Robert Creeley: In Memoriam

For Creeley

The rain falls on.
Acres of violets unfold.
Dandelion, mayflower
Myrtle and forsythia follow.

The cardinals call to each other.
Echoes of delicate
Breath-broken whistles.

I know something now
About subject, object, verb
And about one word that fails
For lack of substance.

Now people say He passed on
Instead of that … Unit
Of space subtracted by one.
It almost rhymes with earth.

What is a poet but a person
Who lives on the ground
Who laughs and listens

Without pretention of knowing
Anything, driven by the lyric’s
Quest for rest that never
(God willing) will be found?

Concord, kitchen table, 1966.
Corbetts, Creeley, a grandmother
And me. Sweater, glasses,
One wet eye.

Lots of laughter
Before and after. Every meeting
Rhymed and fluttered into meter.
The beat was the message.

Hope grant him the beat, the color, the speed of eternal dreaming, the home and human bed of Mount Auburn, friends to meet him, a sister and ancestors, and an earthly tinker to continue his walking for him.

—Fanny Howe

DISTANCE IS TOO SMALL A MATTER TO BREAK THE BOND

I read For Love in my seventh grade English class in Buffalo in the 60s, never imagining that the poet whose work I fell in love with as a young girl would become an abiding friend, a real force in my life.

I’d just given birth to a second daughter after spending two years in Israel, and applied to the writing program at Buffalo because Robert Creeley taught there. The first day of class he walked in late wearing an old army jacket. I felt older than the other students, was paying a babysitter so I could be there, doubted in those first moments that I’d be coming back. When he started speaking it was about what he’d just heard on the car radio; he seemed amused, shy and aggressive at once. I was sure the class wasn’t for me. Then I must have started listening, resistances disappeared, and there was nothing I needed to hear more than the words he was speaking.

He used class time to read Williams, Olson, Duncan, Levertov, all new to me—and arranged for each of us to meet him individually to discuss our work. I’d handed in a notebook of fragments, reflections on my swollen body, sleepless nights, unfinished thoughts. When I walked into his office I expected him to say, these aren’t poems. Instead he looked at me and said, you look good to me. Not flirtatious, just direct, warm, human—affirming my life and giving me courage—saying yes to the poems, but moreso, yes to me.

It turned out he was going through a divorce and graciously accepted my invitation for dinner at our house which soon became a place he felt at home in, at ease with my husband Donald, and with our two small children underfoot. Of course I was deeply attracted to him, and he must have known how I felt from my meager poems. He loved the ‘big bashes’ my brothers held at our house with their friends and local bands. We celebrated his 50th birthday at one of them. At the end of another when we’d all had too much to drink and everyone had left but the five of us—Steve, Mike, Bob, Donald and I—we sat around the table, it was very late, very quiet, the girls asleep upstairs. Bob turned to Donald and suddenly uttered words so honest and direct that he clarified the air with them—acknowledging our connection, his friendship with Donald, his respect for the house, and, like the rare gentleman that he was, assuring that our relationship would endure. When Pen and Bob married, Donald and I were their witnesses before the judge; it was a double blessing and honor, to embrace these two friends of our heart, though the judge, seeing the two of them enter his chambers in scruffy clothes, assumed that we were the ones to be married.

I was preparing to leave for Israel in 1978. I was miserable, torn; it was then to console me that Robert said “distance is too small a matter to break the bond.” Letters back and forth, our occasional visits to Buffalo and Maine, his two visits to Jerusalem, his endless gestures of generosity and kindness proved his words true. He invited me to read with him when my first book was published; all the Creeley fans who came that day to the Tapas café in Cambridge were forced to listen to my poems first. I am stunned now thinking of my extraordinary luck in having him in my life, in the “extreme unction” of his wisdom and friendship. This October I was traveling with my son Udi, soon to finish his army service and interested in seeing some US schools. Bob picked us up at the Providence train station, youthful and energetic as ever. We stayed up late eating and drinking—Bob, Pen, Udi and I—as we watched a presidential debate on TV, we laughed, lamented the state of the world. It was a charmed visit.

Three weeks ago Wednesday I was driving home from Tel Aviv with Udi. I’d been debating whether to attend a poetry event that evening where I’d have to see someone who does not speak to me. A few years back it was Bob I’d turned to for insight and direction to get through the original crisis, and as always he was there for me, clear and true, cutting through the hurt and insecurity to what was essential. I told Udi how Bob had helped me through disappointments, frustrations. We talked about our wonderful visit a few months earlier. Later that night back in Jerusalem I received word of Robert’s death. It must have occurred at the time we were talking about him.

