Creeley on ...

jazz.

To try to answer Vance's question a little better:

What I was trying to make clear was that jazz gave me a model for rhythmic patterns and possibilities finally more useful than what I was getting from the usual 1940s models of what was supposed to be good poetry. A lot of it was, in fact, terrific—[William Carlos] Williams, [Ezra] Pound, [Wallace] Stevens—but none, with the exception of Williams, came close to the way I’d say or write things.


It was the phrasing, the cadence, that most occupied me. Something as simple as a “backbeat” was curiously outside the usual concerns of poetry. Everyone was talking about “meaning,” or “figures of speech,” “ambiguity,” etc. I was interested, literally, in sound and rhythm, no matter what I then thought about it or even knew. I listened to the classic records of the period—all the stuff coming up to bebop and then the great initial releases circa 1945 of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, [big] bands like Tadd Dameron and Boyd Raeburn, singers like Sarah Vaughn. I’d track, not didactically, as with a ruler, but intuitively, “by ear,” as poet friend Charles Olson put it, all those shifts and changes, all built usually on the most simple of melodic lines. I wish some poet then had been doing with “Mary Had a Little Lamb” what Bird was doing with “I’ve Got Rhythm”!

Creeley on Sound

For me sound -- Pound's "Listen to the sound that it makes" -- has always been a crucial factor. That's why jazz back then in the mid-forties was so useful -- it let me hear ways of linking, how 'serial order' might be played, what a rhythm could literally accomplish. I wasn't getting that from the usual discussions of poetry at all. Anyhow I write and read my own poems as sounds and rhythms -- and that is a crucial part of their fact. One gets phrasing from all manner of source, people talking in the street, Frank Sinatra, and so on. Jack Kerouac is a terrific instance albeit he hardly took to the stage with any pleasure. But anyhow I write poetry to be spoken, I speak it when I write it -- like Bud Powell playing piano.

Creeley Read This Blog By the Way

RC: I much like the quickness of exchange (for which read "publication") it provides. I truly think the more, the merrier -- and let one's own perceptions and needs make the relevant connections. Pound said years ago, "Damn your taste! I want if possible to sharpen your perceptions after which your taste can take care of itself." It's as if someone has finally opened that bleak door of usual discretion and habit, and let in a great diversity of response, proposal, everything. Two blogs I value indeed:

http://thirdfactory.net
http://jonathanmayhew.blogspot.com

The Minimal Gesture

You grow with a poet. I was reading Creeley at 15 and at 50 I still am reading him. His work has grown with me. As I get more subtle in my thought, get to be a better reader, Creeley gets better too. He is not a writer to be left behind. If you knew him only at the level of English-department comprehensive exams, say, you would think of the early work about domestic difficulties, the association with WCW, and leave it at that.

It is easy to dismiss the apparent slightness of gesture, the understatement, as a mere abdication of responsibility or as a self-indulgent descent into triviality. I imagine the horror of Simic at realizing that Creeley had written so much. A Collected Poems, in two volumes, of a writer known for his brevity and early anthology pieces. A nice man (in his later days) who had some "interesting ideas about literature." It never occurred to him that a writer like Creeley teaches you how to read him. If you are just looking for the 50 pages of lyric condensation, you might be making a mistake. Of course, Creeley does have that 50 pages (actually much more than that), but he also has the throw-away poems.

I'd compare him to Morton Feldman if I had more time and energy today.

Creeley vs. Simic

Look at how remarkably better a typical poem by Robert Creeley is than one by Charles Simic, with his lazy similes (shiver like straw) and his clichés (meek little lamb), his attempts at portentous, meaningful statement (like the last heroic soldier / of a defeated army). I'm embarrassed even to cite such phrases. All day long! The huge shears coming after the little lamb! The truth is dark under the eyelids! Give me a break. Simic is vaguely existential, Creeley is quietly specific and far more subtle. Compare the histrionic gesture of staying out a few minutes longer in the cold, and the subtlety of remembering overheard sounds of many years ago. Compare the subtlety of Creeley's music against the tuneless ear of the younger poet.

I will never forgive Simic's condescension toward Creeley in The New York Review of Books. Here was an opportunity to be generous toward a true master, and Simic chooses uncomprehending condescension. He could have learned something from Creeley's art if he had tried.

