Critiquing Creeley

As the title suggests, Form, Power, and Person in Robert Creeley’s Life and Work examines the language and aesthetics of Robert Creeley’s poetry, as well as the personality, history, and persona of Creeley himself, all of which are complex and at times contradictory subjects. The ten essays (all by critics of considerable reputation) respond to the “new urgency,” according to Stephen Fredman’s introduction, “to reassess Creeley and his career, and this collection of essays is the first to do so.” The collection takes as its implicit starting point those widely accepted tenets of Creeley’s elliptical, introspective style and his relationship to other poets—Williams, Duncan, Olson, and Levertov in particular—as respondents and co-creators of twentieth-century poetics. The collection also enters the conversation of “what is poetry” in general and how it now fits into the modern dispensation.

As the title also informs, Form, Power, and Person is divided into three sections of three to four essays each: “Form” (which examines the artistry, characteristics, and structure of Creeley’s distinctive poetry); “Power” (which looks at Creeley’s dynamics of gender and politics in the poetry); and “Person” (which, again according to the introduction, “consider[s] Creeley’s unique artistic and psychological project of constructing a person” by examining Creeley’s letters, interviews, and occasionally a personal recollection—at stake is Creeley’s “concept of experience”).

There is far less of Creeley himself, the “person,” than the title would seem to indicate, although two of the authors have brief, winning anecdotes about their time with the poet. Rachel Blau DuPlessis opens her essay with a cringe-worthy reminiscence involving a two year old, a session at the 1986 H. D. conference, light switches, an aggressive Allen Ginsberg, and a rather chivalrous Creeley. And Peter Middleton paints an interesting portrait of Creeley as a teacher who talks exclusively in tangents and unscripted digressions about poetry but nevertheless reveals “performatively what poetic thinking required.” Still, there is enough about Creeley and his modes of speech, his occasional scuffles, his relationships with other poets, his thoughts about the Vietnam war, and his belief that language, and especially poetry, was innately political that a reader gets a sense of this somewhat contentious but engaging man, and how his sensibilities influenced his poetry. Likewise, much is made of Creeley’s losses in life: his father, when the poet was age five, and then his eye to an accident several years later. There is always the danger of reading too much authorial intent in these instances, even for a poet cum public figure such as Creeley, whose life and thoughts are reasonably well documented; yet, to the authors’ and editors’ credit, Form, Power, and Person stays away from the most damning and sensational evaluations of Robert-Creeley-the-man and focuses primarily in what can be inferred from the poetry itself.

Most interestingly (and this is also to the collection’s credit), several themes cohere through the essays as a whole: the dynamics of gender and sexuality and the place of poetry in the modern world. Both can be read as part and parcel of any discussion about the canon, of course, but it is interesting to see how one poet deals with them.

Of these two overarching subjects, Form, Power, and Person does the most work placing poetry within its modern context, and three essays stand out in this regard. In “Robert Creeley Out of School: The Making of a Singular Poetics,” Marjorie Perloff comments upon Creeley’s idiosyncratic use of language and imagery, both his aversion to Romantic excess and his denial of everyday syntax. One of the aspects of his artistry that has always made Creeley stand out from the post-war explosion of styles is this very elliptical use of form that, according to Perloff, set the stage for the school of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry and its challenges to the mainstream. Such an orientation potentially repositions...