Here are two poems Robert Creeley wrote during his first visit to Jerusalem:

A LITANY

An old man doesn’t know
his disposition nor argue

its necessity. He sits
waiting, remembering at best

the other worlds of his desire.
Into this extreme unction

comes sun, comes any day of
the week, and he moves, accordingly.

4/28/89

DON & LINDA’S HOUSE

Place, light,
windows look
in, look out—

pots, plants,
green ground,
roses, the flowers
abound—

This archaic
language feels
the insistence,
the common ground.

4/30/89

—Linda Stern Zisquit
Jerusalem

Still sad a couple of weeks later at the passing of Robert Creeley, & reading the tributes, feeling much like many others, about the man & the poet, kindness generosity indeed, modesty, & a keenly lived life, with the sensitive lost eye that wept when it was talked about. Last meetings in Auckland in 1995—at our house, at a lunch at The Black Crow in town, & at a farewell party in Ponsonby.

Context: Coming from England, where American writing was unheard of in the 50s when I had been a student of Eng Lit. I was introduced to it in New Zealand in the early 70s by Wystan Curnow. By the middle of the decade I was enthusiastically reading Creeley & then heard him talk in a classroom & give a reading in Auckland, a big moment in my life. But didn’t get to meet him. In London in 1977–78, I had A Day Book in my hands day & night & was writing short wry Creeleyesque things.

By 1982 I was married to Judi Stout and traveled with her in Europe & then stayed in New York for a couple of months. I had written to Bob saying we’d like to visit him in Buffalo. But got a letter back saying he was on leave in Albuquerque and if we were coming that way … so we diverted & went to amazing N.M. Remembering Bob’s account of his own visit to Basil Bunting, we took with us as a gift the bottle of single malt that we’d bought in Scotland for this occasion. We went straight into a lunch party arranged for Jonathan Williams’ visit. Then likewise, invited to participate in whatever was going on, would we care to go next day to Taos?

With no sense of this being in any way risky, with the fairly calm older Bob Creeley, yes we’d like that. Just a warning from Pen, unnecessary as it turned out, to go steady on the beer at lunch-time. We got to Taos safely enough, intending to visit Larry Bell but he wasn’t home. There was six inches of mud in the streets. Bell’s secretary showed us round, after we’d taken off our shoes, & we looked at the expensive glass-treatment equipment he’d just purchased with a grant. I don’t recall having met before an artist with a secretary, or with equipment as high-tech & expensive as that before.

Fine and dry, but some snow still lying about near Santa Fe. The driving was careful and skillful, only two things on his mind, the death of his friend Max Finstein—‘the best con-man in the country’ in the poem ‘Oh Max’—& Walter Chappell’s request for him to write ‘something’ for a forthcoming book of Walter’s photos. I had the feeling that Bob felt he was being used & was not happy about it. But we talked—mainly he talked—with a few questions from me all the way to Taos & back—the aftermath of the death of Barnet Newman, hearing the dealers & critics talking the same day about how the prices would go up, about Black Mountain & Charles Olson [my curiosity prompting that] about schizophrenic offspring which was common ground, about the decline in the N.M. water-table, as the result of various overuse, watering golf-courses, about the condition of the pueblos,—for a long-time I remembered almost all this conversation in some detail, but never wrote it down and it’s faded. & like everyone else says, a friendship was formed that persisted for a long time.

There was just the one tricky moment. We had to stop off at Walter Chappell’s house, to settle the question of the ‘something’ to be written. It was in a remote place, at the foot of a red block of mountain, the oldest rocks in America, Bob told us. [The Sandia’s?] There was a plank bridge covered in snow that had to be crossed, in reverse. Judi & I got out & watched this nervy performance. Walter was making Krilian photos of plants, his ‘metaflora’ & made one while we were there, as a demonstration. Bob & Walter had a little to-ing and fro-ing, but eventually there was agreement, and the ‘something’ was eventually written.

The importance of Bob Creeley for writers in New Zealand is inestimable—many who had their sense of writing changed forever by his poems in the 60s, by his readings in 1976, his teaching Auckland University in 1995, and by many acts of generosity and friendship.

