The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1945-1975

This is the poem we posted in the personals section of our local newspaper when our son graduated from high school many years past.Hey kid/you. *Flesh filled/to bursting.Here’s another, two pages further in. It’s entitled “HERE”:Here is/ where there/is.That was the Creeley I first became attached to, the poet of short bursts of thought or emotion, concentrating on sometimes hidden sometimes obvious essentials, a wordworker with ordinary language, short on extravagance or superstructure, un-ornate and anti-Baroque. Read especially “Numbers”, a long set of poems and poem fragments dedicated to painter Robert Indiana. They’re what Plato would have written if he were a Zen monk. Creeley wrote that these poems emerged as “a matter or process rather than product, that is, of scribbling, of writing for the immediacy of the pleasure … without paying attention to some final code of significance.”I already own who knows how many books of poems by Creeley (1926-2005) so why did I buy these two volumes, which collect poems written across a sixty-year career? First, there are books of Creeley’s that I don‘t own: Creeley wrote prolificly. Second, I wanted to read the poems together and chronologically –or roughly so: you don’t plow your way straight through 1300 pages of poems, you need time and space to think through what you’ve read.In the preface to The Charm, his 1969 collection of his early and unpublished poems, Creeley reminisced about a conversation he had had with Allen Ginsberg years before. Ginsberg said to him, “you don’t have to worry so much about writing a ‘bad’ poem. You can afford to now.” And poet Robert Duncan insisted to him “that poetry is not some ultimate preserve for the most rarified and articulate of human utterances, but has a place for all speech and all occasions thereof.” That’s sound advice, especially for a poet whose special province was the immediate. There‘s a fair amount of dross in this collection but that’s part of the process. It’s redeemed by what’s so good in this collection, the exceptional output of our premiere buccaneer-poet.

I have read many glowing reviews of Creeley over the years and so decided to invest in this book, but was greatly disappointed. It's a littl like a case of the emperor's new clothes. The poems are typical of the faults of much of the insular faculty poetry of the west of the past 70 years - unambitious, over-reliant on line breaks to attempt to create an effect (for example try removing the and the poems simply read as prose), and a general feeling of a lack of necessity in the poems - e.g. they didn't need really to be written. Not particularly what Creeley's reputation is built on, because I wouldn't even describe it as mediocre but uninspired poetry - actually rather incompetent, a little embarrassing in its lack of quality and not even really qualifying as poetry. It's probably the most disappointed I've ever been in a purchase of poetry. Incredibly pretentious and vacuous stuff. It's borderline insulting to pass stuff like this off to the public, and I pity any young reader who picks this up as an example. I will give some examples below, all of which by the way are full examples and not excerpts as one may think:HEREHere iswhere thereis.HEYHey kidyou. *Flesh filledto bursting.YOUBack and forth acrosstime, lots of thingsone needs one'shand held for. Don'tstumble, in the dark. Keepwalking. This is life.'OH, LOVE . . .'Oh love, falling-the word onetriesto say arefacts, thesteps, thewalk downplaceand time.LOVETracking through thisinterminable sadness -like somebody said,change the record.BUTif we go back to wherewe never be we'llbe there. [REPEAT] But

A great poet for the printed page. Unfortunately, years ago I once went to a poetry reading where he read his poetry, and it was the dullest evening I had ever spent. I was in the middle of a row of seats, and could not leave without drawing too much attention to myself and inconveniencing a lot of people. I remember thinking, "If I had a gun in my hand I would have shot myself just to get away from his uninflected droning."

Really Great!

Using simple phrases and a lot of white space, Robert Creeley is a innovator of modern verse that suffuses mystery into the mundune. He is straightforward, spare, uses very few metaphors. He is an absolute master of measure, using the sound of the words and the pauses in between to create beautiful, haunting verse. It is difficult to be cerebral while reading his work, the poetry never explains or describe but is made to be experienced as a bodily phenomenon. It engages a quieter, deeper more subtle appreciation challenging for a modern readership used to instant gratifications.