INTERVIEW
Robert Creeley

POETRY
Robert Creeley
Pam Burr Smith
Ron Lavalette
Gian Lombardo
Hugh Ogden
Gary Lawless
Jane Eklund
Tom Chandler
April Ossmann
Rich Murphy
Graeme Mullen
Lewis Turco 
Elizabeth Tibbetts
Sydney Lea

2004 PUSHCART NOMINATIONS

The First Annual
Coat Hanger Award

New England Reads

Jack Reviews
Robert Creeley

Puerta
 

“I’ll never get it right enough, / will never stop trying”: Robert Creeley
                                                                               
                                                                                                 Review by Jack Anders
                                                                                                      MiPOesias Magazine
                                                                                                               August 8, 2004
 

            The title of my essay comes from a poem on p. 615 of Robert Creeley’s 1982 Collected Poems (University of California Press) which turned out to have been collected much too early, rather like James Wright’s 1972 Collected Poems that came out years before what to me are his best poems, the late ones from his sojourn in Italy, and pregnant with that light. There is an American value related to persistence related to the abysmal melancholy wherein we become plunged upon the consideration of the formidable evils and banalities conflagrated within the term “American” and within the continuing scientific procession in front of religion as the source for statements both true and awesome at the same time. The scientists continue to afford leave for poetry within their model and this concession increases the credibility of the scientific worldview. For example:

The most important thing to understand is that the brain is “context bound.” It is not a logical system like a computer that processes only programmed information; it does not produce preordained outcomes like a clock. Rather it is a selectional system that, through pattern recognition, puts things together in always novel ways. It is this selectional repertoire in the brain that makes each individual unique, that accounts for the ability to create poetry and music, that accounts for all the differences that arise from the same biological apparatus—the body and the brain. There is no singular mapping to create the mind; there is, rather, an unforetold plurality of possibilities. In a logical system, novelty and unforeseen variation are often considered to be noise. In a selectional system such diversity actually provides the opportunity for favorable selection.

(Summer 2004 New Perspectives Quarterly interview, emphasis added).

The person who said this, Gerald Edelman, is an example of a good scientist. He was awarded the Nobel prize for physiology and medicine in 1972. He is one of the world’s foremost experts on the brain and consciousness. He is founder and director of the Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla, Calif., a “scientific monastery,” as he terms it. In the Summer 2004 from which the above quotation is taken, Mr. Edelman goes on to say:

It is silly reductionism, of course, to claim that you and I are just bags of molecules. But I do not believe consciousness arises from spooky forces. I don’t believe in some Cartesian dualistic domain that is inaccessible to science. The brain is embodied and the body is embedded in its environment. That trio must operate in an integrated way. You can’t separate the activity and development of the brain from the environment or the body. There is a constant interplay between what is remembered and envisioned—an image—and what is actually happening in the senses. We now know that this interplay is enabled by reentrant interactions between the thalamus and cortex. First, signals enter my brain through this so-called dynamic core. Later, I can “see” images with my eyes closed. But I’m using the same circuits, only in a broader, more general and unique way—perhaps stimulated by a pleasurable memory or an ambitious idea. The brain can speak to itself and the conscious brain can use its discriminations to plan the future, narrate the past and develop a social self. Is consciousness the same as spirit? If you want to call the uniqueness of each individual consciousness a soul, that is all right with me. But there is a problem none of us likes to face. When the body goes, we go.

(Emphasis added).

I cannot claim to fully understand the intricacies of Mr. Edelman’s statements. I am inclined to afford them credence. I have met a few scientists — a loose term I am using to include such variegate pursuits as biochemistry, astrophysics, astronomy, neuropsychology, computer programming – and I have found that the better the scientist the more that a sense or spirit of self-effacing awe and simple humility in the face of overwhelmingly extraordinary phenomenae of the outside (and the inside) world, scientifically speaking, tends to creep into their personalities. I would almost want to call this a religious spirit. I remember once standing in the very chilly open observatory dome of the Morehead planetarium/observatory in Chapel Hill and looking at an intricately detailed moon-surface, soft and dusty, and brittle and chilly, at once, my eye fastened to the cold circle of the telescope eyepiece, late at night, with an astronomy teacher. The sense of awe was palpable, also that of a childlike excitement, the excitement of feeling that one is engaged in the exploration of a mystery. These sensations, I would say, are also familiar to poets. And yet, how does one deal with the corollary to scientific thought which I have highlighted above in the excerpt from Edelman’s interview — namely, a complete nihilism when it comes to the effect of death?