Simic's poem isn't even all that bad, you'll say. It's exactly what they teach you to write in the creative writing class, in fact. The similes, the vague portentousness straining after the "deep image," the "all day" or "all evening" cliché, the bare branches and little lamb, the first snowflake of winter. That makes the contrast all the more stark.


The truth is dark under your eyelids.

What are you going to do about it?
The birds are silent; there's no one to ask.
All day long you'll squint at the gray sky.
When the wind blows you'll shiver like straw.

A meek little lamb you grew your wool
Till they came after you with huge shears.
Flies hovered over open mouth,
Then they, too, flew off like the leaves,
The bare branches reached after them in vain.

Winter coming. Like the last heroic soldier
Of a defeated army, you'll stay at your post,
Head bared to the first snow flake.
Till a neighbor comes to yell at you,
You're crazier than the weather, Charlie.

Silence

I can't speak so
simply of whatever
was then
the fashion

of silence
everyone's-- Blue
expansive morning
and in

the lilac bush just
under window
farm house
spaces all

the teeming chatter
of innumerable birds--
I'd lie quiet
trying

to go to sleep late
evenings in summer
such buzzes settling
twitters

of birds--The relatives
in rooms underneath
me murmuring--
Listened hard to catch

faint edges of sounds
through blurs of fading
spectrum now out
there forever.

Echoes

(275) Creeley. Echoes. New York: New Directions, 1993. 113 pp.

I thought that I had already done this book for this project, and it turned out it was the 1982 Creeley chapbook of the same title.

Many think Creeley's later work is mediocre, but this isn't so. When people think of his early work, they are only thinking about a few spectacular anthology pieces. Actually, Creeley's early work also had many unspectacular poems, just like his later books. I don't know if his batting average is any different. Late Creeley stratches the same itch for me as early Creeley, and has the advantage of being less known, less cliché.

Entire memory
hangs tree
in mind to see
a bird be-

but now puts stutter
to work, shutters
the windows, shudders,
sits and mutters-

because can't
go back, still
can't get
out. Still can't.

This poem is called "Echo," one of several with similar titles ("Echoes").

A Form of Women

(267)

I'm resuming my series 9000 books of poetry. I just read A Form of Women, by Creeley, published in 1959. I picked up the first edition cheaply in New York. I'd read all the poems before, but there is something different about reading them in the first edition.

I'm not saying that Bill Evans and Robert Creeley are my two favorites--they are among my favorites of course--but they are two in a special category in that I have periods where I crave their work intensely, as though they were chocolate or some other craveable substance. When I want Creeley nothing else will substitute. There are other musicians or poets that I like just as much, but for whom i never feel that sense of an itch that can only be scratched one way.

About Bud Powell, on the other hand, I feel a sense that I do not want him to stop. As far as i'm concerned he could play 3,000 choruses of "Bouncing With Bud" and I would be perfectly happy.

I had a dream that I was at a banquet celebrating Robert Creeley and Denise Levertov. Creeley himself was in attendance. I had to give a speech, and at the end of this speech I was about to recite "I Know a Man," but Creeley interrupted me. So I improvised the following poem:

This is my im-
aginary Cree-
ley poem.

I hope you like it
sport.
You're up next.

Wild applause. The next speaker got up and began to talk about Levertov. She implied that the real reason we were here was to celebrate her work, not Creeley's. I've rarely been able to remember poems I've composed in dreams, so this is a breakthrough for me. I was particularly proud of the word "sport" for some reason.

(227)

*Creeley. If I were writing this. 2003. 98 pp.

Who'd have thought that Creeley at such a late stage in the game could come up with poetry of this quality. Look at the poem "Supper."

I recognized some of these poems from a jazz record Creeley made with Steve Swallow and others. The book Drawn & Quartered, which was part of the 9000 book projects, is included here too, sadly without the images.

(222)

*Creeley. Life & Death. . 1998. 85 pp.

Come out
where there's still time
left
to play.

Yes, and we hear on the back cover his "stature has been further confirmed" by some award like they give to everyone who lasts a certain while. This is a very rich book; it's quite a moving experience to read it cover to cover like I've just done, after starting and not finishing a few other books today.

