By Marjorie Perloff

Published in Electronic Book Review, 10 (2007)

no less than water
no more than wet
–Robert Çreeley, “Funny” [1]

The Creeley memorials of 2005-06—festivals, readings, conferences, and especially website testimonials– have been so overwhelming in their homage and veneration for the late great poet, that we tend to forget that it was not always thus, that Creeley’s distinctive poetics have been the object of curious misunderstandings. For all his bridge building, his geniality and the uncanny ability, in his later years, to persuade friends and colleagues from one camp to accept and work with those of another, Creeley was and remains curiously singular—a poet who fits uneasily into the very schools with which he is regularly linked. A “Black Mountain” poet whose actual poems have very little in common with the work of his mentor Charles Olson or his close friends Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov, a younger friend and strong advocate of the Objectivists, who had little taste for the citational poetics of Zukofsky or the strenuous political/philosophical engagements of Oppen or Reznikoff, an affiliated member of the Beat community, whose spare writing could never be confused with the expansive-ecstatic mode of Allen Ginsberg or Gregory Corso, a composer of dense, abrupt first-person lyric in an age of loose, expansive and encyclopedic “longpoems”—Creeley is, in the end, sui generis.

How, then, to characterize a Creeley poem? We might begin by considering the arguments made early in the poet’s career, and still in evidence, against Creeley’s lyric mode. Take, for starters, M. L. Rosenthal’s now notorious commentary on Creeley in the well-known survey The New Poets, American and British Poetry Since World War II, published by Oxford in 1967. Rosenthal, himself a poet, was an early admirer of Pound and Williams (he attended many of the famed poetry conferences sponsored by the University of Maine at Orono), but although he found the occasional Creeley poem in For Love and Words “touching” and “alive with wit,” he dismissed the bulk as “brief mutterings . . . or the few shuffling steps of an actor pretending to dance.” Their humor, “especially in his complaints about married life,” struck Rosenthal as “too often obvious and easy,” and he concluded that “the work “demand[s] too little from its author, though the author demands a good deal of attentive sympathy and faith from the reader.”

It is a judgment echoed by the eminent Christopher Ricks, now the Oxford Professor of Poetry, who wrote in the New York Times Book Review in 1973 that “Creeley is at the mercy of his own notions. He would seem to be a professional quietist and libertarian, but these conventions (e.g. no regular verse, no standard linear development) turn out to be more cramping than those of a minuet” (7 Jan. 1973, 5, 22) And in the Yale Review for Autumn 1977, Helen Vendler, comparing Creeley (the occasion was the publication by Scribners of the Selected Poems) to Olga Broumas, the Yale Younger Poet for that year, declared, “Creeley remains so much a follower of Williams, without Williams’s rebelliousness, verve, and social breadth, and his verse seems, though intermittently attractive, fatally pinched.” And further, “In Creeley, there is a relentless process of abstraction, of “serial diminishment of progression”; he purchases composition at the price of momentum and sweep.” Not surprisingly, in the light of these remarks, Creeley was omitted from Vendler’s 1985 Harvard Book of Contemporary Poetry, which did include such exact contemporaries of Creeley’s, as John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Allen Ginsberg, A. R. Ammons, James Merrill, W. S. Merwin, and James Wright.

The publication of the Collected Poems in 1982 didn’t altogether change this negative mood. “Creeley is not [as claimed by the publisher] a major poet,” complained Richard Tillinghast in The Nation, for “It has not been his ambition to address in a sustained manner the large human issues that are traditionally associated with major poetry” (19 November 1983, 501). The title of Tillinghast’s piece is “Yesterday’s Avant-Garde”—yesterday, presumably, because “experimental” poetry in the Pound-Olson tradition was held suspect in the conservative 1980s. Indeed, the language poets had now appeared on the scene, and Tillinghast takes the opportunity to disparage the new movement:

Creeley has become a guru to “language poets”—a term whose equivalent in other arts would be “dancing choreographers’ or “music composers” or “food chefs.” Literary self-consciousness is as old as poetry itself; every poet is a “language poet.” In much of Creeley’s work, however, particularly after For Love, language itself is the exclusive focus, thereby positing an ideal reader who is a philosopher of language. Wittgenstein would have spent many happy hours with Creeley’s poems. My own reactions I can sum up variously, depending on my mood, as: (1) this poetry deliberately avoids communication, for reasons of its own; (2) it is so abstruse that I lose interest; (3) it is simply over my head. (Nation, 504)

The last disclaimer may be true, given that marvelously wrong-headed remark about Wittgenstein, who never spent a happy hour with anyone’s poems, much less those by one of his contemporaries, although, as I suggested in Wittgenstein’s Ladder, the reverse was certainly the case: Creeley knew his Wittgenstein well. Other reviewers, in any case, agreed that Creeley’s poetry “deliberately avoids communication”; in The New York Times Book Review, Alan Williamson observed that for Creeley, “minimalism has become more and more an end in itself. . . . Tautology mingled with neutral observation in a John Cage-like faith in the inherent value of silencing the interpretive function” (March 9, 1980, 8-9).

