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Reviewed by:
  • Form, Power, and Person in Robert Creeley's Life and Work
  • Norman Finkelstein
Form, Power, and Person in Robert Creeley's Life and Work. Stephen Fredman and Steve McCaffery, eds. Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 2010. Pp xii + 250. $39.95 (cloth).

In his introduction to this excellent volume, Stephen Fredman observes that "As with any major writer for whom death has recently enclosed his or her dates in parentheses, a new urgency arises to reassess Creeley and his career, and this collection of essays is the first to do so" (1). Presenting these essays as "beginning a full-scale reconsideration" (1) of Creeley's work is certainly the right tack to take: although all of the writers take previous criticism into account in an effective and responsible manner, there is a welcome sense that what the editors call the poet's "Form," "Power," and "Person" can only now begin to be studied. This is true to an even greater extent for Creeley (1926–2005) than for most writers, because, as a number of the critics in the collection point out, he was deeply engaged with and totally open to the social dimension of poetry. He was so well known and so "dear" to so many people, especially in the latter part of his career, that his presence inevitably shaped the ongoing reception and study of his work. As a teacher, mentor, lecturer, correspondent, artistic collaborator, interview-giver, book blurber and indefatigable conversationalist, Creeley played a crucial role in shaping what Fredman, in his contribution to the volume, names the "contextual practice" of his art.

A legendary figure in American poetry since the 1950s, Creeley, as Rachel Blau DuPlessis notes, in his last years "articulated feelings about entering the common place, the common experiences, being just like everyone else" (91). From Williams he learned to attend upon the immediate and the everyday; from Olson came the importance of participation in the polis. Literary history quickly caught up with him; he was known as a Black Mountain poet, an associate of the Beats, a second-generation objectivist, a precursor of the Language poets. But the simple fact of Creeley's genius, demonstrated again and again over the decades, produced an ineluctable tension in both the work and the career. He was not "like everyone else" and knew it, despite what we may honor (and what we may analyze) as his desire to be so. Thus one of the great values of this collection is the way in which the writers seek to distinguish Creeley from his numerous, tangled literary and artistic associations, while simultaneously taking them into account.

Two essays in particular go a long way towards achieving this goal, Marjorie Perloff's "Robert Creeley Out of School" and Peter Middleton's "Scenes of Instruction: Creeley's Reflexive Poetics." Methodologically, there are some striking similarities between the two. In a bravura reading of "The Rain," Perloff argues that

the poem's aesthetic is by no means Williams' 'no ideas but in things'; indeed, things don't much interest Creeley except as the occasion to brood on a particular mental condition or emotion. No red wheel barrows here and, despite its title, no rainwater either, and certainly no chickens. No sharp, imagistic phrases as in Roethke, no nouns charged with rich symbolic reference as in Eliot, no proper names as in Pound and Olson, no occult references as in Duncan. But no ordinary language as in Frank O'Hara either. On the contrary, Creeley's vocabulary includes precisely those words and locutions others would avoid as "unpoetic": in this case, "insisted upon," "something," "getting out of," "tiredness," "wet."

(29)

Now compare these remarks to Middleton's: "Asked to describe his poems one might say that what distinguishes Creeley is the sexual frankness he shares with Ginsberg, the use of the line as a marker of the breath-or-thought hesitations he shares with Olson, the openness to nonmaterialist and mythological influences he shares with Robert Duncan, and the high valuation [End Page 489] of emotion he shares with Levertov" (172). Both critics, in attempting to define what makes Creeley's style unique, have recourse to the affinities and...

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