The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous contribution to this book provided by the Humanities Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation.
Also by Robert Creeley
POETRY
For Love
Words
The Charm
Pieces
A Day Book
Hello: A Journal
Later
Mirrors
Memory Gardens
Windows
Echoes
Life & Death
If I were writing this
On Earth
FICTION
The Gold Diggers
The Island
Mabel: A Story
DRAMA
Listen
ESSAYS AND INTERVIEWS
A Quick Graph: Collected Notes & Essays
Contexts of Poetry: Interviews 1961–1971
Was That a Real Poem & Other Essays
Autobiography
Tales Out of School
Day Book of a Virtual Poet
COLLECTIONS AND SELECTIONS
Collected Poems: 1945–1975
Selected Poems
So There: Poems 1976–1983
Just in Time: Poems 1984–1994
Collected Essays
Collected Prose
LETTERS
Charles Olson and Robert Creeley: The Complete Correspondence
Irving Layton and Robert Creeley: The Complete Correspondence
AS EDITOR
The Black Mountain Review, 1954–1957
New American Story (with Donald M. Allen)
The New Writing in the U.S.A. (with Donald M. Allen)
Selected Writings of Charles Olson
Whitman: Selected by Robert Creeley
The Essential Burns
Charles Olson, Selected Poems
Best American Poetry, 2002
George Oppen, Selected Poems
SELECTED COLLABORATIONS
AND ARTISTS BOOKS
The Immoral Proposition (with René Laubiès)
All That Is Lovely in Men (with Dan Rice)
123456789 (with Arthur Okamura)
A Sight (with R.B. Kitaj)
A Day Book (with R.B. Kitaj)
Numbers (with Robert Indiana)
The Class of ’47 (with Joe Brainard)
Presences: A Text for Marisol (with Marisol)
Thirty Things (with Bobbie Louise Hawkins)
Away (with Bobbie Louise Hawkins)
Mabel: A Story (with Jim Dine)
7&6 (with Robert Therrien and Michel Butor)
Parts (with Susan Rothenberg)
Famous Last Words (with John Chamberlain)
Gnomic Verses (with Cletus Johnson)
Visual Poetics (with Donald Sultan)
It (with Francesco Clemente)
Life & Death (with Francesco Clemente)
There (with Francesco Clemente)
Edges (with Alex Katz)
The Dogs of Auckland (with Max Gimblett)
Signs (with Georg Baslitz)
En Famille (with Elsa Dorfman)
Drawn & Quartered (with Archie Rand)
Tandoori Satori (with Francesco Clemente)
The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1975–2005
The Collected Poems of
Robert Creeley
1975–2005
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
BERKELEY LOS ANGELES LONDON
University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.
University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California
University of California Press, Ltd.
London, England
© 2006 by the Estate of Robert Creeley
For acknowledgment of the preface, the epigraphs, and of poems previously published, please see credits, page 639.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Creeley, Robert, 1926–
[Poems]
The collected poems of Robert Creeley.
p. cm.
Includes index.
Contents: [1] 1945–1975—[2] 1975–2005.
ISBN-10 0-520-24158-4 (v. 1 : pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN-13 978-0-520-24158-9 (v. 1 : pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN-10 0-520-24159-2 (v. 2 : alk. paper)
ISBN-13 978-0-520-24159-6 (v. 2 : alk. paper)
I. Title.
PS3505.R43A17 2006
811'.54—dc22
2006040498
Manufactured in the United States of America
15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
This book is printed on New Leaf EcoBook 50, a 100% recycled fiber of which 50% is de-inked post-consumer waste, processed chlorine-free. EcoBook 50 is acid-free and meets the minimum requirements of ANSI / ASTM D 5634-01 (Permanence of Paper).
Contents
Note
Preface: Old Poetry
Author’s Note
Hello: A Journal, February 29-May 3, 1976
Later
Mirrors
Memory Gardens
Windows
Echoes
Life & Death
If I were writing this
On Earth
Unpublished Poems
Credits
Index of Titles and First Lines
Note
AT SEVENTY-FIVE YEARS OLD Robert was as excited by the prospect of the University of California Press’s bringing out his Collected Poems as he was by the prospect of our moving to Providence, Rhode Island, from Buffalo.
In the hospital in March 2005—on the last night of his life, as it turned out—he asked for the hard drive of his computer, so that he could work the next day on the manuscript for this volume of poetry.