Like M. L. Rosenthal, Williamson and Tillinghast are what we used to call academic poets, before the academy, thanks, in no small part, to Creeley himself, began to welcome poets of a very different stamp. A quiet revolution has certainly occurred. But what Charles Bernstein dubbed “official verse culture” –the culture of the leading commercial presses, journals, and prize-giving institutions—has not changed all that much: witness David Lehman’s recent Oxford Book of American Poetry, published in 2006. Lehman is a poet with New York school credentials and a PhD from Columbia who has held a variety of academic posts but is perhaps best known for his general editorship of the annual Best American Poetry volumes, one of which he invited Creeley to edit. In the new anthology, a 1000- page blockbuster, Lehman gives Creeley short shrift. Whereas James Merrill and A. R. Ammons (both born, like Creeley, in 1926) get twenty-three and fifteen pages respectively, Creeley gets a mere five. In his headnote, Lehman notes:

Even poets on the other end of the poetic spectrum admire Creeley, as in Donald Hall’s phrase, “the master of the strange, stuttering line-break.” Hall observes that if you took a sentence from a late Henry James novel like The Ambassadors and arranged it in two-word lines, you would have a Creeley poem worrying out its self-consciousness. Creeley seems often to substitute speech rhythms for imagery as the engine of the poem. (745)

What, one wonders, is Creeley’s “end of the poetic spectrum,” a spectrum Lehman alludes to as just faintly disreputable? One surmises that the term refers to Black Mountain or Beat or,more broadly, the “Pound tradition”: Olson too only gets five pages, Duncan, five, Levertov, three, and Ed Dorn is not included at all. To be called “the master of the strange, stuttering line-break” is, in any case, to be treated as eccentric—a poet who has his limitations, of course, but at least has this one talent–a talent that allows the poet to produce line units that recall “cut up” segments of Henry James. Moreover, Lehman implies, Creeley’s “substitution” of speech rhythms for imagery as the” engine of the poem” is somehow aberrant: imagery, after all, remains, in most accounts, the hallmark of poetry.

From Rosenthal to Lehman, Creeley’s detractors have voiced the same reservation: Creeley’s lyric is too “minimalist” (“cramped” (Ricks) and “pinched’ (Vendler), its language too abstract and conceptual, its communicative channel too often blocked, its subject-matter too far removed from the “great human issues.” True, Creeley has invented a new verse form—“the strange, stuttering line-break”—but, we are told, such prosodic invention, employing those speech rhythms that substitute for the resource of imagery, is not enough.

Rosenthal, however, concludes his chapter on Creeley with a remark that points unwittingly in another direction:

Perhaps Creeley’s restraint and cool control is the last stand of genuine sensibility, against the violence and ruthlessness of twentieth-century civilization. But genuine sensibility cannot give up its passion quite so tamely: it all seems a little to confined to settle for just yet.—Perhaps after World War III? If so, Creeley is indeed ahead of his time.

However we want to take this melodramatic comment—and, sadly, the reference to World War III no longer seems so far-fetched– Rosenthal does seem to sense that Creeley’s “cool control” provides a special measure for the violence and ruthlessness of our own moment. Keeping this notion in mind, I want to turn now to a characteristic poem from For Love. Here is “The Rain”:

All night the sound had
come back again,
and again falls
this quiet, persistent rain.

What am I to myself
that must be remembered,
insisted upon
so often? Is it

that never the ease,
even the hardness,
of rain falling
will have for me

something other than this,
something not so insistent—
am I to be locked in this
final uneasiness.

Love, if you love me,
lie next to me.
Be for me, like rain,
the getting out

of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi-
lust of intentional indifference.
Be wet
with a decent happiness. (CP 207)

Rain is, of course, one of the most prominent symbols in poetry, whether as a portent of storm, flood and human destruction, or, conversely—and more commonly—as the source of life, fertility, and renewal, as in English poetry from Chaucer to Eliot, or for that matter in East Asian poetry as well, As a Basho haiku has it:

		Spring rain
		    leaking through the roof
			dripping from the wasps’ nest[2]

In Romantic and Modernist poetry, the association of rain with the longing for sexual fulfillment occurs again and again, from Verlaine’s “Il pleure sur mon coeur” to Thomas Hardy’s “We Sat at the Window,” to Apollinaire’s calligramme “Il Pleut,” [3] with its visual representation of women’s voices raining down the page, as if in the poet’s memory [figure 1].