(211)

*Creeley. Hello: A Journal, February 29-May 3, 1976. . 1978. 85 pp.

Trees want
to be still?
Winds
won't let them?

This is probably not going to convince a Charles Simic that Creeley is worthwhile. It is Creeley at his least fearful of the seemingly trivial observation. "Sitting at table--/ good talk / with good people." On the other hand, I think Simic's poetry is pretty trivial, where Creeley is essential:

If the world's one's
own experience of it,

then why walk around
in it, or think of it.

More would be more
than one could know

alone, more than myself's
small senses, of it.

That's just it, isn't it? The sense of being in one's experience and nowhere else, but the simultaneous sense that there ought to be more. Creeley already lives in Rilke's untranslated world. And he knows how to to notate it. That last comma is priceless. Think, too, of how much weight is on that neuter pronoun it, repeated four times in this short poem.

These reflection on self in the moment occur in a travel diary. It is travel, being in a different place, that instigates reflection on the essential non-travel: not being able to get out of one's own skin: "So it's // all by myself / again, one / way or another."

(188)

*Creeley. Pieces.. 1969. 81 pp.

I usually don't like san-serif fonts, but this kind of poetry seems well suited to it. You can still get the first edition of Pieces on the used market for not too much money.

I had a Creeleyesque idea the other day which is that I can only inhabit a single day. I can inhabit another day at some other time, but only one at a time. It was a strange perception in its obviousness. Everybody knows this, so to picture it as an epiphany seems odd, but it felt like that to me.

Now I don't feel this way about, say, an hour, or a minute, or a week or month or year. It is the day that is the temporal dwelling place, the time that can be inhabited at one stretch. Maybe that's what makes it untrivial.

Why does it seem Creeleyesque to me? It seems to me that that is what he is constrantly trying to get at. That "phenomenological" sense of being aware of being alive in a certain frame.

I met two people in one day in Charlottesville who, completely independently of each other, had translated Creeley into Spanish--Pieces in one case and Life and Death in the other. How's that for a convergence? I kept waitng to meet Creeley's third translator. One of these is Marcos Canteli, a grad. student at Duke and friend of Tony Tost. The other, Alan Smith, a friend of my wife's whom I had never met myself and knew only by name as a scholar of 19th century Spanish novel.

My friend the Spanish poet Juan Carlos Mestre was there too. I gave my talk on Lorca and Frank O'Hara.

Just when I thought of Creeley as sentimental I come across

"Between what was
and what might be
still seems to be
a life"

or

"Gods one would have
hauled out like props"

or

"When the world has become a pestilence..."

"the ridiculous small places
of the patient hates"

"Oh dull edge of prospect"

or maybe

"Shuddering racket of
air conditioner's colder

than imagined winter.."

A rigorously unsentimental view of life, really. Not every poem is of the "magnitude" of Creeley's "major" early lyrics, the ones everyone knows.

But part of that is a sense of limitation, of measure. There are no easy epiphanies to be had.

Anyway, Creeley turns the idea of being "major" on its head, as in the poem "EPIC"

"Wanting to tell
a story,
like hell's simple invention, or
some neat recovery

of the state of grace,
I can recall lace curtains,
people I think I remember,
Mrs. Curley's face."

What is the yardstick? Can Creeley's Minimus Poems be "greater" than Olson's Maximus? Isn't funny how greatness implies a sense of scale, of sheer size? Like Creeley's poem for Berrigan that does acknowledge that size and scale of a different kind of writer...

What's the rap on Creeley?: domestic, trivial, self-indulgent, dull, no "images," or uninteresting ones, weak sense of narrative, stuttering, strained, limited and minimalistic--too "theoretical," too involved with the sense of writing itself. Yet each of many separate instances gives the lie to all that.

I wrote a letter to The New York Review of Books about the Simic / Creeley review. Very moderate in tone. It basically says "I'd love to show Simic my 400 pages of Creeley." I doubt they will publish it because they get "thousands of letters."

***

Certain of us need the Creeleyesque. Sometimes for me it's an actual physical craving I get on occasion for that particular tone, that "insistence," to use a word he himself might use. It's a language that without him would not exist, an idiolect. For me, unoriginal poet, it's a useful register to be able to call upon. Creeleytude, Creeleytas.

