Robert Creeley, a Poet Who Mirrored His Time

Robert Creeley, who lived from 1926 to 2005, avoided complicated, explicit metaphor and elaborate imagery or description, and reflected the artistic zeitgeist from the 1950’s through to the end of the century. His poems were stripped down, direct, and yet mind bending. He worked with many great painters, sculptors, musicians, and writers of that time. Stephen Fredman, a professor of English at Notre Dame, told me that Creeley’s “registrations of what it was like to be alive in this century and in a particular moment are available to anyone and anywhere. He’s a naked human being. There is no pretension.” Although I had admired Creeley’s work since I was a teenager, when I interviewed him in 1996 in Buffalo, New York, I approached him with straightforward curiosity and tried to avoid pandering. He responded generously and warmly.

I’m sure you’ve been asked many times about influences. I want to ask a slightly different version of that question, which is, looking back over your long body of work, who were the influences who have most endured?

William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane. I was thinking last evening of Eileen Myles [Poet, novelist and art journalist, born in 1949]. The people who have that endearing way of writing or saying things that come easily to one’s own understanding and are not threatening and were pleasantly friendly. I love Stendhal although I was always reading him in translation. The Stendhal that I read was extraordinarily attractive, quick, witty, self-qualifying in a way that I found completely winning and challenging. Then there are my own peers. I have great respect and love for Robert Duncan as a poet. Someone asked me who did I think was the Picasso of poetry. And I thought, Allen Ginsberg.  He’s sustained the burden of being a public figure in such a wise and thoughtful way. 

What is it about Williams’ poetry that attracted you?

His intense vulnerability, his extraordinary passion. His vivid anger—the way he felt things so intensely and explicitly. I remember I was with a scholar in Finland and we were waiting for a trolley. He said suddenly and without preamble, “Emotion means a great deal to your generation.” [Creeley laughs.] Yeah, it really does. It’s a validating condition. Seems as though we have to feel things strongly, specifically or passionately to feel there are legitimate things to say.  As Ezra Pound said, “Only emotion endures.” So we had a lot of advice, so to speak, that feeling was the sine qua non of what we wrote. Besides, even if you are moaning emphatically, you don’t have to be moaning as yourself. There were also poets who did seem to be kind of charmingly. wittily apart from it:  Kenneth Koch or Frank O’Hara, who had a great poem entitled “In Memory of My Feelings.” Equally John Ashberry. I’m vividly impressed by elders who command that authority, who can make feelings so explicit and so powerful. 

Who do you like to read these days? 

I like Russell Banks a great deal.  I’ve happily known him, first as a poet. I’ve read his work pretty much all along. I’m always fascinated by what he can do. I like Paul Auster [Born, 1947, writer and film director, perhaps best known for The New York Trilogy] I think Paul Auster is a very provocative person and writer.  

How do you see your own work as having shifted over time?

It’s more narrative now probably was at first. The pace is more relaxed. 

Do you see changes in subject?

For some years as an author I had what I refer to as my graveyard shift. I had fears that I might cease to exist starting in my mid 30’s and going into my 40’s. It was a pleasant relief in my 50’s to realize I was still alive and doing quite well. 

What do you listen to for music?

Fifteen or so years ago, I listened a great deal to Beethoven. It was very moving to me, very securing. Now I no longer listen to it and it doesn’t serve to complete or locate a world that I have. I find myself tacitly bored by the proposal. I think the most durable music that I have listened to is jazz.  I have friends, like Steve Swallow [Jazz bass player, born 1940] who are bored by bebop. It’s become such a cliche. By the time you get to Wynton Marsalis, it is really over. 

I remember going with Steve Lacey [Saxophonist, 1934 to 2004] to Connecticut College for a jazz workshop. I remember the teacher, who was certainly not the enemy, was very proud that he had scores of all the basic jazz standards. Steve said “Get rid of them. That’s not the way to learn jazz, you need to listen to it.” There are situations either in terms of the rhythm or the pitch that cannot be located in writing. So, if you try to do it didactically by using a score transcribed from a performance, you have no chance of doing it well.

You do a lot of readings and a lot of travel. What do you get out of it? Wouldn’t it be easier to stay home?

If one does something then one wants to know what people think of it, or at least I do. So that it’s a curious testing. Not just “Am I still charming?” but “Is this finding any permanence?” It’s the most particular and obvious kind of testing for what I do. Not all poets need this. But mine is a poetry made of sounds and rhythms. It’s best heard when it’s read, obviously. It’s like music in that sense. 

We were talking about New England and what your sense of yourself as a Yankee was. . . 

I was always interested in the characteristic ways that New Englanders state themselves. Edward Dahlberg [novelist, essayist, autobiographer, 1900-1977] once said to me “Bob, why do you try so hard to say so little?” It was that curious compaction and elusiveness that was so characteristic of New England. I love the way that when one is driving or walking in some rural parts and another person suddenly is present, you always acknowledge them with a physical gesture.

I’d always been ambivalent about Robert Frost because I felt he, wittingly or otherwise, became a kind of Colonel Sanders of poetry. He became the prototypical Yankee in the public world, whereas in fact, he’s not really that person at all. Edwin Arlington Robinson [poet from Maine, 1869-1935] would be my hero in that dimension. Even more obvious is Longfellow. I was listening to Eileen Myles [from Boston] last night with that acerbic irony and determination to recognize herself clearly and that determination not to falsify her own worth.

How do you stay connected to the visual arts?