[INSERT IL PLEUT]

Closer to home, Creeley surely knew William Carlos Williams’s 1930 poem “Rain,” which begins:

	As the rain falls
	so does
		     your love

	bathe every
			 open
	object of the world—

	In houses
	the priceless dry
			       rooms
	of illicit love
	where we live
	hear the wash of the
			          rain-—[4]

Here, in what Williams himself once referred to as “the best poem I have ever done” (see CP, 527), rain is associated with the poet’s desire for an unattainable love and is contrasted to the indoor world of “dry / rooms / of illicit love”—a ‘love” associated with the “whorishness” of “metalware” and “woven stuffs.” The poem’s lineation follows the movement of the rain “falling endlessly / from / her thoughts”; the poet longs to be “bathed” by the “spring wash / of your love / the falling rain.” But something fearful or perverse in his nature prevents it from happening: “my life is spent / to keep out love / with which / she rains upon / the world.”

Creeley’s poem is at once more intimate than Williams’s and yet also much more opaque. Written in six quatrains rather than in Williams’s spatially organized free verse lines, it begins literally enough with the sleepless poet’s awareness of the “quiet, persistent rain” that has been falling “all night “ The eye rhyme “rain” (in the title), “again,” “again,” “rain,” would seem at first to function mimetically, sound repetition conveying the gentle rainfall itself. But syntax undercuts sound, for the second “again” introduces a new clause with a tense shift and inversion of word order. Creeley’s is not, in fact, “speech rhythm”: to whom and in what context would anyone say, “and again falls this quiet, persistent rain”? The fourth elongated line, moreover, with its alliteration of t’s, emphasizes, not regularity of rhythm, but an irritating persistence. Indeed, the first stanza swiftly establishes the poem’s tone of malaise, dislocation, restlessness.

Hence the shift, in stanza 2, from the rain itself to the poet’s intense self-questioning: “What am I to myself / that must be remembered, / insisted upon / so often?” As Creeley’s detractors note, the language is abstract and conceptual, the grammar ungainly: the question, “What am I to myself” is guardedly indirect. The key word here is “insisted,” which is repeated in stanza 4, where the poet wishes for “something not so insistent” as the falling rain. From “persistent” to “insistent”: the two adjectives are close enough to be almost interchangeable, but “insistent” has a more negative connotation. A persistent caller, for example, is not as irritating as an insistent one—a person who demands your attention, who wants something. The poet knows this, knows that he can never respond to the external stimulus—whether it be the “ease” of gentle rain or its opposite, the “hardness of rain falling”– casually or instinctively. On the contrary, it is his condition “to be locked in this / final uneasiness.” Never, it seems, can the poet be easy.

Note that as readers, we have absolutely no idea why this should be the case. Unlike, say, the Robert Lowell of “Eye and Tooth,” whose similar insomnia—

Outside, the summer rain,
a simmer of rot and renewal,
fell in pinpricks.
Even new life is fuel—[5]

links the poet’s present pain from a throbbing cut cornea to a terrifying childhood memory of something once seen (“No ease for the boy at the keyhole”), Creeley does not concern himelf with cause and effect, past and present. The world merely is; it is everything that is the case, and one has to deal with it as best one can. At the core of “The Rain,” as in most of Creeley’s poems, early and late, there is mystery—a mystery that no “conceptual” statement can clear up.

And so the lover turns to his woman and pleads with her: “Love, if you love me, / lie next to me.” It couldn’t be simpler, or could it? It is she who must now supply the “rain” that can get him out “of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi-/lust of intentional indifference.” Here the clumsy catalogue of abstract nouns with the awkward line break after “semi,” provides a terrifying sense of the paralysis and anxiety that haunts the man who speaks. Even his “intentional indifference” (perhaps the lovers have had a quarrel earlier?) is haunted by “semi-lust,” a feeling that can’t be ignored but is not strong enough to act on either. As for the woman beside him, we have no idea what she is thinking or feeling, and neither does the poet. “If you love me” is a big “if.”

After the near breakdown of these two lines—line 21 has thirteen syllables carrying six stresses and two caesurae–, the abrupt conclusion is explosive: “Be wet/ with a decent happiness.” “Be wet for me,” is a common enough phrase used to arouse one’s partner, to strengthen her desire. Yet, if we come back to the rain symbolism of the first five stanzas: the curious thing is the breakdown of the metaphor: the beloved’s “wetness” cannot be that of rain falling; the literal image is of a pool or well that receives the speaker’s semen: the “hardness of rain,” should, in other words, be his. The unsuccessful nature of the union is thus implicit. And indeed, the lover doesn’t ask for ecstasy or erotic transport–only for a “decent happiness.” “Decent’: the strangeness of the adjective is surely a Creeley hallmark: one can’t imagine another poet who would use it in this context. “Decent” means “adequate” or “sufficient” as in “we had a decent crowd last night.” It also means “conforming to accepted standards of moral behavior,” as in “That was the decent thing to do.” And, by a slight shading, it means “kind, considerate, or generous,” as in “How decent of her to help him out.” As for “happiness,” the choice of the abstract noun, echoing as it does the earlier “tiredness” and “fatuousness,” is almost as puzzling as that of “decent.” Women aren’t wet with “happiness” but with desire; happiness comes after fulfillment and even then it is an odd word choice in the context, suggesting that the poet is restrained by rules of conduct and speaks indirectly. He is, in other words, a courtly lover.