—Tony Green

Almost fifty years ago Robert Creeley and I sat almost side by side at Harvard in a course on the eighteenth-century English novel. Not quite together, since the students were seated alphabetically and between us was one named Berlin. We never spoke—Creeley was much too forbidding-looking for me to attempt that, and perhaps I was too, but one of my keener lesser regrets is that we never sat down together and thrashed out the relative merits of Pamela and Joseph Andrews. At any rate, Creeley—we also participated in a poetry workshop where the future novelist John Hawkes was also a student—was a memorable presence on campus, though he didn’t stay there long. Later on when one heard of him one realized that one knew one was going to all along.
I don’t remember Creeley’s poems in the workshop and wish I could forget my own, but we may well have realized then that we were on opposite sides of the poetic fence: me so European and maximalist, influenced by Auden and Stevens; he so American, with perhaps an Asian conciseness gleaned from Pound, stemming obviously from the Pound-Williams tradition to which Olson’s presence would soon be added. Yet I’ve never been able to think of Creeley as a minimalist, which some have called him. If cramming as many possible things into the smallest space with no sign of strain or congestion is minimal, then maybe he is a minimalist. But what strikes me most about his poetry is a sense of richness and ripeness, beautifully contained in a vessel which was made to order by the circumstance of writing the poem. As he writes in “Some Place”:

And lest we misinterpret his accuracy for pride, he adds farther on:

No one, I think, has ever stated what it is to be a poet more cogently and, yes, more succinctly than Robert Creeley. But his succinctness is like the unfettered flashing of a diamond.

—John Ashbery, introducing Creeley in 1995 at the New School.

AS EVER

As ever, death.   Whenever, where.   But it’s

the drawn-together life we’re finally

muted by.   Must stand, regard as whole

what was still partial   still

under revision.   So it felt, so we thought.

Then to hear sweep

the scythe on grass

still witherless and sweet

[for R.C.]

—Adrienne Rich
April 2 2005

Since time withdrew from your body we can see your mind as sheer expanse. Like a country read about, seen from a distance, visited. It’s without borders, nothingness making inroads. It contains the sun and the nothing new under it. There is nothing it is, nothing not. Its way is into form, as the body’s was out of the room, the door, the hat, the chair, the fact. It remains, and yet we lament the end of a world.

—Rosmarie Waldrop

I am just one of the hundreds of poets Robert Creeley personally knew, personally touched and just one of thousands who were not poets, who took his poems in whole and deep. Within minutes of the fabulous Creeleys’ move to Providence I was going around saying, Dig it. I wondered if he stayed in my earshot much longer he would not go around saying, goddamnit. But he wasn’t profane, never anything but supremely gentle and graceful. He said lucid, significant things. He laughed readily. He quoted as if it were breathing—defining statements, words to live by—and the source could be a ballad, a relative, Pound, Olson, or literally, a passerby whose scrap of conversation he tuned in to. He absorbed the wisdom commonly available to humans and so aggressively ignored by most. He could instantly identify valuable information and give it shape and his very particular breath. He was a monologist who had become the ideally responsive listener. He was a compact, intense and all but omnipresent maker of poems whose command of a room was absolute whether he sat quietly in the background of the kitchen’s hubbub, hands folded across his lap or appeared in a crowded hall as if out of a cloud. The rivet in his direction was involuntary. If you wanted his approval you needn’t go begging, for not only did he never withhold, he volunteered it. He made his poetry livable, durable. He included us. You wanted to lean into him like a barn. Or draw your chair near his fire. You wanted to take his hand so everyone would see and would know, This is my friend. If Bob could make poetry his life, and he did, the rest of us doubters can be assured, poetry really matters. Oh man, we have to make good on what he gave us. We have to aim true to make our language bear up to his light.

—C. D. Wright

CREELEY SONG

all that is lovely in words
even if gone to pieces
all that is lovely

gone, all of it, for love
and autobiography,
lovely, the charm, as if

I were writing this,
all of it for love
now in pieces

all that is lovely
echoes still
in life & death

still memory
gardens open
onto windows,

lovely, and mirrors
all that was lovely
in a man

—Peter Gizzi

Just in the Morning

There are no clouds.
Pink or purple, in a terrible wind
The locust flowers, having their own minds,

Hang on. Sun’s bright, March 30th,
Not a cloud in the sky.
But the ground is dark somehow, as though clouds were passing.
Absent or present, death slips beneath.

And above us?
Who’s to say there is no one
Already building a fire in the cabin
I can see from here, tilted awkwardly
On the mountaintop beside only one tree?
The wind seems not to reach that high.
The smoke from the chimney goes straight up.

