The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley

by Robert Creeley

  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.

  .