- "My / Eye Locked in / Self Sight":The Self-Portrait Poems of Robert Creeley's Words
If Frank O'Hara "is almost certainly the subject of more portraits than any other poet of the twentieth century," as Brian Glavey relays in a beautiful essay on the "statuesque" New York School poet, then Robert Creeley is second in line (782). Featured in numerous portraits by visual artists like Francesco Clemente and R. B. Kitaj, and in photographs by Elsa Dorfman, Jonathan Williams, and others, Robert Creeley should, as John Yau notes, "rightfully be called a 'poet among painters'" (Perloff, qtd. in Yau 47). As perceptive readers like Yau and Charles Altieri as well as Creeley's own wide-ranging art criticism suggest, the plastic arts have been central to his poetic imaginary.1 Inspired by an early residence in Europe where he had, as he writes in "On the Road," "come to know some painters, like they say"—including a rapturous introduction to abstract expressionism—and by a brief tenure at Black Mountain College, where he taught alongside leading experimental figures in dance, music, and film, Creeley grew enamored of the "energy" and "viability" in these other media: an attention to process and material that he became intent to replicate in poetry (Collected Essays 369).2 Perhaps in an effort to better achieve this in his verse, [End Page 97] Creeley became a prodigious collaborator, producing numerous art books, folio works, and projects with artists that inspired him: Kitaj, Clemente, Robert Indiana, Jim Dine, Marisol, and others. These collaborative works, and their consequences for Creeley's poetic development, have been ably explored by scholars like Amy Cappellazzo and Elizabeth Licata, Stephen Fredman, and Barbara Montefalcone.3
Significant as the visual arts influence and the act of collaboration have been to Creeley's artistic growth in general, however, his status as routine portrait subject bespeaks something integral to his verse. Indelible in every portrait is Creeley's signature lopsided gaze—the result of a childhood accident that claimed his left eye. In images, he appears either to wink at or to look skeptically on viewers, both deflecting and courting their attention. His stare is the more magnetic as a result: we long to see what Creeley sees with his impenetrable myopia even as we bristle at the piercing intensity of his one-eyed glance. That Creeley's portraits provoke this feeling is a testament to his poetry, conditioned always by an acuminous eye. The many Creeley portraits, that is, reveal something fundamental about his poetics: its obsession with seeing and being seen. This obsession is not surprising given his visual affliction; nevertheless, Creeley's many likenesses serve as a fiffing tribute to a poet whose verse continually takes visual measure of other people and, ultimately, of himself.
Writing about Christopher Felver's photographic collection of portraits, duly titled The Poet Exposed, Creeley relays:
I'm struck that portrait has a root sense of "to draw forth," which in turn provokes a sense of "draw" I'd never before thought of. The painter Kitaj called the act of drawing another human being the sum and measure of the art. It is an entirely human one in all respects. No other relation can so define the imagination or the power of seeing literally.
(CE 458)
Creeley is taken with the portraits' sheer humanity: their ability to capture not just the poet on view but the essential "relation" between photographer and subject. "The photographer is a friend," he observes, "the faces are remarkably open. … and this person come [End Page 98] to call, with his camera, is there in like manner, equally open" (459). Creeley describes a reflexive artform in which poet and photographer are "equally open" to each other, both exposed: "the man looking at them is by that defined." What Creeley discerns in this review is an essential quality he develops in his own portrait poems; in a body of work that endeavors "to draw forth" others, what he most often "draw[s] forth" is himself. His portrait poems give way to self-portraits. Yet if this reflexive project is a flattering one for Felver, in whose lens a convivial...