Now I can only guess what he might have done. We had talked about his writing a new preface. He had thought about what he wanted to say: These are my poems. I love them and stand by them.
In retrospect, I realize the courage such an act takes, the courage artists have every day to produce something out of the raw feelings and intimate perceptions of life, then to hold it up to public scrutiny. In reading these poems again, I hear Robert’s voice, and I see the last twenty-seven years of my own life laid out, almost a diary. I think of the way I first saw this writing, just words on a page, a little distillation of a day, tender and vulnerable and fresh, a moment, untried, yet a whole world of thought, life, and history in each. Those words, “This is my life’s work. I love it and stand by it,” are such an affirmation. To come to that moment, to say so clearly, without hesitation. To have that heart. Yes. Here it is. That heart.
If there are poems left out, acknowledgments not made, inadequacies of text or explication, the fault is mine. I plead inexperience. But I know this work stands on its own.
Onward.
PENELOPE CREELEY
PROVIDENCE, NOVEMBER 19, 2005
Preface: Old Poetry
Ay, tear her tattered ensign down!
Long has it waved on high,
And many an eye has danced to see
That banner in the sky;
Beneath it rung the battle shout,
And burst the cannon’s roar;—
The meteor of the ocean air
Shall sweep the clouds no more.
–OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
<
br /> Even to speak becomes an unanticipated drama, because where one has come to, and where it is one now has to go, have no language any longer specific. We all will talk like that, yet no one will understand us.
When I was a young man, I felt often as if I were battling for the integrity of my habits of speech, my words, my friends, my life. W. C. Williams had put it most clearly, and with the expected emphasis of that time: “When a man makes a poem, makes it, mind you, he takes words as he finds them interrelated about him and composes them—without distortion which would mar their exact significances—into an intense expression of his perceptions and ardors that they may constitute a revelation in the speech that he uses.” In the furies, then, of the war and the chaos of a disintegrating society, I felt a place, of useful honor and possibility, in those words.
As though one might dignify, make sufficient, all the bits and pieces one had been given, all the remnants of a family, the confusions of name and person, flotsam, even the successes quickly subsumed by the next arrival.
This was originally published as the preface to So There: Poems 1976–1983 (New York: New Directions, 1998). On July 1, 1998, Robert Creeley wrote to Peggy Fox of New Directions about his use of italics in this preface: “The paragraphs in italics are simply to have a variation of ‘voice,’ the italicized sections being more reflective, reacting to the subject or thought in mind, the non-italicized sections being the forward statement, so to speak. Otherwise quotations are in quotes.”
And after that, the next—and then the next again. How would one ever catch up?
There was no identity, call it, for the poet in my world. It was only in my mind and imagination that any of it was real. “Only the imagination is real,” Williams said. It felt particularly American to have no viable tradition, no consequence of others seemingly sufficient, my elders contested if not dismissed. Yet, paradoxically, we were exceptionally chauvinistic, felt finally a contempt for the poetry of that old world, the European, which nonetheless still intimidated us. All the arts, it seemed, fought to become dominant in whatever scale they might be weighed in—Abstract Expressionists vs. the School of Paris, John Cage vs. Benjamin Britten, Louis Zukofsky vs. W. H. Auden. Already that person as myself had become an insistent we, a plural of swelling confidence.
They say you can be sure of three things in America, in any company, and you can always let them be known without fear of social reprisal. One, that you know nothing about opera. Two, that you know nothing about poetry. Three, that you speak no language other than English. Is that true?
René Thom somewhere speaks of poetry’s being like humor. It stays local because it uses its means with such particularity. Just so, a friend tells me of a friend of his, a fellow student who is Japanese, saying, “What the Americans think is interesting in Japanese poetry misses the point entirely. They miss the essence, the kernel, the substance of its effects.” Another friend once told me he had written a haiku whose second line was a measured one mile long.
“A Nation of nothing but poetry . . .” Who owns it? “He is the president of regulation . . .” How did that go? How is it (ever) far if you think it? Where are we? It was poetry that got us here, and now we have to go too. “I’ll hate to leave this earthly paradise . . .” Is there a country? “Image Nation . . .”