***

Certain others are Creeley skeptics, the way I am a Duncan skeptic. The skeptics say that it is dull (Berryman), that there's nothing there. There's probably nothing to be done--in the sense that a justification not immanent to the work itself will not convince. It is an immanent sort of thing. The Creeley skeptics are not less cultivated, less intelligent, or less anything else. They are just less in need of what Creeley offers. It's there in just a few words, recognizable

"Most explicit--
the sense of trap"

I learned something quite significant from this. I learned that C Dale Young and I do not speak the same language, poetically speaking. I searched through a recent poetic sequence of mine, The Thelonious Monk Fake Book, to see whether I use words like dark, sadness, chest, hands, water, rain, body, silence. Generally, I don't use these words very much if at all. Where my vocabulary coincided the most with his was in an Ira Gershwin lyric I happened to be quoting at one point. "Holding hands at midnight , 'neath the moonlit sky." I did use "blue" a lot, but that was quoting the titles of Monk tunes, mostly.

It's no criticism of C Dale's excellent book of poetry of course to say that I simply couldn't bring myself use words like that (very much). To me they are *poetry words.* In other words they might correspond to what the average person expects to find in a poem. I don't like depending on an identifiably poetic tone. On the other hand I'm sure my own *poetry words* would be just as embarrassing, if I knew what they were... If I did know I'm sure I would be obliged to ban them, viewing them as crutches that I was better off without...

(You wouldn't ask Creeley to write a book without the word "echo" repeated 30 times, on the other hand.)

I'm not crazy (lately) about poetry that sounds too written, work that is with a willful quality that's like bad acting. Where the "craft" is visible as "fine writing" there is probably some overwriting there. "Craft" is something to be unlearned, in that sense. I prefer the Creeley approach where he doesn't feel the need to show you how good he is at every turn. It's kind of a hard lesson because everyone wants to stand out from the crowd with marvelous writing chops. It's hard to remember how deceptively simple some of the best writing is, in Lorca, in Creeley. It's not like it's not trying hard, but that is doesn't show visible signs of effort. I always pick up those signs, somehow; that is my misfortune in that I can't enjoy a lot of poetry that's well written and I'm sure better than anything I could ever come up with, because I simply can't take that overwritten Derek Walcott effect.

***

Picked up Paul Violi's Harmatan at the Dusty Bookshelf here in town. In other poetry new there was reading last week by Irby, Roitman, and Larkin. It was nice seeing and hearing Maryrose again.

***

Kagemusha was worse than I remembered it. Kurosawa was in decline at this point of his career. I should have rented "The Spirit of the Beehive" instead.

***

I love Lorca after all. Hah! I will accept my destiny--long postponed--as a full fledged lorquista. I didn't write about him ever for the same reason that any self respecting Spanish poet has to flee Lorca with both feet as fast as possible. I do hate bad lorquistas with a passion. Few have attracted as many crappy critics!

Linguist Mark Liberman makes an eloquent point here: that the idea of a perfect, elegant, and correct language is always displaced unto a past, but that this past is always imaginary. That is to say, people never have spoken in this *perfect* language, and nobody seriously thinks that we should return to 18th century, or 17th century, norms--or to the norms of whatever period is considered the golden age of language usage. It's a fundamentally dishonest argument, because the norms of usage, whatever they are, must always necessarily be those of the present, never those of the past. [I hope my paraphrase does some justice to Liberman's post]

And so it is too with the norms of the "poetry language" (Kenneth Koch). We can't seriously propose to bring back Victorian ideals, or Elizabethan ideas, because we wouldn't be happy with the result even if we could actually bring back those ideals. We are stuck in the present, and that present is more lively and interesting because it is *our* time. "As if you would never leave me and were / the inexorable product of my own time."

Part of time is the way in which time is *felt*. I'm thinking of the "feel" of a musician or poet for time itself. Think of how Charlie Parker changed the way we perceive the passage of time from one second to the next! (Cortázar wrote about this in his story "El perseguidor.") Creeley felt and understood Parker's innovation.

Time to teach grammar!