What kind of poem, then, is “The Rain”? To note, as is customary in Creeley criticism, that his is a poetry of process rather than product, that it only discovers what it wants to say in the act of saying it, does not get us very far, and neither does the application of Creeley’s own famed Olsonian precept that “Form is never more than the extension of content.” The choice of stanza form, after all, clearly preceded the individual locutions. Moreover—and here Creeley parts company with the “open field” poetics of Black Mountain—“The Rain” is certainly a closural poem: the ending, with its period, is presented as conclusive: this, the reader feels, is how it is, at least for now. Indeed, “The Rain” is a highly formalized poem, even as it defies the dominant conventions of lyric poetry—raw or cooked—at Creeley’s moment.

“The Rain” is not, for starters, an autobiographical poem that moves from present to past and back to the present with newly earned insight or epiphany, like Lowell’s “Eye and Tooth,” or, say, Sylvia Plath’s “Cut Thumb.” Memory plays little role for Creeley; it is the immediate present that counts. Self-awareness is difficult to sustain: it is of the moment. Hence the choice of the short—or serial—poem, for the mood cannot sustain itself. Again, the poem’s aesthetic is by no means that of “No ideas but in things” (Williams); indeed, things don’t much interest Creeley except as the occasion to brood on a particular mental condition or emotion. No red wheelbarrows here and further, despite its title, no rainwater either and certainly no chickens. No sharp, imagistic phrases as in Roethke, no nouns charged with rich symbolic reference as in Eliot, no proper names as in Pound and Olson, no occult references as in Duncan. But no ordinary language as in Frank O’Hara either. On the contrary, Creeley’s vocabulary includes precisely those words and locutions others would avoid as “unpoetic”: in this case, “insisted upon,” “something,” “getting out,” “tiredness” “wet.”

These words—and this is Creeley’s signature—are used with a Flaubertian intensity that evidently escaped readers like Tillinghast and Williamson. The “hardness” of rain is desirable because the poet is trying to have a hardon. “Something not so insistent” is longed for as a form of “persistence” that might be more appropriate. “Decent” goes with “wet” in what is a near rhyme; “uneasiness” might give way to “happiness.” The imperatives of stanza 5 counter the stagnation of passive and intransitive constructions that have preceded it. The rain, for that matter, is never seen, only heard; its “sound” must be countered by the sound of the poet’s own voice, “Love, if you love me….”

A maker of words, then—of le mot juste—and also of the syntax that relates the words in question. The poet as grammarian: a poet whose inverted sentences, peculiar word order, and odd use of “literary” constructions, even in his critical prose and in his many interviews, is notable. I have always been struck by the idiosyncratic inflections that characterize what purports to be “ordinary” prose. Here are some examples, culled at random from interviews and essays between 1964 and 1998:

I think this is very much the way Americans are given to speak—not in some dismay that they haven’t another way to speak, but, rather, that they feel that they, perhaps more than any other group of people upon the earth at this moment, have had both to imagine and thereby to make that reality which they are then given to live in.[6]

I’ve always been embarrassed for a so-called larger view. I’ve been given to write about that which has the most intimate presence for me. . . . And I am given as a man to work with what is most intimate to me. [7]

I had headed west, for the first time, thinking to be rid of all the “easternisms” of my New England upbringing and habit. [8]

There in Florida I thought a lot about the social facts of age, seeing us milling confusedly in supermarkets, else risking life and limb trying to negotiate parking lots in our oversized cars. [9]

Reading these comments, one can hear Creeley speaking (and, thanks to Penn Sound, we can literally do this), not because his phrasing is characteristic of what is called “speech rhythm”—the natural words in the natural order—but because such expressions as “I am given to,” “I’ve been embarrassed for,” “seeing us milling confusedly,” “else risking life and limb” as well as the repeated use, in his critical prose and interviews, of the adjectives “lovely” “beautiful,” “intimate,” and the parenthetical adverbs –“unhappily,” “sweetly,” “forgetfully”–create an equivocal aura that is uniquely Creeleyan. “There are lovely moments in the world” begins Creeley’s 1974 essay “Last Night: Random Thoughts on San Francisco,” and the same essay recalls that “The city was humanly so beautiful” (Real Poem 86). Most poets of Creeley’s generation would regard such value judgments as too soft, too feminine, too gentle—aren’t these the adjectives a Girly Man would use? Interestingly, Creeley’s female contemporaries—say, Adrienne Rich—weren’t given to using the adjectives in question either.

