Robert Creeley’s Hallmarks

           

Charles Olson’s The Maximus Poems was dedicated to Robert Creeley who was born in Arlington, Massachusetts, in1926. He entered Harvard in 1943 but left school to serve in the American Field Service in Burma and India during the Second World War, 1944-5. He returned to Harvard in 1946 but took his BA from Black Mountain College in 1955. An MA from the University of New Mexico followed in 1960. He began his academic career by teaching two semesters at Black Mountain, wandered about a bit, and then settled into the English faculty of "Black Mountain II" at the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1967.

 

            According to Arthur L. Ford in his book Robert Creeley (1978,  p. 25), "Creeley has long been aware that he is part of a definable tradition in the American poetry of this century, — so long as 'tradition' is thought of in general terms and so long as it recognizes crucial distinctions among its members. The tradition most visible to the general public has been the  Eliot-Stevens tradition supported by the intellectual probings of the New Critics in the 1940s and early 1950s. Parallel to that tradition has been  the tradition Creeley identifies with, the Pound-Olson-Zukofsky-Black  Mountain  tradition — what M. L. Rosenthal [in his book The New Poets: American and British Poetry Since  World  War  II (1967)] calls 'The Projectivist Movement'." This "movement" Rosenthal derives from Olson's   essay on "Projective Verse," mentioned elsewhere.

 

            Le Fou, Creeley's first book, was published in 1952, and since then, according to his publisher, barely a year has passed without a new collection of poems. The 1983 entry, titled Mirrors, had some tendencies toward concrete imagery, but Creeley's greatest weakness was always vagueness and abstraction. It was hard for many readers and critics to understand Creeley's reputation as an innovative poet; even harder for some to imagine that his work lived up to the Black Mountain tenet — which he is supposed to have articulated — that "form is never more than an extension  of content," for his poems were often written in couplet, triplet, and quatrain stanzas that break into and out of rhyme as happenstance appears to dictate. An example is "The Hero," from Collected Poems, also published in 1982 and covering the span of years from 1945 to 1975.

 

            "The Hero" is written in variable isoverbal ("word-count") prosody; the number of words per line varies from three to seven, but the norm is four to six. Another technique to be found in this piece is variable rhyme — there is no set rhyme scheme, but some of the lines rhyme and the  poem concludes with a rhymed couplet. All of the stanzas are quatrains, as in the first two:

 

THE HERO

 

Each voice which was asked

spoke its words, and heard

more than that, the fair question,

the onerous burden of the asking.

 

And so the hero, the

hero! stepped that gracefully

into his redemption, losing

or gaining life thereby.

 

            Despite these obviously formal elements various critics continue to  insist that Creeley wrote in "free verse" (that is, prose: unmetered language), but most of his forms were strict enough so that it is a question whether it can even be maintained that he wrote in forms of prose. This particular poem is without doubt verse-mode, not prose-mode. M. L. Rosenthal in The New Poets quoted Creeley's "'preoccupation with a personal rhythm in the sense that the discovery  of an external equivalent of the speaking self is felt to be the true object of poetry,'" and went  on  to say that this speaking self serves both as the center of the poem's universe and the private life of the poet. "Despite his mask of humble, confused comedian, loving and lovable, he therefore stands in his own  work's way,  too seldom letting his poems free themselves of his blocking presence" (p. 148). When he used imagery, Creeley could be interesting and effective on the sensory level.

 

            In an essay titled "Poetry:  Schools of Dissidents," the poet Daniel Hoffman wrote in The Harvard Guide to Contemporary American Writing, which he edited, that as he grew older Creeley's work tended to become increasingly fragmentary in nature, even the titles subsequent to For Love: Poems 1950-1960 hinting at the fragmentation of experience in Creeley's work: Words, Pieces, A Day Book. In Hoffman's opinion, "Creeley has never included ideas,  or commitments to social issues, in the repertoire of his work; his stripped-down poems have been, as it were, a proving of Pound's belief in 'technique as the test of a man's sincerity.'" (p. 533)

 

            But perhaps Hoffman and Rosenthal both were being too kind, for  here is a late entry, from Mirrors — the appropriately titled "Greeting Card," the six central couplets of which read,

 

GREETING CARD

 

Know love's surety

either in you or me.

 

Believe you are always

all that human is

 

in loyalty, in generosity,

in wise, good-natured clarity.

 

No one more than you

would be love's truth —

nor less

deserve ever unhappiness.

 

Therefore wonder's delight

will make the way.

 

            The poem is filled with clichés; its lofty diction is tied to inverted syntax which has made much 19th-century verse unpopular in the twentieth century. This sort of writing would be anathema to the avant-garde of the last century if it weren't the product of a member in good standing of the Black Mountain group. Not even the title saves it from banality. Such verses of Creeley are formally disconcerting, and their "content," which their "form" is supposed to follow, can descend as low as the mundane and may rise only as high as the obscure.