Implicit in the very basis of the scientific exploration and mapping of reality is a critique of religion. The tension between the two has led to interesting historical moments, dating back at least to the Italian church’s humiliation of Galileo forcing him to renounce his seminal insight. More or less a hundred years ago, there were several new vectors in the assault upon orthodox institutionalized religious ideology in the West, including Nietzsche, Freud, Marx and Darwin. In the late 1880s, Nietzsche foresaw what he phrased as “western nihilism” falling over, irrupting and darkening the entire landscape of the self in the century to come. In America, this vector was already included in the minds of American writers, for example, consider this description by Nathaniel Hawthorne of fellow writer Herman Melville in Hawthorne’s journal, excerpted at p. 91 of Charles Olson’s book “Call Me Ishmael”:

Melville, as he always does, began to reason of Providence and futurity, and of everything that lies beyond human ken, and informed me that he had “pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated’; but still he does not seem to rest in that anticipation, and, I think, will never rest until he gets hold of a definite belief.

It is strange how he persists — and has persisted ever since I knew him, and probably long before – in wandering to and fro over these deserts, as dismal and monotonous as the sandhills amid which we were sitting. He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other.

If he were a religious man, he would be one of the most truly religious and reverential; he has a very high and noble nature and is better worth immortality than most of us.

I detect a schism, perhaps innumerable schisms, in the way that American writers have dealt with this amazing crux of a moral and existential problem, over the brief history of our being here since about a few hundred years ago when we came in and killed off the Native Americans and their beliefs which, to me, were so beautiful and real that I now believe they are creeping back up through our consciousness and helping to save us and make us, perhaps, for once, Native Americans ourselves. One route, or splinter, of the schism, would certainly be Walt Whitman’s with its celestial Emersonian extension of the Self below all selves, his holy optimism, and his amazing speaking which, to me, relates quite clearly back and over to the Buddhist, sufi, and other ancient belief-traditions in India, and proximate regions. Whitman’s optimistic extension of the Self, at once happy and true (rarest of all combinations), is believable in his poems – I come out of his poems seduced by it. Then I go read Dickinson. To me, she is one of the other chief schisms, one with a believable negativity, one might say (although there is a caveat in the sense that there is something always childlike and happy in all poetry, in the very act of poetry, to me). When I say “schism” I am thinking specifically of the sense of mutual misreading between these two traditions; for example, there is a statement by Dickinson, in one of her letters, to the effect of that she had not read Whitman, but heard he was obscene (the word she may have used was “scandalous,” her implication was that he was not appropriate for her to read); this distance or split continues down to this day.

For example, there is a poem by Robert Creeley found at p. 332 of his Selected Poems (University of California Press 1991) called “Age.” The poem when I first read it horrified and scared and illuminated me with its sense of the reduction ad absurdum of age and what seemed to be a pretty immaculate description of a colon or prostate exam. And yet, I read a comment by the great Buddhist street master Allen Ginsberg wherein he found the poem funny! He was cracking up as he was talking about it. Yet for me, the poem was scary, definitely a “bummer” Dickinson-type poem. (awful pun intended).

If Emily can misread Walt to be “scandalous,” and Allen can misread Robert to be funny, then – perhaps my own reading is completely wrong, and their readings are right. This wild freedom of interpretive difference, or play, in the way that we approach poems, is related to the health of poetry, one might say.

William Carlos Williams identified Creeley as having a very acute ear for the sounds and rhythms, the cadences of the lines, the phrases, in his poems. Dr. Williams said that Creeley had “[t]he subtlest feeling for the measure that I encounter anywhere except in the verses of Ezra Pound.” (Back cover blurb, Selected Poems, U. Cal. Press). High praise indeed. Especially since in his late speculations on what he termed the “variable foot,” Dr. Williams was especially interested in rhythm, or cadence, or measure, and what impact that could have on poetic form, in the free verse environment outside of regular forms such as the ballad or sonnet, or the formal structures of a poet such as Philip Larkin. Robert Frost famously said that free verse was like playing tennis without a net, but what Dr. Williams realized was that there were still all manner of nets, or possible nets, to work with. In Creeley’s writing, one witnesses a craft-sense for measure, or rhythm, or the physical velocity of the words and musical sounds, which not only erects a new tennis net in the place of, say, an iambic pentameter a/b/a/b rhyme scheme, but also allows for experiments in plain language (in ancient parlance, “plain chant,” plain song, peasant song, fellaheen campfire-song), or extreme simplicity and plainness of vocabulary, and of abstract removal from phanopoiea (Ezra Pound’s term for intricately observed visual detail, with attendant idiosyncrasy in word-choice, for example as one might see in the poems of Elizabeth Bishop), which are unrivalled to this day. Dr. Williams was interested in the antipoetic as a form of poetic, and in reading something like this by Creeley, there is a shock-effect, a sense of “but is that a poem?” “can you be that vague in a poem?” which immediately leads into a realization of a different possibility for the poem:

I didn’t know what I could do.
I have never known it
but in doing found it
as best I could.

“Wait you can’t be that vague in a poem!” in the reader’s mind becomes “Wait you can’t be that vague in a poem?” becomes “Wait, can you be that vague in a poem?” becomes “Wait, is that vague?” becomes . . . a new possibility?

(from “Mazatlan: Sea,” p. 158, Selected Poems).

Or again this:

Reading that primitive systems
seem to have natural cause for
the return to one, after ten—
but this is not ten — out of
nothing, one, to return to that —
Americans have a funny way —
somebody wrote a poem about it —
of “doing nothing” — What else
should, can, they do?

(“Numbers,” Selected Poems, p. 148).

The reader’s reaction might instantly be, “but is that a poem, that’s just a notebook thought,” but then (at least for me), this reader-response gradually transmutes into, “well, perhaps a poem could be like this?” “what is a poem anyway?” “hey let me try that” etc.

Whatever’s
to be
thought
of thinking
thinking’s
thought of
it still
thinks
it thinks
to know
itself so
thought.

(“Whatever,” from Windows (New Directions 1987) p. 127).

This sense of expanded experimental possibility is not related to content. This is very important. It is content which kills us. It is content, meaning, “what it means” which guides us as a gunsight does a bullet to what I opened this essay with, the nothingness after death. It is meaning which takes us to the awful lack of meaning which is the realization of western nihilism and of the fact (the apparent fact, for who am I to know) that the mind is the brain, the brain is a biological machine, the brain will stroke out or crumble, mind will go away, “I” will die, effective forever and permanent, zero, no me, nada, zip, horrific nothingness). I want to say (if it is not an effrontery) that this is the permanent enemy-theme, frightening meaning, in all of Creeley’s poems, and moreso as he grows old. BUT MEANING IS NOT ALL. “Without music life is a mistake” said Nietzsche and poetry is all about the precious music of the words, the words as physical sound and graphical objects having tactile melodious and rhythmical aspects, to be handled in the poem, as paint is handled in a painting, regardless of what the words mean, entirely aside from signified content – the essence and source of poetry. In the words of the masters:

“It isn’t what he says that counts as a work of art, it’s what he makes, with such intensity of perception that it lives with an intrinsic movement of its own to verify its authenticity.”
—Williams, quoted at p. 726, Michael Schmidt, Lives of the Poets (Phoenix 1998).

“A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words . . .”
—Id., p. 727.

“Music, states of happiness, mythology, faces worn by time, certain twilights and certain places, all want to tell us something, or have told us something we shouldn’t have lost, or are about to tell us something; that imminence of a revelation as yet unproduced is, perhaps, the aesthetic fact.”
— Jorge Luis Borges,
“The Wall and the Books,” in Selected Non Fictions (Penguin 1999), p. 346).

“Upper limit music, lower limit speech.”
— Louis Zukofsky, quoted by Robert Creeley at p. vii, introduction to Zukofsky’s book, A Test of Poetry (Wesleyan 2000).

The form of motion, of beauty, of stalks of grass curved southward in a north breeze which just shifted, in the arch of the back of a neck of a mourning dove, or in a upward cascade of piano notes in late Beethoven or guitar notes in late Hendrix, are aesthetic facts which say nothing about death — which have integrity without having to be slaves of the statement “death is everything, death is zero, we are exterminated.”

And yet the effort incessantly to tease meaning out of these mere formalities, these mere bodily gestures in the form of music, will always persist.

