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Love and frangibility: An appreciation of Robert Creeley
American Poetry Review, The, May/Jun 1997 by McHugh, Heather
Robert Creeley: Echoes. New Directions, 1993. Robert Creeley: Selected Poems. University of California Press, 1991.
Robert Creeley's most recent collection, Echoes, will be taken for many things-an affectionate retracing of poetic grounds, an inquiry into memory and time, his continuing exploration of what binds and also sets the bounds about us. But Echoes, like so much of Creeley's work, will probably go under-recognized for its instrumental means: its delicate proliferations of meaning through lineation and syntax. Such neglect comes with the territory, for the finest turns are also the subtlest. Robert Creeley remains one of American poetry's great syntacticians.
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He's perennially mistakable on several counts, two of which I'd like to dispense with before I go any further. First of all, he's often miscast as a rebel against poetic forms, foot soldier in the resistance against prosodic refinement. This misperception is, I suppose, one of the Black Mountain school's lesser legacies, by virtue of which a work of art could be taken for a work of politics, or economy in means for a rebuke to wealth in meaning. I believe that Robert Creeley's abstemious formality nourishes a luxury of readings.
The second simplicity of which Creeley's poetic temperament might wrongly be suspected: that of a romanticizing sentimentality. He himself conspires in this misprision insofar as he is given, now and then, to turns of corny terminology. Just to take an example from the new book: a poem entitled "Valentine" begins "Home's still heart/ light in the window/ all the familiar tokens.... " However sensible a reader may be of the double duty done by that apostrophe (sign of contraction and of possession) or by the word "still" (which can serve as adjective or adverb, or as both), such happinesses can't gainsay the sappinesses. His cause is not much helped, either, by titles like "Reflection" (or a poem's closing command to "Sing me a song.. . [that] echoes this silence"); out of context, these could pass for Simon-and-Garfunkel lyrics. Poeticality (which adds three curlicues to the poetic) can sink a poem, or so it seems to a reader for whom the love of letters outweighs most letters of love. Much of Creeley's subject matter is amorous, after all; so even before we open Echoes, its title runs the risk of bestowing on the larger enterprise a host of rose mistints.
But what distinguishes Creeley from the pop balladeers with whom such lyricisms might have lumped him is his vigorous, visceral aversion equally to unminded particulars and to routine generalities. The famous older poem "The Window," ending as it did with "I can feel my eye breaking," might have seemed to supply a biogra-philiacal reader with the very signature of poetic confession; but Creeley is clearly investigating not so much the human figure as the human grounds. He's not so much staking his own claim to self-distinction as querying all claims to self-distinction. What Creeley reminds us, at every turn, is that the human being places itself (in a sensible landscape) vis qua vis, not just vis a uis. A sentimental reader might discern, in that oculoclastic ending ("I can feel my eye breaking"), only the poem-making self, the one with one glass eye, rather than the sign of every selving's ever-constitutive damage.
And now, some thirty years after "The Window," we get the poem "Thinking of Wallace Stevens": "After so many years the familiar/ seems even more strange, the hands II one was born with even more remote, the feet...." Common places are estranged in Creeley: his is a cool eye, even when it breaks, or perhaps especially when it breaks-a fact which distinguishes the eye from the heart, whose breaking can't escape the clutches of cliche. Creeley (like a graphic artist) has an eye's mind, where others would put the proverbial mind's eye. He's a lover of the world, but it's no less a world of ideas than of flesh. (And what is reflection, after all, but an eye's idea of an echo?) Creeley is, in fact, not so much an echo-emoter as an echo-engineer.
De Nomination
In their eponymous book, echoes work in the manner of mathematical rather than of literary figures: the sum of the occurrences of the -word echo becomes, in its way, the site of an analysis of taxonomy. We first encounter the word in its plural form, as the book's title. (As such, it is a notation for the peculiar physics of a work of art-in whose natural world echoes may precede their voices.) The "echo" then recurs, at the level of a secondary taxonomic order, six times as a title for individual poems, at first intermittently and then, in the third section of the book, in very fast succession, entitling poems 23, 24, and 25. (The 22nd poem of this section is the grammatical plural, or "Echoes"-like the book title-so the nature of the plural name itself is again made an occasion for rhetorical reflection. Is, for example, the second "echoes" an echo of the first "echoes"? does eponymy itself propose a form of memory? is an echo an event multipliedor is it another singularity? can the part be an echo of the whole? is the plural always an echo of the singular? Such questions, once raised, go on deepening a calling's grounds and airs. Creeley's work is nothing if not an answer to a lonely calling.)
