Arts and Letters

For the tribute for Robert Creeley tonight we have gathered statements from five sources: Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Charles Bernstein, Fanny Howe, Paul Auster, and John Ashbery. The wide range and diversity of these five writers is in itself a tribute to the deep respect in which Creeley is held.

I will begin with:

Lawrence Ferlinghetti:

Robert Creeley was always a kind of mystery to me—conflicted, restless, lyric, super-critical—but kind. I respected him enormously, both in his person and in his poetry. In his poetry he strove to get beyond what was “passing by the window”—a great piece of advice for any poet. I never heard him in class but he must have been a marvelous if difficult teacher.

The last time I saw him was at an Ezra Pound Conference in Hailey, Idaho, where Pound was born. We both made speeches about Pound. Between us was seated the elder American authority on Pound, Hugh Kenner (The Pound Era). We were each in our own worlds, just momentarily passing through the same spot on earth.

Charles Bernstein:

Along with his poetic hero, William Carlos Williams, Robert Creeley is the great 20th century American poet of the everyday. For Creeley the ordinary is not something represented but rather something enacted word by word in each poem. His works combine searing emotional intensity and mind-boggling linguistic invention, proof that lyric intensity is dependent on formal ingenuity (and the other way around). Creeley was exemplary in his support of younger poets who rejected a poetics of complacency that reigns now, as it did in his time. He championed the radical modernists of the generation before him. And most important, he was necessary company to those of his own generation who risked the most in their successful transformation of postwar poetic thinking.

Fanny Howe:

His poetry alternates between the woodwind and the string
—the tree being his material—
and a plaintive element of song that can be extended
by both abbreviating and stretching its tendency to conversation.

Paul Auster:

There are only a few who still demand our attention, who remain necessary to us as we continue to explore and listen to and try to reimagine the ever-evolving organism that is the American language. Robert Creeley’s poems are necessary poems that span half a century of American life, and whatever form he chose to work in, whether spare lyrics or more discursive modes of expression, he was a master of syntactical grace and invention, a tactile poet who spoke to us from the profoundest philosophical depths. Robert Creeley represents everything that is new and alive in American poetry since World War II and beyond, and yet the novelties in his work are anchored in the past as well. The American past of Dickinson and Thoreau and the New England soil he walked on with them, producing a contemporary language of rare historical resonance and beauty. Robert Creeley: an essential poet, whose work will continue to be read long after all of us are gone.

John Ashbery:

In the late 1940s 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 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 (a poem called) “Some Place”:

I resolved it, I
found in my life a
center and secured it.

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

There is nothing I am
nothing not. A place
between, I am. I am
more than thought, less
than thought.

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.