It is I: Robert Creeley’s Deictic Subjectivity and the Sublime Self

Robert Creeley’s mid-career poetry productively uses intentionally unspecific and therefore projective deixis in order to negatively present the sublimity inherent in some of the key ideas with which his work struggles—issues of time, place, knowability, and the self. Moreover, Jean-François Lyotard’s theorizations around the immanence of the sublime, and on the “second self ” in relation to the sublime, illuminate the ways in which Creeley uses projective deixis in order to suggest that subjectivity must be encountered as presentation, never as representation. Creeley’s poetry, through its heavy reliance on deixis, entrenches and illustrates the immanent sublime at the heart of experience, while implicitly arguing that one must also treat subjectivity as unknown and unknowable.