Ever since I was a kid in grammar school, I felt it was an extraordinary, wondrous ability to be able to picture the world and make pictures of it. I remember a friend in the Second World War, we were in Burma, and I remember he would write friends back at home and he would send these terrific watercolor sketches. It was an extraordinary ability to figure the world in a very literal manner, so compact and so determinate.

I remember Wyndham Lewis [British writer and painter, 1882-1957] said “Watch out for writers hanging around painters because they are getting energy from these dear people.” Very often as a young man my friends were painters. They were making an object having the emotional force explicitly of their own feelings.

I wanted to have a gestural, expressive element of that kind. The thing seen was not simply a picture of mother, however dear, but it was the experience of seeing mother. What it means to me. To do that without simple ego-centric preoccupation: That was the problem. How to get said what was particular to oneself without letting oneself be the entire content: A solipsistic dilemma. 

Tell me about your time in Europe. 

I was the dummy. My French was hopeless. I was the mascot of these terrific intellectuals. It wasn’t that we sat down and chatted about art as a subject but the practical and daily information of things had much to do with these various ways of thinking about art. It was an internationalism without any consciousness or wish to be so. It was almost like being in the army with people from diverse places. That was the feeling in Europe at that time. Visual art was at the cutting edge of where the arts more generally were moving. 

Was jazz was also an inspiration at that time?

It was a great relief from the didacticism of that time. To return from the Second World War to an exposition of German-defined classical art was stultifying. As an 18- or 19-year-old person, I didn’t expect my professors to give me necessary answers but I at least expected them to share some of my interests. They seemed to think “All that is over, now we can get on to the defining terms of our real lives.” 

I thought “Wait a minute, these are the defining terms of our real lives.” I think many of my generation did feel exactly that quandary. It wasn’t that we felt anger or contempt for the imagination of the great humanistic tradition but it didn’t seem to apply to the world that we had been dealing with just moments ago. The coherence of that order seemed to be shattered. 

That was why it was so hard to come back to college. I was trying to complete my so-called education [at Harvard] and never quite made it. The dear dean who let me off the hook said “Your grades at midterm were two incompletes and an E. Obviously all is not going well with you. Why don’t you take a leave of absence and return when you feel more stable?” I’d married and had a baby and was commuting from a ridiculous distance. It was very thoughtful and good natured. That’s what I did but I never managed to get back.

I remember walking on Mass. Ave. all the way to Arlington. I felt so overwhelmed at times by Harvard Yard and the contrast with the black and working-class Irish population around us. My mother was the town nurse in the small town I grew up in. At times Harvard just socially had to be fled. [He laughs.]

Let’s move from Harvard to Black Mountain College [where Creeley taught], which seems to have attained mythical status.

Willem de Kooning [Dutch-American abstract expressionist, 1904-1997] once said that the only problem with Black Mountain is that if you go there they want to give it to you. Anything to keep it open. Both staff and students often totaled about 30 or 40 people. There was one time when it looked like we might not have any students at all. Thankfully some students showed up. The college at that time was having to sell parts of its property to have money to continue to operate. I was making $80 a month. I probably would have done it for nothing. John Chamberlain, the sculptor, put it succinctly. He said it was the first place he’d come to as a student where people were more interested in what they didn’t know than what they did. That whole disposition was very pleasant to me. 

What brought you to Buffalo?

A job really, at the time when the University of Buffalo became the University at Buffalo. The New York university system acquired a private university and expanded it and made it a state university. The hiring that was done to expand the English department to deal with the increased enrollment was very interesting. The chairman made the pitch to employ people in the English department who would be writers of various distinction who would not be put in as writers in residence or to run workshops but writers who would teach standard academic materials. That was glorious. That meant one came into the university not as a curious exception to its usual patterns. So John Barth came in to teach Melville, and so forth.

I’ve been treated remarkably generously. I have what constitutes a university appointment that requires me only to say that I am from the State University of New York at Buffalo. I’ve had a suspicion that the usual form of writing programs puts them at odds with and apart from the patterns of the English departments. It tends to ghettoize the people and give them degrees that have no negotiable authority in employment. Occasionally someone seems to learn something, but not often. 

When you teach poetry, how do you go about it?

I seek a common proposal. It’s almost as if we’re sitting here now at this curious, round, leather-covered table. What would you presume this table’s occasion to be? In that imagination, would you consider it to be a well-made table or a poorly made table? Do you feel it has an applicability in the world, either of your own habit or one that you presume it to have come from? Look not so much at its practical condition or content but “What is it?” Is there a measure that seems apt? 

What is a poem? People will tell me “You are a poet for god’s sake, you should have some vague sense of what it is you are doing.” But it is remarkably hard to qualify. William Carlos Williams called poems “A small (or large) machine made of words.” That doesn’t get you very far. It’s a terrifying question. 

I don’t like workshops because of the competitive nature of them. Inevitably X’s poems are matched or measured against Y’s poems. It always seems like a brutal exchange to have 10 or 12 people sitting in a circumstance where almost by definition there will be winners and losers. 

I prefer teaching reading courses where there is no emphasis on the ranking of the group. You’re trying to figure out how to get to Boston. If someone knows, for god’s sake tell us. 

Most interviews carry the warning that they were edited for clarity and brevity. The length of Creeley’s replies, his meandering way of speaking and, at times, bad audio, meant that I edited this transcript particularly heavily. But I have done my best to stay true to what I perceived to be his intent.