“Lovely,” “sadly,” “confusedly,” “else risking life and limb”: it is the decorum and politesse of these old-fashioned locutions that makes the horror and emptiness of everyday life as depicted in Creeley’s poems so chilling. In the 1998 collection Life & Death, there is a poem called “Edges,” in which the poet recalls “want[ing] something”:

Beyond the easy, commodious adjustment
to determining thought, the loss of reasons
to ever do otherwise than comply—
tedious, destructive ineriors of mind

As whatever came to be seen,
representative, inexorably chosen,
then left as some judgment. [10]

Here it is the quasi-Victorian inflection of formal and abstract diction—“commodious,” “otherwise than comply,” “inexorably”—that makes the poet’s fear of old age and death, the “flotsam [another archaicizing word] of recollection” so painful.

“As whatever came in to be seen”: Creeley’s genius is to take that “whatever” –note that it is no image, no thing, no allusion, no citationall reference—and to relate it to all the other words in a given poem, according to the norms of what Aristotle called to prepon, fitness or proportionality—the necessary relatedness of item to item and each to the whole . Whether the words in question do or do not relate in the world outside the poem is irrelevant; they relate within it. In “The Rain,” for example, the second syllable of “decent” matches, not only the final syllable of “persistent” and “insistent” but also the middle syllable of “intentional” and with, a slight variant, the last syllable of “indifference.” Ent/ence: it is the Latin suffix denoting actual existence, the state of being. The poem’s repeated “insistence”/”persistence” defines the “I”, “myself” and “me” that appear in the poem, first-person pronouns that fail to cohere into what might be a stable identity. “Quiet,” furthermore, almost has the necessary ent in it, and so does “wet.” But not quite, and therein, to use another Creeley word, lies the problem. The poem gives us a personal world in fragments or, more accurately, layers, and these layers remain separate.

The verbal and morphemic play in which a poem like “The Rain” engages has a curious relationship to the poetry of the early sixties, when Creeley came of age. On the one hand, as I noted above, it deviates sharply from the Robert Lowell model. On the other, it is hardly a minimalist “concrete poem,” even though Mary Ellen Solt, in her ground-breaking survey, recruits Creeley for the Concrete camp, citing “Le Fou” as an example of the poetic ideogram. [11] But Creeley was no Concretist, as a comparison to Augusto de Campos’s own rain poem, the 1959 “fluvial / pluvial” [figure 2] makes clear. [12] [13] For de Campos, the typographic constellation—in this case the morphing of the letters that compose pluvial into its cognate fluvial—has eliminated all traces of the poet’s ego so as to make a linguistic-visual construct. For Creeley, on the other hand, the lettristic breakdown of a given word itself—in this case rain—is hardly enough to satisfy the poet.

[INSERT PLUVIAL IMAGE]

But Creeley’s own particular blend of linguistic density, elliptical grammar, and semantic charge was to come into its own in the mid-eighties, with the coming of a new generation of experimental poets. Creeley seems to have known this:: in 1986, in a review for the San Francisco Chronicle of Ron Silliman’s controversial anthology In the American Tree, Creeley declared, “Whatever poetry may prove to be at last, the very word (from the Greek poiein , “to make”) determines a made thing, a construct, a literal system of words.” “A great deal of the writing,” he adds, “has active rapport with the resources that the system of language itself provides and plays upon patterns of syntax and reference with remarkable effect.” Not everyone, Creeley is quick to insist, will find such “structuralist” poetics attractive: “We are, of course, far more likely to think of a poem as a pleasing sentiment, a lyric impulse, an expression of feeling that can engage the reader or listener in some intensive manner.” But, having paid “pleasing sentiment” its due, Creeley concludes:
Certainly one will have favorites and I have a lot of them here, as it happens: Robert Grenier and Charles Bernstein, and also Barrett Watten, David Bromige, Fanny Howe, Susan Howe, Stephen Rodefer, Bernadette Mayer, Bob Perelman, and others. Michael Palmer’s “Echo” must be, surely, one of the great poems of the period, just as Clark Coolidge’s work is now a contemporary classic. . . . . The brilliance of the writers collected here is not simply literary. Their response to the world, however demanding, is intently communal. They are asking – often with great wit and heart – that we recognize that language itself is real and we must learn to live in its complex places.
I cite this review at some length because it shows Creeley’s clear-eyed understanding that here was a new movement with such affinities to his own poetry. Later, as that movement became more vocal and more doctrinaire, Creeley took a more circumspect position toward it. He himself, after all, belonged, or so the common wisdom would have it, to the school of Olson: it was Olson who was his mentor and the New American Poetry, as defined by Donald Allen in his watershed anthology, that was his poetic and spiritual home.

