Wednesday, March 30, 2005

Poet Robert Creeley has died at the age of 78 Miriam Bobkoff at Icarus tapped me on the shoulder this evening to inform me of Creeley's passing. From NPR: "Massachusetts-born poet Robert Creeley died Wednesday in Odessa, Texas. Creeley is associated with a group of writers often referred to collectively as 'The Black Mountain Poets.' He authored 60 books of poetry and criticism." Here's a short essay of his from the anthology Claims for Poetry (ed. Donald Hall, University of Michigan, 1982). I offer it here in homage to an important and influential poet and teacher. I do not claim to understand it. To Define by Robert Creeley (1953) The process of definition is the intent of the poem, or is to that sense--"Peace comes of communication." Poetry stands in no need of any sympathy, or even goodwill. One acts from bottom, the root is the purpose quite beyond any kindness. A poetry can act on this: "A poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it (he will have some several causations) by way of the poem itself to, all the way over to, the reader." One breaks the line of aesthetics, or that outcrop of a general division of knowledge. A sense of the KINETIC impels recognition of force. Force is, and therefore stays. The means of poetry are, perhaps, related to Pound's sense of the increment of association; usage coheres value. Tradition is an aspect of what one is now thinking--not what someone once thought. We make with what we have, and in this way anything is worth looking at. A tradition becomes inept when it blocks the necessary conclusion; it says we have felt nothing, it implies others have felt more. A poetry denies its end in any descriptive act, I mean any act which leaves the attention outside the poem. Our anger cannot exist usefully without its objects, but a description of them is also a perpetuation. There is that confusion--one wants the thing to act on, and yet hates it. Description does nothing, it includes the object--it neither hates nor loves. If one can junk these things, of the content which relates only to denial, the negative, the impact of dissolution--act otherwise, on other things. There is no country. Speech is an assertion of one man, by one man. "Therefore each speech having its own character the poetry it engenders will be peculiar to that speech also in its own intrinsic form." *** From The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry: Somewhere The galloping collections of boards are the house which I afforded one evening to walk into just as the night came down. Dark inside, the candle lit of its own free will, the attic groaned then, the stairs led me up into the air. From the outside, it must have seemed a wonder that it was the inside he as me saw in the dark there. The Faces The faces with anticipated youth look out from the current identifications, judge or salesman, the neighbor, the man who killed, mattering only as the sliding world they betoken, the time it never mattered to accumulate, the fact that nothing mattered but for what one could make of it, some passing, oblique pleasure, a pain immense in its intensity, a sly but insistent yearning to outwit it all, be different, move far, far away, avoid forever the girl next door, whose cracked, wrinkled smile will still persist, still know you. [Photo from http://www.brown.edu/Administration/News_Bureau/2003-04/03-015.html .] 8:13:37 PM    comment []

Little time myself here this morning. I must take another boxload of books and DVDs to the post office so they'll go out in today's mail. And I have some final draft poems I'm mailing away ("must be postmarked by March 31"), and those must be printed out and letters attached. I think the snow is done for a while. We'll see what the weekly newspaper has to say in its next edition, but surely this two weeks of precip has laid down a good deep snowpack on the peaks. I've found a great-sounding place I may move to later this spring or early summer, and to help that along I'm reducing the payload here somewhat. Three large boxes of unsellable books, boxes of unneeded dishware, pots, pans, glasses. I have trouble ridding myself of bowls, spoons, and wire whisks, but can comfortably halve my accumulations of each. Repeat trips through rooms every day carefully combing, remembering what it feels like to regret a too-hasty decision, miss later an irreplaceable thing, and be judicious in my gleanings. *** APRIL IS NATIONAL POETRY MONTH "What's being sold now in poetry," points out [Copper Canyon managing editor Michael Weigers], "is the sound bite. Crappy books are getting huge media attention. What's being sold is not the poetry but the writers' stories," along with their would-be celebrity. "Poetry has become fashionable," he regrets, "and not enough work is getting attention for its literary merit. People aren't sitting down to read the words. The commitment is to merchandising, not to poetry," he concludes glumly, as many an idealist would. (from Stealing Glimpses: Of Poetry, Poets, and Things in Between, by Molly McQuade [Louisville: Sarabande Books, 1999]) What do you think? Still true? *** Busy morning, as I've said, wrapping items to put in the mail, typing up a quick entry here, and a lengthy, delightful interruption: a phone call from a dear friend, long-lost-spiritbrother I haven't spoken with in 14 years. I saw his name in the caller ID and laughed with joy. These are the things that keep us on the planet. We spent hours catching one another up on our lives. I am so glad. I hope we stay in touch now. He was lost family, to me--"family" in its truest sense. I want to say more about what I wrote yesterday, and to respond to the responders, and now I have to flee! to get things in the mail. But I plan to add a considered, grateful paragraph or two later in the day. Blessings. 12:23:21 PM    comment []