—Donald Revell

A Minor—in memory of Robert Creeley

I enjoy the unfolding each time
Paying attention to the space one’s in
Its grammar emerging the minutia
I can’t make up everything
Pulls a scak or sack over one’s eyes
See what I mean? Torture
Becomes, as they say, problematic
I wished to tell someone but couldn’t
Until I found my way in
Once there, the idea became clearer
Their presence (those previously relocated)
Made possible its articulation
Putting the idea forward in their absence
It appeared incapable of an assertion
No context and therefore no content
A lack of gravity, or a greater gravity
Nothing could be made of it
Invariably I would attempt to toss it
(Discovering late that I had
Its portability taunted me)
An improvisation in which discipline
Each time I sat down to work
Needed to be counter-balanced
(Subverted) by freedom, to break off
When not needed, or could help
Understand when people
Didn’t understand the purpose in
Approaching the conclusion
To press out the last drop
Each time I had to relearn
They had been once beautiful, dangerous and
Unstable—in the wrong time and in
The wrong place
But because they were on all sides wrong
They were right for me

—Andrew Levy

Words for RC
they were
never enough

they were
very nearly
the only things
we had

like erosions
in the wind
and the sun
and rain

were they
enough?

perhaps

————

Heard him read a number of times, most significantly in an intimate setting at a workshop where the words came so quiet, so clear like an autumn day when the first leaves are falling. As Stein said of Matisse, “he was a great one”—now we can only go on as we are able, a tear welling over a slender smile.

—Bill Higginson

Remembering Robert Creeley

Robert’s downright humility amidst extraordinary accomplishment was remarkable. He and his wife spoke with me at length—in the parking lot—after a reading at Brown one evening. I introduced myself as a Brown undergraduate, and we reminisced about Buffalo (my native city). He spoke to me as if I were an old friend, and invited me to visit his office later that week to continue our conversation.

Indeed, we met, and spent an hour throwing anecdotes about Buffalo’s festivals and nuanced streets—and it was his genuine interest in my experiences that expanded his role to include “mentor,” in addition to “professor.” I often wondered if he was aware of his own esteem!

Robert Creeley’s generosity will be dearly missed. Though his seminar was officially limited in enrollment to 20, he offered to admit the nearly 50 of us who compacted into the room—many students sitting quite literally on top of each other, the classroom door fully obstructed.

Professor Creeley sent out a personal note of condolence upon hearing of a death in my family. He offered to help me “in any way”—and meant it. He brought out the best in us: as writers, and as people.

Robert Creeley—you’re irreplaceable! May perpetual light shine upon you.

—Sean M. Rumschik

They say you died as the sun rose to greet the day
I made a photograph at 7:00 am
in the brilliant sunlight
just before going to bed
after sleeping on the couch
all night

Maybe at the same time
maybe I went to sleep
when you did
maybe I caught the light
just as you kissed it
goodbye

Too soon
too soon
my friend

Please don’t fly away

I want to reach up
to grasp you
find a tether
a something
to hold you to this earth
a while longer

Great rocks are weeping
returning their salt
to the sea
waves swirl and eddy
in confusion
echoes of your wisdom
clatter
in the trees

The birds are calling
your name

—For Robert Creeley
Susan Pease Porter
March 30, 2005

Robert Creeley (1926–2005)

Absolutely exemplary. Certainly these last ten years or so, a quality of sweetness, pleasure, and generosity. A life lived in and of words with absolute integrity. For me, personally, no more important poet, no one better able to show ways in words to make manifest the grace, pleasure, complexity, cadences, and play of mind at work.

I met Bob in the late 1970s, at a Black Mountain College celebration at Warren Wilson College. We spent a couple of days in conversation; I interviewed Bob; I listened to him read. Much of our time together I asked him for information on the three-line stanzas that he developed, and what relationship his writing had to similar modes in Williams. Great fun witnessing a packed auditorium at his reading, only to have Bob tell stories and follow out a range of thoughts for forty-five minutes to an hour before he read the first poem. Many left before he read. They missed a superb reading, one that was absolutely continuous with the talking that preceded it.

Yes, quite simply one of the greatest conversationalists of all time …

At the time of that Black Mountain event, I knew only parts of what Creeley had written—mainly Words and For Love. From then until now, I have grown more and more familiar with the range of his writing—the poetry, yes, but also the essays. In fact, when I got news of Bob’s declining health, I was reading a new essay of his on Whitman’s poetry of old age (in a special issue of Virginia Quarterly Review celebrating the 150th anniversary of the publication of the first Leaves of Grass).