There is a very rare and hard-to-find piece of writing that William Carlos Williams did right before the end of his life. This was an introduction to a big hardbound edited selection of Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” in which bits of Whitman’s text were interspersed with black and white photos. (The Illustrated Leaves of Grass, Grosset & Dunlap, 1971). This wonderful piece of prose reflection, which is to be treasured, dates from 1960. Among other things it is profoundly deluded about Whitman’s sexuality, apparently, as in the piece Dr. Williams ties Whitman’s verse to “the love of a woman” and I think Dr. Williams is missing the boat as to Walt’s sexuality, and I would relate this back to another blind spot in Dr. Williams’ writing where he says in one of his letters that he’d heard Hart Crane was a “crude homo” or words to that effect. Regardless, in his late piece about Whitman, Dr. Williams says:

The American idiom is my language, he said, to write a book called Leaves of Grass because leaves of grass can be found everywhere in my country. I’ll open my mouth where I happen to be standing and let the world hear what I happen to say because it is also what they of the world have to say — and so we shall be singing together because we are one.

Emphasis “singing.” He goes on:

There is an art of poetry, Whitman said. I can’t bother about that. It is attested by the witness of many voices, granted. I haven’t at the moment time for it.

. . .

A jarring note had been struck by Whitman. The use of the language in the New World might have to be modified — if not yet, eventually — to accommodate the more variable principal enunciated for the first time by this man. With a shock we realized that, postpone as we may, this was the time our rigid dictates would be modified.

Emphasis “variable.” This is the same term Williams uses when he elucidates his poetics of “variable foot.” But let us continue reading over Dr. Williams' shoulder, as he writes:

When Walt turned his back definitely on blank verse, and in the excitement of a poet’s mind imagined himself free, he was in the main mistaken; on the other hand, he established himself as the greatest poet we shall ever know. To speak of verse as “free” is a contradiction in terms, an impossibility. Measure is the sine qua non of all verse; verse cannot exist without it. When Whitman abandoned blank verse, the iambic pentameter, and turned to the American idiom for release, by the same gesture he turned away from an established custom. He was turning toward the unknown future, knowing that he did not know its profound implications.

There is something enormously touching about overhearing this one elder poet, at the end of his life, speaking of another one. In speaking of others, of course, it is very rare that it is not the case that we are also in a way speaking of ourselves, of our hopes for ourselves. He goes on:

Whitman’s attack had to take a chance at being violently mistaken, for it was directed at the first of all verse verities, measure itself, a revaluation of the underlying principles which carried it. That the entire structure might be outmoded occurred to no one else of his generation.

English verse had crystallized about the iamb ever since the race had come into being. Before Chaucer and Beowulf the pattern had long since been set. The Elizabethans had gripped it into the particular form of their blank verse, the iambic pentameter, until the whole of Christendom would accept nothing else as characteristic. To many, then, Whitman was no better than a heathen . . .

Whitman’s blood was singing within his veins . . .

To hope, and more than that, to give expression to that hope, through real and deeply self-scarred, deeply vulnerable artistic effort, for that to be the effort, effort within the most useless spheres of words, once they have drifted and fallen free of any ulterior, provable, monetarily remunerative adequacy, one might say, is an activity of veracity and humility no more or less subject to doubt than the reality of humanity itself. There is an element of risk to this which is fundamental to the point that all supposed fundamentals are effaced and crushed. In a late work which was left unfinished at his death, the philosopher Theodor Adorno wrote, of Beethoven’s late work, that it was as “process, but not as development,” as a “catching fire between extremes which no longer allow for any secure middle ground or harmony of spontaneity.” This idea of a lack of fundamentals, of a lack of “secure middle ground,” which is, at the same time, a mark of artistic integrity (note the extreme tension of contradiction here, of an integrity marked as self-critique of any integrity, fundament, ground as a value), is to me one of the great realities of Robert Creeley’s poetry, and a reason why I think Michael Schmidt was incorrect in giving him short shrift at pp. 744-45 of Schmidt’s otherwise extraordinarily gigantic and devotional “Lives of the Poets” which I have also quoted from above. One corollary of freedom of interpretation is that there will not be a unified hierarchical base to the reputation of any poet in a truly freely interpretive society. It will always be the case that that one as prescient as Dickinson will decline even to read Whitman, and that when it came to him, “[a] fellow countryman, himself a great writer, Herman Melville, completely missed the point.” (Williams, introduction to The Illustrated Leaves of Grass).

