Love and frangibility: An appreciation of Robert Creeley

For Creeley knows vision abides in division; that's why the word "division" itself crops up so often here, with its hint of bifocality, or broken focality: and that's why the frame-breaking self-revealing literalizing of the ocular, so important in his older and seminal work "The Window," affords the sense against which all of Creeley's subsequent ocular architectures and demolitions must be read. His are the gestures of a poet in whom, as Ginsberg put it, "Mind is shapely." The thought of loss and limits (definitively hard to sever from the thought of presence and extension) is entered in the flesh as poems, and Creeley is exquisitely sensitive to the poem's matter. It happens to matter, because it matters to mind.

In Echoes all you have to do is track key words like "still" and "look, " and you'll see how the smug boundaries between states are overflowed. In almost every use of "still" Creeley makes structurally and semantically indistinguishable the two states-of motionlessness in space and persistence in time; nor in a "look" can one distinguish the one inspected from the one inspecting. That recurring "still" is a changing still; that recurring "look" is a changing "look." An echo is not, in such cases, an identity.

. . particular reference, it wasn't where you said it would be, where you looked wasn't where it was! What fact of common world is presumed common? The objectifying death of all human person, the ground? There you are and I look to see you still. .

"I look to see you still" can well be read to mean "I expect to see you unmoving." But this reading can't be disengaged from the persistence of sensual presence and memory "I still want to see you.") This physical peregrination I've just quoted comes from a poem Creeley calls "Abstract"! But where did we think the particular would be? In reference? (Where you said it?) In identity? (Where you looked. . . and looked what? for something? like something? or even: like yourself?!) The line-breaks place in the inquirer's way precisely the kinds of tour and detour that keep an inquiry moving. The ground itself keeps changing-not only our poetic grounds, which turn from one direction to another, but also the poem's other grounds: the earth to which a death comes down, the flesh or humus of which a human is made, and the visual field against which a figure can be seen (and said) to make its stand.

In that snippet I've just cited, the noun phrase "human person" " . . . The objectifying death of all/ human person, the ground. . .") foils the line-break's expectation that "of all" will introduce a plural noun. For "human person" is neither the usual singular nor the usual collective noun. Here instead our attention is drawn to the flesh itself as humanity's essential material, so that "human person, the ground," is the very stuff of terrestrial being. (In this it resembles the phrase "some/ man" in "The Window," below.) It is the stuff out of which all our differences are pinched up into persons. This personning de-emphasizes stance (in which the distinguishability of singular and plural would figure so predominantly) and instead emphasizes substance: what we are made of, what we IS made of. ("We," the verbal category, cannot fail to be at issue.) The "ground" Creeley dwells on is not only the humus from which the human came, but also the ground which is figure's usual sidekick. And to the figure in this sentence's ambiguous grammar, that is, to the "human person," ground can be read not only as alternative, but as appositive.