It wasn’t until reading Robert Pinky’s column in Slate that I realized we are in the midst of a truly important time: that’s right, it’s National Poetry Month! Which means, of course, ghazals for breakfast, poet statue unveilings in local parks (or not, but what’s Dante without Pinsky!), readings at even the Seawitch, innumberable voices rising in a chorus of luminous verses…
Ahem. More likely, NPM means dirge-toned renderings of the present state of poetry—to the extent that the proliferation of professionalized, uninspired hacks (well, I know of at least one, for a fact) could comprise a collective. This general lament, oddly enough, made me think of David Brooks’s recent column in the NYT. To briefly hack his argument, Brooks writes that the strength of the Republican Party is not its ability to portray a collective view, but rather the large number of opposing factions therein that guarantee a place for more people under the larger umbrella of Republicanism. In the last few decades, there has been an explosion in the number of people reading and writing poetry for, I would argue, similar reasons. The diffusion of poetry (a negative happening, in some opinions) into competing “movements” (language poets, deep imagists, Symbolists, Beats, New Formalists, and anyone else with a pen and free time) has meant that more people are likely to find one of these groupings appealing. Nevertheless, within all of these groups, there were few voices as strong in the last century as Robert Creeley’s, who sadly passed away last week at the age of 78.
It’s easy enough to assume that an artist engages, as Dylan Thomas puts it, a solitary, sullen art. And as neatly as this appeals to the melodramatic adolescent in us all, it’s no way to live a life. Both in person, and in his work, Creeley embraced the idea that poetry was essentially human, and his aesthetic mirrored that. Art as a means of locating oneself in a world in which locations were increasingly difficult to come by. Consider his most famous poem, “I Know A Man.” It’s hard to miss the power of these lines, the angst of communicating (or at least trying to) in world that is out of control:
As I sd to my
friend, because I am
always talking,—John, I
sd, which was not his
name, the darkness sur-
rounds us, what
can we do against
it, or else, shall we &
why not, buy a goddamn big car,
drive, he sd, for
christ’s sake, look
out where yr going.
This past February, Creeley taught a three-week workshop at UNCW, as it turns out his last, that I will remember not only as long as I continue this “poetry thing,” but as long as this “life thing” goes on as well. While there are certainly others who have greater claim to his memory, it is a testament to his personality that anyone who knew him will be saddened by this news. From the second he walked into the classroom, Creeley treated us as peers. The first question he asked was, simply, Why do you write? Not as a challenge, but out of genuine interest in why people still, somehow, find reasons to turn to art.
When I required my students to attend Creeley’s on-campus reading, an often rambling affair with poems punctuated by personal observations or anecdotes, their reactions were almost unanimously twofold: 1) “He reminded me of my grandfather” and 2) “I couldn’t tell when he was reading his poems and when he was just talking.” The first reflects the person, the second the craft and how the two are intricately linked. For Creeley, poetry was an utterance, a human utterance, that reflected both speech and the general human condition. In this reflection lies its importance. Compare the “sullen art,” to the end of Creeley’s poem “So There”:
Thinking of you,
baby, thinking
of all the things
I’d like to say and do.
Old fashioned time
it takes to be
anywhere, at all.
Moving on. Mr. Ocean,
Mr. Sky’s
got the biggest blue eyes
in creation-
“here comes the sun”!
While we can,
let’s do it, let’s
have fun.
It was certainly odd (at first) to have a poet who started his own writing career sending letters (longhand!) to William Carlos Williams encouraging our class to set up a blog. But having gotten to know him a little bit and begin to understand how important Creeley considered communication to be in the life of a poet, it makes sense. And viewing this memorial to Creeley at Conjunctions, it is touching to see so many voices coming together and sharing their own memories in way that would have previously been impossible. Once during class, with his typical modesty, Creeley said, “I have no idea specifically what poetry is but it’s something like the ability to hear water in an empty pool.” Today, thanks to his writing and teaching, there are that many more people lying on the deck, leaning over the pool’s lip, listening.