Let me ask you a question. If you were forced to choose between allowing the free play of value meaning that the value of yourself was in dispute, or allowing yourself to be validated and elevated within a societal hierarchy of valuation which censors and freezes out heretical opinion to the contrary, which would you choose? But before you answer, let me tell you also that when I say “heretical opinion to the contrary” I mean very directly a rampant critique of yourself, of all that you’ve done, and if you are a writer, all that you’ve written, that is so deeply corrosive that if you were to grow to believe it you might realize the entire main thrust and effort of your life not only to have been misguided and wasteful expenditure but also violation and trampling upon the ease of mind and happiness of others, including those closest to you — let me also add that the force of this critique, for a writer lacking fundament, security, ground, because of his or her belief in the integrity of uncertainty, is what led one Kafka to request his friend Max Brod to burn all his works, led the best friends of Byron to indeed burn his spicy memoirs (perhaps his best book, the bastards!) tossing them into the fireplace, led Empedocles to jump into a volano, Crane Hart to jump over deck rail of the S.S. Orizaba, Crane Stephen to only find happiness with a strange woman he met in England, Jesus to weep not for himself but for the pain of loss he foresaw in Magdelene’s mind, James Schuyler to sit with cigarettes, antidepressants, myself the same, Paul Celan to head in the general direction of the Seine after highlighting the a phrase in a biography of the german poet Holderlin which was left open under the desklamp bulb in Paul Celan’s small apartment in Paris, late in an evening, as reported by John Felstiner:

April 19 [1970]: Reading a biography of Holderlin, Celan underlines these words about his great mad predecessor: "Sometimes this genius goes dark and sinks down into the bitter well of his heart." He does not (I noticed when I came on this book in his library) underline the rest of that sentence: "but mostly his apocalyptic star glitters wondrously."

(from Felstiner, “Paul Celan Meets Samuel Beckett,” APR, July/August 2004).

In his write-up on Creeley, Michael Schmidt says, in pertinent part:

Those who purchase his books and take them home to a silent room find them very silent poems. There is a large body of work, much of it in a short measure, but the short line is not necessarily taut, the absence of semantic nuance gives a precision which requires precise and interesting objects. The plainer the language, the more short-breathed the rhythms, the more fascinating the subject-matter must be . . . For Creeley . . . too much has been jettisoned without enough being put in its place.

(Lives of the Poets, p. 744).

I respectfully disagree with this assessment. First of all, if what you seek is “precise and interesting objects,” as opposed to more abstract experiments, then such objects are to be found in Creeley’s poems, as in the following examples:

For love — I would
Split open your head and put
A candle in
Behind the eyes.

Love is dead in us
If we forget
The virtues of an amulet
And quick surprise.

(“For Love,” in Selected Poems, p. 43).

The whole poem rides on the force of the image in the first stanza.

I see you, Aunt Bernice —
And your smile anticipating reality.
I don’t care any longer that you’re older.
There are times all the time the same.

I’m a young old man here on earth,
Sticks, dust, rain, trees, people.
You cat killing rats in Florida was incredible—
Pete — weird, sweet presence, Strong.

You were good to me. You had wit –
Value beyond all other human possibility.
You could smile at the kids, the old cars.
Your house in N.H. was lovely.

(“I Love You,” Selected Poems, p. 238).

You can’t beat that image of Pete the cat.

Back in time
for supper
when the lights

(“Echo,” Selected Poems, p. 297).

There is something so beautiful about the “when” in the last line and the way it breaks off — a Holderlin effect. Human desire, home-love, homesickness, incompletion, verity, is said in such a line-image. Friedrich Holderlin (1770-1843) made a poetic breakthrough akin to the one of Whitman, or of Dickinson, or of you there, when you write a good poem, or have a good insight, or kiss your daughter on the forehead. It is a breakthrough which has to do with the unsaid:

And no one knows

Meanwhile let me roam
And pick wild berries
To quiet my love for you
Upon your paths, O Earth

Here where

And the thorns of roses
And sweet lindens cast their fragrance
Beside the beeches, at noon, when the pale rye
Rustles with the growth of slender stalks,
Their ears bowed to the side
Like autumn, but beneath the high
Vault of oaks, as I muse
And question the sky, the sound of bells
I know well
From afar rings golden at the hour
Of reawakening birds. So it goes.

(Holderlin, “Home,” trans. from the German by Richard Sieburth, in “Hymns and Fragments” (Princeton University Press 1984), p. 127).