Despairs since I was a little boy seem always the same. No money, not enough to eat, no clothes, sick, forced out. No job or identity. Years ago, driving back to San Geronimo Miramar from Guatemala City in the early evening, I caught sight of a body lying out into the narrow road, so stopped to see what had happened. It was a man, drunk, trying to kill himself in that bleak way. He had spent all his life’s accumulated money in one day’s drinking, and had lost his identity card as well—and so he no longer actually existed, in any record. I kept trying, uselessly, persistently, to help.
We will keep ourselves busy enough, working with our various procedures and values. There’ll be no irony or blame. Whoever we imagine it’s for will either hear us out, else leave with a sense of better things to do. Better we learn a common song?
Seventy-two my next birthday and still feeling good, still pouring it out. Hardly a day goes by that I don’t think of something, either to do or to be done. Stay busy seems to be it. But most it’s like coming back again to childhood, dumbly, even uselessly. When I saw my old school chums at our fiftieth reunion, I realized I hadn’t seen them—Fred, Marion, Katie, Ralph and Patsy—since we were fourteen. Now we were over sixty, all the work done but for whatever was left to tidy up. It was a great, unexpected relief not to have to say what we had earned, merited, lost or coveted. It was all done.
So now for the bridge, as in music, carries one over—
Trust to good verses then;
They only will aspire,
When pyramids, as men,
Are lost i’ th’ funeral fire.
And when all bodies meet,
In Lethe to be drowned,
Then only numbers sweet
With endless life are crown’d.
–ROBERT HERRICK
With love, for Herrick and Zukofsky.
BUFFALO, N.Y.
FEB. 8, 1998
Author’s Note
Insofar as the specific lines of these various poems are, in each case, the defining rhythmic unit, it is crucial that their integrity be recognized, else a false presumption of a poem’s underlying beat may well occur in those cases where a runover line, i.e., a line broken by the limits of a page’s dimensions, may be mistaken for the author’s intent. Therefore all such lines are preceded by this symbol * and are indented the characteristic space (1 em) from the poem’s left margin. Read them as if they were one with the lines which they follow.
R.C.
*This note appeared in The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1945–1975. Please note that in this second volume of collected poems, however, a slightly different symbol has been used to identify runover lines.
The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1975–2005
Hello: A Journal, February 29–May 3, 1976
Wellington, New Zealand
“That’s the way
(that’s the way
I like it
(I like it”
.
Clouds coming close.
.
Never forget
clouds dawn’s
pink red acid
gash—!
.
Here comes
one now!
.
Step out into
space. Good
morning.
.
Well, sleep,
man.
.
Not man,
mum’s
the word.
.
What do you
think those hills
are going to do now?
.
They got
all the
lights on—
all the people.
.
You know
if you never
you won’t
2/29
It’s the scale
that’s attractive,
and the water
that’s around it.
.
Did the young
couple come
only home
from London?
Where’s the world
one wants.
.
Singular,
singular,
one
by one.
.
I wish I
could see the stars.
.
Trees want
to be still?
Winds
won’t let them?
.
Anyhow,
it’s night now.
Same clock ticks
in these different places.
3/1
Dunedin
River wandering down
below in the widening green
fields between the hills—
and the sea and the town.
Time settled, or waiting,
or about to be. People,
the old couple, the two babies,
beside me—the so-called
aeroplane. Now
be born,
be born.
.
I’ll never
see you,
want you,
have you,
know you—
I’ll never.
.
“Somebody’s got to pay
for the squeaks in the bed.”
.
Such quiet,
dog’s scratch at door—
pay for it all?
.
Walking
and talking.
Thinking
and drinking.
.
Night.
Light’s out.
3/3
“Summa wancha
out back”
Australia
.
“Sonny Terry,
“Brownie McGhee”
in Dunedin (in
Dunedin
3/4
10:30 AM: Ralph Hotere’s
Warm.
See sun shine.
Look across valley at houses.
Chickens squawk.
Bright glint off roofs.
Water’s also,
in bay, in distance.
Hills.
3/5
Christchurch
You didn’t think you
could do it but you did.
You didn’t do it
but you did.
.
Catching Cold
I want to lay down
and die—
someday—but
not now.
.
South, north, east, west,
man—home’s best.
.
Nary an exit
in Christchurch.
Only
wee holes.
3/9
Out Window: Taylor’s Mistake
Silver,
lifting
light—
mist’s
faintness.
.
The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley Page 1
