Love and frangibility: An appreciation of Robert Creeley

It's no accident that in his Selected Poems (1991, University of California Press), Creeley placed "The Language" right before "The Window." Reading it, we understand why "The Window" 's breakable eye is not just the glass eye of the autobiographically self-absorbed speaker. Saying and seeing are constitutively linked and limited. Mal Dit Mal Vu, in Beckett's title. (Beckett, famed like Creeley as a minimalist, loves language enough to have had to examine its versions of the sentimental-not in order to fall for sentimentality's transparent contract, but in order to love language's opaquer breakings of it.)

THE LANGUAGE

Locate I love you somewhere in

teeth and eyes, bite it but

take care not to hurt, you want so

much so little. Words say everything.

I love you again,

then what is emptiness for. To

fill, fill I heard words and words full

of holes aching. Speech is a mouth.

At the heart of the matter of language (as at the center of the responsive eye) is a hole. Our putting of things in place, our putting of ideas in categories conditioned by space and time-our puttings, in short, in wordscan't fail both to attract and painfully to expose our hooded selves (that is, our selfhoods). "Locate I" is the first line of "The Language." But the poem goes on through the line-break to recast its mission: "Locate I/ love you some-/ where in.... " From the self one moves out, and from the other, one moves back "in." At every turn, this poem recasts itself: "I love you SOME" seems partial in the worst way; but its line-break then delivers us to a deeper love-location: "some-/ where in." Where exactly are we, then? Byron's Cain laments "My/ own and beloved-she, too, understands not/ the mind which overwhelms me ... " This is not the usual intellectual's complaint. It is, in particular, the poet's sorrow. For the mind that overwhelms is not the rationalist's mind, it's the heart's mind, le coeur having reasons of its own.... The lament turns inside-out our usual presumptions about what it means to have one's mind not understood. Even that "too" of Byron's-that token of companionship-misleads us. In the very heart of the downpour of sensual experience, it bespeaks a yearning for (not the presence of) an other, to keep one company, under the self's own bone umbrella. Where do we stand, if we understand an overwhelming? We stand nowhere more than in the very moment of mind attending its own language: in Creeley's poem, "some/ where in." "Where in" stands, for a line's moment, as the very epitome of lecturer's language, legalist's formality. But suddenly again the line will break (this time, at the same time, it's a stanza break too) to correct our racing associations. (A reader's associations always race toward the conventional; that's why the poet has to keep correcting us, because it's precisely the conventional, the usual, that robs us of our chance at insight's astonishment.) By the time we reach the fifth line's comma, a whole sentence's-worth has been delivered, and we can ponder it: "Locate I love you somewhere in teeth and eyes."