In modern and postmodern times, with our abundance of cybernetic instant textual preservation, perhaps we make our fragments for ourselves. In ancient times, this was done by the operation of time, by a few hungry moths, by a grave-preparer peasant in Egypt required to tear apart papyrus into thin strands with which to wrap the paper-mache soul-boat of a mummy, from which strands, recovered later, we have recovered such fragments of Sappho:

Gather your [ lyre ] and sing for me [ Soon ]
As desire once again [ enhances ] your beauty:
Your dress excites, and I rejoice
For I once doubted Aphrodite
But now have asked that soon
You will be with me again

(Sappho, fragment 22, trans. D. W. Myatt).

Or of Jesus:

The wisdom which (humans) call barren is the Mother of the Angels. And the girlfriend of [Jesus] is Mary the Magdalene. [He loved] Mary more than [all the (other)] Disciples, [and he] kissed her often on her [mouth.]

(reconstructed Gospel of Philip, trans. by me).

Well, I'm sure you can see why that was suppressed.

In 1945, a couple Egyptian peasant farmers where walking the cliff edges. A certain form of nutritious soil was to be found at the base of these cliffs, and was gathered and used by these farmers for their crops. One of the men, bored, spotted an opening, a cleft in the cliff. Idly, he tossed a stone in. He heard a sound of tinkling cracked glass. He walked up and peered in. There was an old stoneware pottery vase, quite large, which he had broken. Dust was slowly spilling off its top as tea-steam might rise off a cup of hot tea. He looked within. There were some old scrolls there. He took them out and took them home. It is said that over the next several weeks, while the two very poor peasants were out about Cairo seeking for a westerner antiquarian with a willingness to buy these old wrecked parchments, and carrying samples of them with them, the men’s mother sat at home beside the fire, and as the fire flared low, might use a couple pieces of the parched parchment to feed the flame back up, as it made good tinder. However she did not use all of it (in contrast to the Emperor of Alexandria, who succeeded in using almost all of Sappho’s scrolls and parchment-books from the condemned Library of Alexandria to feed the fires which heated the luxuriant public baths for the sweaty populace) and we have some of the fragment parchments of the Library found in the earthenware jug by these two Egyptian men. It is now called the Nag Hammadi Library. It is believed a small Cliffside community of heretical Gnostic monks carried these texts to the base of the cliff and hid them inside the cleft as the Christian-Roman authorities, 200 or so years after Jesus’ death, had decided which texts would fit into the official Bible and requested that the remainder be destroyed. So in one fragment: And he said, "Whoever finds the meaning of these sayings will not taste death." (Gospel of Thomas, fr. 1, trans. Layton). My god how beautiful and pregnant some of these sayings are, it is breathtaking to me that any one of them might have just as well been used by the two Egyptian boys’ mom to feed the fire, and you know what, I would not criticize her for this, and yet, such beautiful poetic value. Let me quote a few more, which, as I shall show below, relate back to Creeley:

1 And he said, "Whoever discovers the interpretation of these sayings will not taste death."

2 Jesus said, "Those who seek should not stop seeking until they find. When they find, they will be disturbed. When they are disturbed, they will marvel, and will reign over all. [And after they have reigned they will rest.]"

3 Jesus said, "If your leaders say to you, 'Look, the (Father's) kingdom is in the sky,' then the birds of the sky will precede you. If they say to you, 'It is in the sea,' then the fish will precede you. Rather, the kingdom is within you and it is outside you.

When you know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will understand that you are children of the living Father. But if you do not know yourselves, then you live in poverty, and you are the poverty."

4 Jesus said, "The person old in days won't hesitate to ask a little child seven days old about the place of life, and that person will live.

For many of the first will be last, and will become a single one."
. . .

20 The disciples said to Jesus, "Tell us what Heaven's kingdom is like."
He said to them, It's like a mustard seed, the smallest of all seeds, but when it falls on prepared soil, it produces a large plant and becomes a shelter for birds of the sky.

21 Mary said to Jesus, "What are your disciples like?"
He said, They are like little children living in a field that is not theirs.

22 Jesus saw some babies nursing. He said to his disciples, "These nursing babies are like those who enter the kingdom."

. . .

42 Jesus said, "Be passersby." . . .

54 Jesus said, "Congratulations to the poor, for to you belongs Heaven's kingdom."

. . .

77 Jesus said . . . "Split a piece of wood; I am there.
Lift up the stone, and you will find me there."

(Gospel of Thomas, Stephen Patterson and Marvin Meyer).

