GradeSaver has published ClassicNotes on many of Robert Creeley's most important poems, including "Heroes," "I Know a Man," and "The World."
Throughout his career, Creeley's poetry shifted in subject matter but adhered to certain core characteristics. Creeley's writing often dealt with questions surrounding identity, relationships, and meaning. He used a minimal, colloquial voice to achieve an unvarnished texture in his writing. The beginning of his poem, "For Love," dedicated to his wife Bobbie, gives a sense of these qualities: "Yesterday I wanted to / speak of it, that sense above / the others to me / important because all / that I know derives / from what it teaches me." The speaker of the poem is actively reaching for some way to talk about love. Creeley's poetry captures moments that are in the middle of occurring, often featuring speakers who are stumbling through their words in an effort to reach an understanding. In this case, the speaker is trying to find an appropriate description of the love he feels for his wife.
One of the most famous examples of this came in one of Creeley's early, and most famous, poems, "I Know a Man." The poem begins in the midst of an ongoing conversation: "As I sd to my / friend, because I am / always talking,—John, I." In the text, the speaker worries over the darkness that he believes the world is filled with. He wonders if the only solution is to buy a big car. His friend tells him to lighten up and drive, to take his mind off things. The poem ends with the same friend telling him to drive more carefully: "for / christ’s sake, look / out where yr going." The poem does not reach a neat or elegant conclusion, but instead veers into concrete realities after a brief philosophical question. The deceptive looseness of these works provides a glimpse of Creeley's early approach. Heavily informed by his discussions with Charles Olson, Creeley sought to write in a way that made the form of his poems a natural extension of their content. In his view, they had to be completely unified. In the process of doing so, he broke definitively away from traditional, closed forms.
It was Creeley's 1962 collection, For Love, which brought him the most public and critical renown. He followed it up with 1967's Words, which explored many of the same ideas around language and expression in a similarly concise manner. The aptly named poem, "The Language," revisits the same difficulty as "For Love," putting a stable, meaningful label on such a complex emotion. The speaker starts off the poem wrestling with an appropriate definition: "Locate I / love you some- / where in / teeth and / eyes, bite / it but / take care not / to hurt, you / want so / much so / little. Words / say everything." The speaker cannot pinpoint exactly where love lies in the body and seems to be moving towards a description he can't quite manage. The phrase "words say everything" seems to almost be employed half-jokingly. The speaker is just using this description to delve deeper into a feeling he hasn't fully unpacked. Also on display in this excerpt is Creeley's frequent and surprising use of enjambment. The lines are short, and the sentiments expressed are broken up into fragments. This works well to make the poem feel more conversational in tone and show the speaker's thoughts unfurling, seemingly in real-time. This is one of the many attributes that reveals the subtle craft behind Creeley's work. For all of the formal constraints he rejected, he found new ones to shape his work with and attend to rigorously. However, by the time these collections were in print, Creeley's attention had begun to move elsewhere.
After settling into a teaching job at the State University of New York-Buffalo, Creeley began to make a subtle shift in the focus of his work. His lines became even more restrained and his subject matter largely came to be about reflection, growing old, and the different seasons of life. His next major collection, Later (1979) was viewed by readers as the distillation of this later period. Creeley's voice was still recognizable, but certain elements had been retuned to serve a new context. In the poem "Myself," Creeley imagines a walk by the ocean as tinted by the shade of fond memory: "Walked by the sea, / unchanged in memory - / evening, as clouds / on the far-off rim / of water float, / pictures of time, / smoke, faintness - / still the dream." He paints a picture, but does so with delicately placed details. There is no ornamental description or figurative language. The "clouds" and "water" found in the speaker's memory are depicted without pretense. They are shown for what they are and what they mean to the speaker: a dreamy landscape, suffused with nostalgia.
Creeley's other touchstone of this phase was 1998's Life and Death, which dealt squarely with the themes implied by its title. The opening of "Histoire De Florida" is a fitting example of his tone and "You're there / still behind / the mirror / brother face. / Only yesterday / you were younger / now you / look old. / Come out / while there's still time / left / to play." In these late poems, Creeley is still humorous and casual, writing in short lines of variable length. However, there is a deeper awareness of the passage of time as well as the slow creep of age. In this text, the speaker remains optimistic about what he has time to do, but sees his age written in his changing face. It is melancholy, but not despairing.
Creeley remained highly productive towards the end of his life, teaching, editing compilations, and publishing books almost every year. During this time, his work became a little less minimal, embracing echoes of older poets like Thomas Hardy and William Wordsworth. In one of his last collections, If I Were Writing This (2003), he seems to turn the clock back on his approach, writing in longer, more flowing lines. These works also tended to embrace rhyme more clearly and write about their subjects without any opacity. Take, for instance, the ending of "Names," a poem about Marilyn Monroe: "Scared kid, Norma Jean? / Are things really what they seem? / What is it that beauty means?" The lines are more regular and less clipped, but the old preoccupations remain. Creeley is trying to capture the divide between "Marilyn Monroe" and "Norma Jean," one person ostensibly split between two names. In the poem, the speaker attempts to show how people have failed to understand her in a meaningful way, only looking at the surface of her movie star appearance.
Creeley was a poet who made small changes in his method but stayed largely committed to exploring the possibilities of language. While he made subtle readjustments between different periods of his career, he was always seeking the limits of his style. From poet and scholar Stephanie Burt, once again: "Creeley said that he and Olson were trying ‘not only to realise themselves’ in their poems ‘but to realise the potentiality and extension of words as a physical event in the world’. He, and his allies, believed for a while that modern poems could express without representing, that figurative language only got in the way." Creeley didn't view language as a perfect representation of thoughts, feelings, and events. He saw them as a pathway, a means of approaching the things we struggle to name. For Creeley, this imperfect struggle was the engine of his writing.
