Love and frangibility: An appreciation of Robert Creeley

The poem's opening declaration ("Position is where you/ put it") sooner or later passes out of a fixedly tautological predication, or child's definition into a much less settling kind of meta-proposition, in which "position" itself is understood to be placeable and (thus) replaceable. In this case, the act of placing is the "it" "you" act upon. (This reading redeems the vernacular version's "bad" grammar by giving "it" a true antecedent in the main clause.) The positioning of position itself is an essentially abstracting move; it requires us to think of how and where not only things, but also ideas, can be "put." The vernacular sense in which one "puts" something (in words) is severally salient. Lines two through four will feature five grammatical interpositions-by this I mean five syntagms set off by commas interrupt the flow of the sentence, or over-flow the natural ends of sentences. If one were to try to find one's way through this hurdlework of line-breaks and grammatical interruptions, one would not discover until after thirteen words (or a full stanza) the verb which finally makes, of the second "you," an honest grammatical subject. Until that time one can't be sure; indeed, it's possible, in the early twists of perspective on "position," to imagine "did" to have been parallel to "is" (the word before it, in line two); "position," then, would be not only where "it is" but also what "did you, for example"-position is where you put it, and where it did you-an exchange that makes a counterpoiser's (seeing-from-all-angles) sense.

By stanza three we realize that the question is: "did you lift all that?" That silvered tank and that white church. For now we have some objects beyond grammatical ones. A gradual materialization of grammatical category is one of Creeley's great arts: as long as "you" remained unconfirmed as the grammatical subject it could be mistaken for a grammatical object. But even when at last we know it to be the subject, we cannot be too sure we are meant to identify with it. It's the second person, after all, even when it seems to be functioning as the token of a self-address. (In the last sentence of the poem we will feel the poem's materials come plunging suddenly and deeply into the first person, through its very eye.)

Philosophically speaking you could say that the senses, far from sorting the perceiving subject from its objects, actually mark the sites of interpenetration. That's one of the reasons this poem ends with an inanimate eye (it is the natural counterpart to so animated a landscape). The world may be full of life, but the living are full of mere matter, too. Hard to tell them apart, sometimes, in the mouth-pocket, the eye-sac.

Take a closer look at what's IN the window in "The Window": where the speaker"`puts"(as Creeley puts it) a large silvered tank alongside a white church. The church is conventional enough in poetic windows, we might assume we know what it "means"-but that tank is not. Whether it's the military vehicle or the less "poetical" sideyard happenstance, a rustproofed oil reservoir, this "tank" manages to make of the church that follows it (and lies alongside it) just another accident of perspectivesprecisely not material for the pointers of moralists and content-lovers, who would aim their steeples (or convert their materials) into "higher meaning." Indeed, as Creeley sees the world, it isn't easily spiritualized, "lifted," relieved of its avoirdupois. The whole course of the rest of the poem is a plummeting, visually and verbally ("heavy," "dropped," and "fall" act as the most obvious signs of the downcasting). Indeed, once Creeley announced his proposition, that the placement of the eye determines the placement of its objects, then the faux-naif question (if the world is only your window on it, couldn't you lift the world?) leads necessarily to the laying-down of gravity's laws, and how things fall (happenstance) brings us back to how things fall (natural law). What is put in its place (in the eye's mind) incurs the thought of what falls into place (in the nature of things).