Love and frangibility: An appreciation of Robert Creeley

LE FOU

who plot the the !nes talking, tak, always the beat fro the breath

(moving slowly at first

the breath

which is slow

I mean, graces come slowly, it is that way.

So slowly (they are waving we are moving away from (the trees

the usual (go by

which is slower than this is (we are moving!

goodbye

The train of thought enacts here a departure from the usual. Case in point: the usual American poetic trajectory, in which the poet, having done something in the natural world, makes a poem of it. From the get-go, Creeley makes a beeline not for, but of writing. Those plots and lines soon enough become the plots of houselots and the lines of railways, as the poem begins to chug forward, remarking its own marks, parenthesizing counterparts, while never closing the parentheses. And "(moving slowly at first. . . (they are waving. . (the trees. . . (go by. . (we are moving!" amounts to its own line of reading. Our attempts to identify where the motion resides (whether in the observed or the observer) are themselves subject to shifts in understanding. The end cannot be bracketed. At first, "moving slowly at first" seems to modify "the breath" of which-and with which-the poet speaks. We may, because of the second "slow," do a second-take, in which we consider the possibility that breath is slowly moving breath, which is already slow; after all, breaths about breaths materialize the truth about poems in general. even as we stop to clarify our passage through the poem, holding still in our minds a sentence like "breath is slowly moving breath," the clarification itself becomes subject to a proliferation of readings. In one such reading, the two breaths are identical, and the statement is essentially tautological, emphasizing rather the differences between adjective and adverb, "slow" and "slowly." In another reading, breath is itself a subdivided material, so that some breath could move other breath; in which case the featured distinction is between two portions of a whole we generally take to be indivisible, unbreakable. Without a grammatical article before it, "breath" seems huge, our personal coextensiveness with sky, which, to the extent that it exists in the material world, can only be "made of" unboundable stuff. To read Creeley is to undergo a passage in and out of containment, along broken lines of breath. To read Creeley is to suffer a very physical reminder of the breakability of sensibility and sentences, scored for breath, in breath-parts. In a translation of one of Thomas Mann's novels a teacher says to his unruly pupils, "I told you to make a line, and instead you made a dash!" Creeley's breathtaking rule-breaking is that precise.

Once the line of unclosed parentheses trains us to pick up the poem's vertical connections, we begin to understand "moving slowly at first" as part of another line of reading, not so much the melodic as the harmonic line, the social line, the one which collects the attributes belonging to the others, the "they" who seem (in the poem's narrative) to be seeing us off. Along that line of reading it appears, at length, to be they who are moving. but the same train of parentheses also leads to the exclamation "we are moving!" Along such lines, one might well move full circle. If the crazy one is taken seriously, as he plots his lines, then we must follow the trail of slownesses-lines 4, 6, 9, and 13-references first two, then three, then four lines apart: for slownesses abate as accelerations greaten. The last one ("slower than this") directs us toward a deictic we can't surely locate-insofar as deictic pronouns like this "this" are, to use Jakobson's term, "shifters." We seem to be "with" the speaker, included in his "we"; and we understand that "the usual is slower than this," but the comma following "this" makes the deictic reference somewhat less clear. The words "that way," and "this" stubbornly point-but they point to a movement, not a station. And so the word "so," in "So slowly (they are waving/ we are moving . . . ," shifts from adverbial to conjunctive as we move (in the mental and poetic fields) to frame a completed sentence, somehow, over all the interruptions of line-break and parenthesis.