The issue is complicated. Certainly, Creeley’s poetics is not quite that of In the American Tree. What Bruce Andrews has called deprecatingly “the arrow of reference” is still operative in Creeley’s lyric, his collocations of words and morphemes are never as non-semantic or disjunctive as those of later Language poets, his identity, however fractured, never less than central to his what is a very “personal” poetry. The decorous, purposely Old World phrasing–“I am given to,” “I am embarrassed for,” I am “thinking to be rid of”— is surely closer to Robert Duncan than to Ron Silliman. And as Theory, from Derrida and Deleuze to Adorno and Habermas came to dominate the discourse of the various Language Poetry journals, Creeley came to protest, less in print than in private conversation, that theory—dry, intellectual, impersonal– was the enemy of poetry, that he himself was just a “simple” lyric poet who looked to experience and to tradition for inspiration. Thus, in his last decade or so, he made sure he allied himself, not just with experimental poets, but with the larger scene of postwar American—and also British—poetry, endorsing a wide variety of younger poets from Frank Bidart and Forrest Gander to Heather McHugh and Sharon Olds, as if he wanted to warn his more immediate coterie not to box him into a corner. John Ashbery, we might note, has followed a similar path vis-à-vis the New York school.

Poets cannot, of course, be expected to see themselves as later generations see them. It is too soon, in any case, to make authoritative statements about Creeley’s influence today. Still, it may now be useful to revise the earlier genealogy whereby we couple Creeley with Olson, Duncan, and Levertov, with Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti, or with Zukofsky and Reznikoff. Indeed, among the Objectivists, the one poet whose lyric very much resembles Creeley’s is the one whom the label least fits—Lorine Niedecker– just as the “Black Mountain” heir whose aesthetic really is Creeleyesque is that non-American, Tom Raworth. Both Niedecker and Raworth may be characterized as mavericks. Both have strong group affiliations but are loners, working in isolation. Both are obsessed, in their condensed, “minimalist” lyric, with the grammaticity and paragrammaticity of language, both are intensely “personal” and yet intensely oblique and constrained love poets. To read Creeley against Niedecker and Raworth suggests, in any case, that in making genealogies, it is high time to go beyond nation and gender boundaries, high time to cast a wider net so as to capture, in Creeley’s words, “whatever is.”

Footnotes

Marjorie Perloff

Published in Bridge 2, no. 1 (Fall-Winter 2002): 187-94.

Window:

n.1 an opening in the wall of a roof or building or vehicle that is fitted with glass in a frame to admit light or air and allow people to see out.

¶ a pane of glass filling such an opening.

¶ an opening in a wall or screen through which customers are served in a bank, ticket office, or similar building.

¶ a space behind the window of a shop where goods are displayed for sale.

n.2 a thing resembling such an opening in form or function, in particular.

¶ a transparent panel on an envelope to show an address.

¶ Computing—framed area on a display screen for viewing information

¶ a means of observing and learning about. Television is a window on the world.

¶ an interval or opportunity for action. Window of opportunity.

Origin ME: Old Norse vindauga, from vindr “wind” + auga “eye”

– Oxford American Dictionary

In a 1995 interview, Charles Bernstein asked Robert Creeley to comment on the sequence “Helsinki Window,” composed during a recent summer visit the Creeleys had made to Finland. Creeley replies:

We had rented—or rather it had been provided for us—an apartment with a modest rent in a very good-natured circumstance. It was an easy walk into the center of the city of Helsinki. And it was actually the apartment of the family whose father is now the president of Finland, Martti Ahtisaari. And so it had this room. . . And I was working—while he was working at the United Nations—I was working in his very modest study.

And the one window looked out on the central courtyard. It was this great sort of apartment block interior where people would, you know, park occasionally. And basically it was just a space to put out the garbage bins and what not. So that window became my intimate companion and reference, day and night. I could sort of peek out at the neighbors variously, but I could also see the sky. It was up high enough to see out over the roofs to the open sky of the city. Once I had got sort of settled into it, “Helsinki Window,” at the window, I didn’t feel literally like a “shut-in” but I was certainly occupying that window much as, say, someone constrained to be in that room might do as well. And it was also interesting for me, the sequence, because this is the first time for my use of this form, so-called, this particular 12-line stanza or whatever to call it. Almost like a sonnet in its determined compacting. [1]

This charming passage obscures more than it explains. For why does an apartment window that looks out over a dreary inner courtyard with its garbage bins and parked cars become the poet’s “intimate companion and reference, day and night”? Why does Creeley want to take the position of one of the “constrained,” occupying the window in question like a “shut-in”? One thinks immediately of James Stewart in Rear Window, but Creeley has never manifested any particular curiosity about the lives of neighbors in an anonymous city block, especially in a foreign country. Why doesn’t he go out and enjoy the city? Or meet friends in cafés? And why does it matter that the apartment is owned by the now president of Finland?

