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Love and frangibility: An appreciation of Robert Creeley
American Poetry Review, The, May/Jun 1997 by McHugh, Heather
The vehicle is a moving one, especially since we know at the outset that it's poetry we started in, and with; the narrative of leave-taking, the attenuations of slowness, the punctuated excitement ("!") at discovering the moving parts to be ourselves, all converge, along the poem's lines, on that goodbye'd arrival. "Le Fou" is an ars poetica, but it is revealed as such not in any final proud figurative revelation, like the figurative destinations of most such poems contemporary to it, in America. Its artfulness is less a promise than a premise. Where most writers would pass from moving to meaning, Creeley passes from meaning to moving. That last word ("goodbye") might have seemed soggy with bathos had not two other factors been involved, both of material importance in the making of the poem. One is the intercutting of two stories-the story of the others and the story of the we, motions which turn out to inform each other. Goodbye is, after all, language for what both positions-that of the leavetaker and that of the left-might be feeling. We must not fail to follow through on reading the left hand verticality of this design (the parts that precede the parentheses). Toward the end, doing so yields up this rich line of connections: "So slowly . . . we are moving/ away from . . ./ the usual. . ./ which is slower than this, is . . . / goodbye. " Insofar as both are coherent lines of reading-both the right hand verticality of the poem (parenthetically unclosed pieces of text) and the left hand verticality (those portions to the left of, or left out by, the parentheses)-and insofar as they are jointly and severally readable, we are given, already, at least three times in which to read the poem.
The poem keeps its footing on dry ground (that is, saves its "goodbye" from mere bathos) also by foreshadowing the word goodbye a few lines earlier, with the words "go by"-a "go by" that's made prominent by its position at the end of a line. Only "We are moving! " stands out more, on the poem's right side. That "go by" in the realm of the others, a realm which, even as the train departs, is about to seem inseparable from the realm of selves, is three letters short of "goodbye. " What are those three letters? ODE.
In other words (in missing letters) a poem is inscribed, a poem sensible only if you read the languages outside and inside the borders, and read with an eye to relations across borders. All poetry requires we read this way, even if the poet isn't himself calculating the lodes and veins that run beneath the surfaces. For poetry asks us constantly to reinvestigate what we take to be mutually exclusive conditions: ends and means, breakings and wholeness, others and selves, intentions and extensions. We move "away from the usual" precisely in an exquisite attention to the usual (its vernacular phrasings, its stations and occasions, its homely tanks and fallen churches. Where else but in breath might we register the breathtaking? Where else but in life the once-in-a-lifetime intuition?