In the mid-1990s, I gave a reading at Buffalo. Bob attended, and I had the pleasure of reading new poems (which became the book Days) which were very much based in what I had learned from his work. We spent the next morning, over pastry and coffee, sitting and talking, along with my good friend Yunte Huang. Bob’s generosity to Yunte is another story, but typical of Bob’s kindness to so many younger writers …

Here, at Alabama, I had the pleasure of hosting Bob for a reading a couple of years ago. Again, a packed house. A superb reading, though Bob had to sit for most of the reading, as he did for the conversation/discussion the following day. That particular visit enhanced by the presence of Donald Revell (in residence for the semester), another poet deeply steeped in Bob’s life and writing. And again, Bob made time for a morning of coffee, pastry, and conversation.

Last saw Bob at the Louis Zukofsky Centennial at Columbia this past fall. Some familiar anecdotes, and some unfamiliar.

I’ve been quite moved by the increasingly emotionally open work of Bob’s last couple of books—Life & Death and If I were writing this. He seemed able to circle back, to realize the importance and vitality of late 19th century verse—a family tradition of popular poetry—in his own practice. Or, to make of Keats’ work such a central thing.

We corresponded sporadically via e-mail. I would often send Bob a few poems, and his remarks were always appreciative. He blurbed a book of mine—an extended chapbook called As It Is (published by Mark Scroggins)—and was always supportive of my writing.

What Bob showed was the pleasure and work of making one’s way in a writing life. It is rather amazing to think of how many of us have learned from his example.

Yesterday, the day of Bob’s death, at the end of the day, I went with my son, Alan (16 years old), to Beulah Baptist Church—a black church on a hillside on the way home, a place that I’d often admired but where I’d never stopped. A modest graveyard with a cement angel of Memory leading the way up the dry, red clay hill. At the top of the hill, we walked around for a bit, sun streaming through the clouds. The wisteria now in bloom, we looked at the tombstones, stood beside one for “Pa Pa” Jones, and I read aloud several of Bob’s poems from Life & Death.

Earlier in the day I’d been in touch with several others to whom Bob had been so important—Charles Bernstein, Yunte Huang, Joel Kuszai, Don Revell, Claudia Keelan, Norman Fischer, Tyrone Williams. Even at the time of Bob’s death, it’s hard not to bear in mind his favorite closing in correspondence: “Onward.” Without Bob here to be the figure of Onward, we must take what we have learned from him and be, in our writing and friendship and conversation and correspondence, that no longer singular figure of Onward.

Hank Lazer
March 31, 2005

*

Here’s the e-mail I sent to Bob on Monday, March 28, 2005:

Dear Bob,

A gray cold day of spring break, giving way to sunny windy afternoon.
I spoke with Joel Kuszai mid-day, and learned some of your health
difficulties. And then heard from Charles Bernstein, a more
optimistic version. I’m simply writing to let you know I’m thinking
of you. And thinking with you. Got in today’s mail the latest issue
of Virginia Quarterly Review—on Whitman, and your superb piece on
Whitman’s poetry of old age. When I read at the Walt Whitman Center
in Camden (several years ago, back when Alicia Askenase was in charge
of the reading series), I visited Walt Whitman’s house, and recognize
it in the last photos. For me, the determining feature of my early
years of writing poetry was to have an especially close relationship
with my four grandparents—all Russian Jews, all living close to
us. In the way that drugs & zen of the 1960s allowed it, I spent time
with them, in their decay mental & physical, with a mixture of love,
curiosity, and observation (rather than the disabling frustrations
that I saw in my parents’ relationship to their aging parents). My
poems began with telling their stories, my grandparents, and with
learning (or trying to learn) something of the phenomenology of
aging. And thus, yes, a reading of Williams’ later work and others,
including, eventually Oppen.

A rambling way, Bob, to say that you are on my mind these days, as
your poetry and your essays and correspondence will always be.

With much love,

Hank

*

And a poem, from several years ago, very much with Creeley in mind, from an ongoing work, Portions.

YOU

so the old
cabin leans “sit
up” i said

as if to
someone i said
it to you

i always do
if there were
no one else

if there were
only you i
would say “sit

up” & think
someone heard such
is my sense

the old cabin
leans what is
never passes away

—Hank Lazer

you can’t hold on
to anyone
that’s clear
my hands are dry
there’s a dead mouse in the kitchen
this rainy april day
the temperate disguises of the present
then slipshod into a black world in which
stars subsist
bob no longer bob
but he doesn’t care
‘I love the energy of irresolution,’
he ‘once’ said
in his inclusiveness, gently smoking,
smiling, j