To answer these questions, we might turn to Creeley’s earlier “Window” poems—and there are dozens. Indeed, from the inception of his career, Creeley has been especially sensitive to domestic thresholds—doors, mirrors, and, most of all, windows. Perhaps his interest in this particular opening has to do with the word’s etymology: Old Norse vindauga, from vindr “wind” + auga “eye”. Eye in the wind: for Creeley this reference is only too personal, given that the poet lost his own left eye in a terrible automobile accident when he was only two. Indeed, throughout his life, Creeley has had to compensate for his one-eyed state, has had to use the good eye–often, no doubt, smarting in the wind–to admit the light and to see what is out there. The eye is also, by analogy, the fragile pane of glass itself that can be easily injured or broken. And it is (#2 above) a means of observing and learning, an information channel.

Take the well-known poem “Goodbye” (in For Love ), which was prompted by another painful accident which caused the death of Bobbie Creeley’s young daughter Leslie:

She stood at the window. There was
a sound, a light.
She stood at the window. A face.

Was it that she was looking for,
he thought. Was it that
she was looking for. He said,

turn from it, turn
from it. The pain is
not unpainful. Turn from it.

The act of her anger, of
the anger she felt then,
not turning to him. [2]

Here the husband watches his wife slip away from him, her mind, no doubt tormented by guilt, concentrated on the lost child. The window admits “a sound, a light”—indeed, the ghostly face of the child itself. The poet, sensing the distance between himself and his wife, tries to break the spell. The threefold repetition of “turn from it,” is punctuated only by the foolish statement that “The pain is not unpainful.” But the “turn” backfires on him. Instead of “turn[ing] from it,” it is “turning to him ” that the woman, in her anger, refuses. The window, in this context, is less opening than escape—an escape the woman wants and which the man, inside the claustrophobic room, wants to deny her. Deadlock, as in so many of these early poems, is all.

A decade later, the volume Words contains two poems called “The Window.” The first begins:

Position is where you
put it, where it is

and tries to assess the mind’s workings as it organizes that which is seen in its varied forms of relatedness: “that large tank there, silvered, / with the white church along-side,” then a “man [who] walks by, a /car beside him on / the dropped / road, a leaf of / yellow color” which is “going to / fall.” And we read:

It

all drops into
place. My

face is heavy
with the sight. I can
feel my eye breaking. (CP 284)

This, like so many of the poems of the period, uses what seems to be simple observation for almost surrealistic effect. The mind tries to relate everything it sees outside the window—tank, church, man, car, leaf—so as to make sense of the vision, the composition. Why then, is the poet’s face “heavy/with the sight,” so heavy he “can / feel [his] eye breaking”? Perhaps because the microcosmic glass—the human eye—cannot ever really capture what is seen in the macrocosmic one. The poet can list different “positions,” and try, so to speak, to connect the dots, but nothing adds up. The items don’t really fit together. And the effort to see actually hurts.

The pain in question is named more explicitly in the second “Window” poem, which begins:

There will be no simple
way to avoid what
confronts me. Again and
again I know it, but

take heart, hopefully,
in the world unavoidably
present. (CP 336)

How to avoid “what confronts me”? “Out the far window / there was such intensity/ of yellow light.” But the poet is in no mood to look out. Rather, he turns to the “window” of his beloved’s body; “you / were surely open to me.” But although he gets the “love I so wanted,” he is too spent to connect inner and outer. Indeed, he merely “fell senseless, with relief.”

Here the reader’s window onto the scene does not accord with the window in the poem, yellow with “such intensity.” In the window which is the poem, in other words, the room shuts down on the hung-over speaker, whose hands are shaking with “an insistent trembling / from the night’s / drinking.” What seems “open” is really a problematic form of closure.

More than twenty years later, in the volume Windows (1990), the acute anxiety of the earlier work seems, at first glance, to have dissipated. The sequence “Window,” for example, begins with the minimalist “Then”:

The window had
been half
opened and the

door also
opened and the
world then

invited, waited,
and one
entered. (JIT 112)

Indeed, the next lyric states, in only eight words, “The world is / many, the / mind is one,” and in the third, “Where,” the window has “opened, / beyond edge / of white hall,” and the poet asks quite jauntily, “Who’s / home?”

But these window poems are more accurately read marking the calm before the storm. “Helsinki Window” has a very different tone. The sequence’s epigraph, to begin with, comes from Malcolm Lowry’s Dark as the Grave Wherein my Friend is Laid,” in which the down-and-out writer posits that perhaps it is so difficult to create a larger, comprehensive artistic structure that one had better stick to short poems, whose “measured frames thrown up in an instant of inspiration” may be able to “outwit the process” of having to produce a larger, finished work (JIT 481). The opening poem called “X” follows through on this notion:

The trees are kept
in the center of the court,
where they take up room
just to prove it—

and the garbage cans extend
on the asphalt at the far side
under the grey sky and the building’s
recessed, regular windows.

