The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley: 1945–1975 (review)

142 Western American Literature The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley: 1945-1975. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California, 1983. 671 pages, $28.50.) “Take off your clothes, love, / And come to me,” begins one of Robert Creeley’s most beautiful and least characteristic poems (“Old Song” ) in this collection covering the period 1945 to 1975. “Soon will the sun be breaking / Over yon sea.” Least characteristic, because so many of the pieces in these 645 pages of Creeley’s writings are literally slivers and self-indulgent shards of poetic forms and emotion-stirring images. From “Down Home” : “Water / neither knows / who drinks / it nor denies.” And in the same book or chapbook from which that was taken (“In London,” 1972) is this three-liner titled “For Marisol” : “A little / water / falls.” An autobiographical indicator, one would guess, of what evoked some of these spastic responses is given in “On Acid,” which begins: “And had no actual / hesitancies, always / (flickering) mind’s / sensations: here, here, here.*” And the second of four mini-stanzas of “Out” : “Here is the rain again. / I hear it / in my ear here.” In a self-explanatory note for William Heyen’s American Poets in 1976 (Bobbs-Merrill, 1976), Creeley tells us he has argued that his New England upbringing (Massachusetts primarily) “clarifies [his] apparently laconic way of saying things, especially” in his early poetry. And he wonders whether such a “use of words” may also derive from “feeling tentative with them, unsure of their appropriate significations — as though” his ignorance were deflecting him from the “right way.” Were other famous New England poets — Long­ fellow, Whittier, the Lowells, Robinson, et al. — so sparing with words, so reductive? Perhaps it is Creeley’s impaired eyesight that is effectively at work here. In any case Creeley is thought of as a minimalist poet. Among the more prominent subjects of his micro-miniaturized experiences are women and sex, people (“You look out and you see people. / You have some reason in mind. / You are there in a real sense.” ), mind trips (“In my head I am / walking but I am not / in my head, where / is there to walk, / not thought of, is / the road itself more / than seen.”), language (“Locate I / love you some- / where in / teeth and / eyes, bite / it but / take care not / to hurt, you / want so / much so/little.” ). These gleanings are from his (relatively) more coherent responses. M. L. Rosenthal, in The New Poets (New York, 1967), says help­ fully of Creeley’s poems: “the theater of their occurrence is such a minimal one that they are like brief mutterings often, or the few shuffling steps of an actor pretending to dance.” Little rhyme and very little accessible private reason in Creeley, the affili­ ate of Charles Olson and his Black Mountain School of poetry. It was that poetic Ishmael, Olson, whose doctrine of projective verse with its high-energy constructs, energy discharges, field composition, and cumulative perceptions led the group (which included Levertov and Duncan) into the arid poetic wilderness of breath-oriented formless free verse and loose thought. And so in Creeley’s work the projectionist principle is supposed to be that the poem, exploding upon the reader’s consciousness in short revelatory pops, is like a string of firecrackers going off. Every breath-unit of sound is a kind of Reviews 143 detonation, sometimes of a flashy idea; the whole display — a little message packing a wallop and encased in an aura of wonder. Much has been made of such “poems.” Hugh Kenner, in a recent review of this new collection (Harper’s, September, 1983), claims the familiar “I Know a Man” (from For Love, 1962) is “one of the most quietly influential of modem American poems.” “As I sd to my / friend, because I am / always talking, — John, I . . . drive, he sd, for / christ’s sake, look / out where yr going.” Now and then such a caper will work very well indeed, as in “The Teachings” (from In London, 1972) : “of my grandmother / who at over eighty / went west from West Acton, / to see a long lost son named / Archie . . . and / she never spoke of him again.” But...