he rejected the ''literariness" of allusion and metrical form. There's a singularly stripped-down, casual quality to his poetry. For him, breath was the determining element in verse. ''I heard words/and words full/of holes/aching. Speech/is a mouth," he wrote in his poem ''The Language."
The most mannered thing about Mr. Creeley's verse was its absence of manner. He wrote in free verse, with short lines and stanzas. Not everyone approved: ''There are two things to be said about Robert Creeley's poem," the critic John Simon once wrote. ''They are short; they are not short enough."
In poetry, Mr. Creeley once said, ''form is never more than the expression of content." Yet a central paradox defined his work: For all that he wrote in a minimalist style, his great subject was the most maximal of human emotions, love and the complications that arise from it.
Creeley's early poems, collected in Poems 1950-1965 (1966), are minutely detailed,often obscure-analyses of feelings, their verse invariably free, their lines and stanzas short, and their sentences terse. A new disillusionment with analytical thinking is evident in Words (1967), Pieces (1969), and A Day Book (1972), and  following Creeley's second marriage  to Beat poet Bobby Louise Hall ending in divorce in 1976, his  poetry from that time reflected a brooding sense of loss. and a  less exalted view of love in Later (1978) and Echoes (1982). More notable for its continuities than for its changes, however, his poetry managed to sustain its unique brand of vigilant minimalism  as evident in For Love: Poems 1950–60 (1960). His manner became even more fragmentary in later volumes, notably Words (1965), Pieces (1969), Hello: A Journal (1978), and Memory Gardens (1986). Life and Death and The Dogs of Auckland appeared in 1998. He would finally marry gor the third time in 1977 to Penelope Highton who he would remain with for the rest of his life.
Creeley wrote more than 60 books during his lifetime and is often cited as one of the most important and infuential poets of the last century, he was also known for the diversity of his collaberations with artists outside his own authority. These include records with two decisive jazz composer/ musicians, the bassist Steve Swallow and the saxophonist Steve Lacey, and the alternative rock group Mercury Rev, with their 1993 musical setting of his poem ' So There'. He also worked for more than three decades with such visual artists as Robert Indiana, Jim Dine, Francesco Clemence, Alex Katz and Susan Rothenberg among others.
He subsequently taught at the University of New Mexico, and then would teach Poetry at Brown University and also served as the Samuel P. Capen Professor of Poetry and the Humanities at State University of New York at Buffalo He was admitted to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1988, and was the recipient of the Frost Medal (1987) and the Bollingen Prize in American poetry (1999),and received the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award in 2001 .
He died  in Odessa, Texas 30 March 2005, he had been struggling with a lung ailment and died of complications from pneumonia. In his last years he often wrote of the anxieties of aging with humor,  and wistful anticipation. He leaves a  rich lasting legacy, I for one admire his poetry a lot, simple wisdoms that serve to remind us all of our deepest truths..

Goodbye -Robert Creeley

The century was well along
when I came in
and now that it's ending,
I realize it won't
be long.
But couldn't it all have been
a little nicer,
as my mother'd say. Did it
have to kill everything in
sight,
did right always have to beso wrong?
I know this body is impatient.
I know I constitute only a meager voice and mind.
Yet I loved, I love.
I want no sentimentality.
I want no more than home.

Self-Portrait - Robert Creeley

He wants to be
a brutal old man,
an aggressive old man,
as dull, as brutal
as the emptiness around him,

He doesn’t want compromise,
nor to be ever nice
to anyone. Just mean,
and final in his brutal,
his total, rejection of it all.

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

Now he’ll stand on
his own dwindling legs.
His arms, his skin,
shrink daily. And
he loves, but hates equally.


DO YOU THINK THAT - Robert Creeley

Do you think that if
you once do what you want
to do you will want not to do it.

Do you think that if
there’s an apple on the table
and somebody eats it, it
won’t be there anymore.

Do you think that if
two people are in love with one another,
one or the other has got to be
less in love than the other at
some point in the otherwise happy relationship.

Do you think that if
you once took a breath, you’re by
that committed to taking the next one
and so on until the very process of
breathing’s an endlessly expanding need
almost of its own necessity forever.

Do you think that if
no one knows then whatever
it is, no one will know and
that will be the case, like
they say, for an indefinite
period of time if such time
can have a qualification of such time.

Do you know anyone,
really. Have you been, really,
much alone. Are you lonely,
now, for example. Does anything
really matter to you, really, or
has anything mattered. Does each
thing tend to be there, and then not
to be there, just as if that were it.

Do you think that if
I said, I love you, or anyone
said it, or you did. Do you
think that if you had all
such decisions to make and could
make them. Do you think that
if you did. That you really
would have to think it all into
reality, that world, each time, new.

Language - Robert Creeley
 

Locate I

love you some-

where in

teeth and   

eyes, bite   

it but

take care not   

to hurt, you   

want so

much so   

little. Words   

say everything.

I

love you

again,

then what   

is emptiness   

for. To

fill, fill.

I heard words   

and words full

of holes   

aching. Speech   

is a mouth.

Ground Zero - Robert Creeley

What's after or before
seems a dull locus now
as if there ever could be more

or less of what there is,
a life lived just because
it is a life if nothing more.

The street goes by the door
just like it did before.
Years after I am dead,

there will be someone here instead
perhaps to open it,
look out to see what's there --

even if nothing is,
or ever was,
or somehow all got lost.

Persist, go on, believe.
Dreams may be all we have,
whatever one believe

of worlds wherever they are --
with people waiting there
will know us when we come

when all the strife is over,
all the sad battles lost or won,
all turned to dust.

Mind's Heart- Robert Creeley

Mind's heart, it must
be that some
truth lies locked
in you.

Or else, lies, all
lies, and no man
true enough to know
the difference.

Mercury Rev-So There (As read by Robert Creeley)

Sincerely Y'alls - Chris Massey , John Mills, Steve Swallow & Robert Creeley, 1999