All these go up and down
with significant pattern,
and people look out of them.
One can see their faces.

I know I am safe here
and that no one will get me,
no matter where it is
or who can find me. (JIT 183)

Here is the lyric equivalent of Creeley’s description of the Helsinki apartment in the Bernstein interview cited above. In that account, the issue is one of constraint, of somehow feeling like a “shut-in,” but in “X,” we learn that the source of that constraint is the poet’s own state of mind, a fear that “they” are out to get you and that, in order to be “safe,” he must stay hidden inside his room. The gray courtyard fits his needs because his window faces on nothing but other “recessed, regular windows,” containing the “faces” of total strangers. “Helsinki Courtyard” thus provides the perfect objective correlative for what is evidently an acute anxiety state, a severe case, it would seem, of agorophobia. How and why this “patient small agony,” as he calls it in a neighboring poem “Small Time,” has come into being is never discussed. It merely is.

The title poem of “Helsinki Window” has nine sections of twelve lines each. The stanza, almost that of the sonnet, says Creeley, looks like a window and hence seemed appropriate. Each stanza contains one long sentence, draped over its lines—an unusual procedure for Creeley, who is given to abrupt, broken phrases, sharply enjambed and then often cut in midline. But the new form works very well for what is a more phenomenological, genuinely reflective poetic. Here is the first stanza:

Go out into brightened
space out there the fainter
yellowish place it
makes for eye to enter out
to greyed penumbra all the
way to thoughtful searching
sight of all beyond that
solid red both brick and seeming
metal roof or higher black
beyond the genial slope I
look at daily house top on
my own way up to heaven. (194)

“Nothing is permitted to quit end, or stop, until the final word of the poem,” Creely tells Bernstein, “But there’s no surprise, remarkably. The first one, for example, is again literal. One is looking out a window, and thus entering a more opening space” (JIT 30). What is remarkable, however, is the echo-structure of this seemingly low-key process of looking. The first five lines, for example, not only have internal rhyme (“space”/ “place” and “grey[ed]” /”way”), but the voiceless stop “t” appears as a kind of pin prick ten times in twenty-three short words. The poet’s eye penetrates the larger eye which is the window the “greyed penumbra” of that inner courtyard space with its brick walls, metal roof and black sky beyond it. It is hardly the passage to heaven one dreams of but, in certain moods, perhaps it’s all there is. And the final stop after “heaven” suggests that there is, after all, a point of arrival, however tenuous.

In the next stanza, the poet imagines what the world beyond his courtyard prison might look like but expresses little desire to get to that “sodden edge of sea’s/ bay, city’s graveyard, park/ deserted, flattened aspect” (195). For the moment, he knows that he has to stay where he is, and at least he can contemplate, from his modest little room, the strange yellow light peculiar to Finland:

I love I love the safety of
small world this door frame back
of me the panes of simple glass (JIT 196)

Soon, “Windows now lit close out the / upper dark the night’s a face.” And again day succeeds night and at “one forty five afternoon,” the poet observes “a green door-/way with arched upper window / a backyard edge of back wall / to enclosed alley low down small / windows,” and, as he contemplates the parked cars underneath them, thinks to himself that he has “miles and more miles still to go” (197). Indeed, in the next stanza, he reaches a kind of nadir:

This early still sunless morning when a chair’s
creak translates to cat’s cry a blackness still
out the window might be apparent night when the
house still sleeping behind me seems a bag of
immense empty silence (198)

Note that the window is now opaque; one finds the necessary light, not by looking through the window, but by accepting the space inside the dark room. It is here that the poet becomes aware of a “small spare pool of / light watching the letters the words to speak.” And this inward “turn from it” seems to break the spell. The final stanza has eleven lines rather than twelve and the lines are about half the length of those in stanzas 1-8. The window looking out on the world disappears as do doors and mirrors. Rather, we have “Classic emptiness”, the “edge of / hierarchic roof top,” an “acid fine edge / of apparent difference.” Space is no longer divided into inside and outside, dark and light, up and down. Rather, “it is there here here”

no

other thing can for a
moment distract it be
beyond its simple space. (JIT 198)

Nothing, it seems, can “be beyond” that simple space, a space, let’s recall, that relates Robert Creeley to the apartment’s distinguished owner. By the end of “Helsinki Window,” the speaker has come out on the far side of his depression. No longer does he stare out the window at those other dreary courtyard windows, those garbage cans and parked cars. No longer does he need to order his wife to “turn from it” so as to avoid the pain. The window—the poet’s eye which, at earlier moments, Creeley “felt breaking” –is now integrated into a space “simple” in its lack of fixed boundaries and divisions. Here, perhaps, is the “window of opportunity” Creeley has been looking for so assiduously. “Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself,” as Wallace Stevens put it in the final poem of The Rock.