I know that I am not the only one who can hear the majesty of these sayings. For Walt Whitman never read them, and yet he wrote:

The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me . . . . he complains
of my gab and my loitering.

I too am not a bit tamed . . . . I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the word.

The last scud of day holds back for me,
It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadowed wilds.
It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk.

I depart as air . . . . I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,
I effuse my flesh in eddies and drift it in lacy jags.

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love.
If you want me again look for me under your bootsoles.

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.

(from “I celebrate myself,” Leave of Grass 1855 edition, in Gary Schmidgall ed., p. 65).

My god how heartfelt and wonderful. Compare:

Split a piece of wood; I am there.
Lift up the stone, and you will find me there.

(Yeshua, impoverished handyman’s son in Palestinian outpost of Rome, in suppressed Gospel of Thomas).

If you want me again look for me under your bootsoles.

(Whitman, mediocre suppressed-gay newspaper rag reporter, lived off sociable handouts). And:

My legacy — what will it be?
flowers in spring,
the cuckoo in summer,
and the crimson maples
of autumn . . .

(Ryokan, very poor Buddhist monk, in Japan, tolerated by his neighbors, enjoyed playing ball with children, early 1800s). And:

The fairest thing I leave behind is sunlight,
then shining stars and the full moon's face,
and also ripe cucumbers and apples and pears.

(Praxilla, a Greek lyric woman poet of the fifth century B.C., she was criticized for this poem because the powers-that-be believed that calling a vulgar cucumber a beautiful thing worth of soul transmigration was not only sacrilegious, but idiotic).

Incredibly beautiful. Allowing life and death. And too weird to get dogmatized into organized political-economic-military-church-WalMart structures. No wonder there was such a great tumult about Yeshua the son of the carpenter (in that time, the appellation “carpenter” was basically a catch-all for any sort of odd-job handyman, landless jobber) and the woman who maybe was raped by or even had an affair with that gross roman soldier Panthera (a truth suppressed for being too vile, or a vile rumor added for the truth was too pure? What’s the difference?), and when Yeshua got distracted from work in the woodshop and drifted down the roman provincial port city Caesarea and gabbed with some of the disreputable greek teachers down at the boys’ school and their fragrant reminiscences of Heraclitus the grouchy presocratic who said:

(10) Nature loves to hide.

(11) The lord whose is the oracle at Delphi neither utters nor hides his meaning, but shows it by a sign.

(12) And the Sibyl, with raving lips uttering things mirthless, unadorned, and unperfumed, reaches over a thousand years with her voice, thanks to the god in her.

. . .

(32) The sun is new every day.

. . .

(46) It is the opposite which is good for us.

(47) The hidden attunement is better than the open.

. . .

(66) The bow lives as it kills.

(67) Mortals are immortals and immortals are mortals, the one. Living the others' death and dying the others' life.

(68) For it is death to souls to become water, and death to water to become earth. But water comes from earth; and from water, soul.

(69) The way up and the way down is one and the same.

(70) In the circumference of a circle the beginning and end are common.

(71) You will not find the boundaries of soul by traveling in any direction, so deep is the measure of it.

(Heraclitus, Fragments).

Heraclitus, Sappho and Jesus are all examples of the fragment due to the incidence of time, the moths which eat at the records of the weather-exposed parchment. 2000 years later, Holderlin is the example of the fragment caused not by time’s effacing effect on the physical materiality of text, but rather, due to silent and scorched interiority’s of the poet’s mind. The caesurae in Holderlin’s text are not caused by moths eating bits out of his pieces of paper, but rather, shifts and changes in his own head, as he stops mid-sentence, or erases or writes over what he just wrote. The effect of the fragmentations, the gaps, is peculiarly contemporary to us; there is something about the effect, to my ear, which makes his poems seem infinitely closer to my own mind, in a sense, than, say, those of his historical contemporary Goethe. I should also note here, along the theme of freedom of interpretation and the conflicts that brings, that Goethe was said not to have much liked Holderlin’s poems, and on the one occasion they met, Holderlin having dropped by Schiller’s house, Holderlin did not realize at the time that the rather quiet older man in the room was — well, here, let him tell the story:

I’ve already visited Schiller a few times, the first time not exactly with success. I went in, got a friendly welcome, and hardly noticed in the background a stranger of whom not a gesture and for long afterward not a sound made me suspect anything special. Schiller introduced us, but I did not gather his name. Coldly, almost without a glance, I said How-do-you-do, and was altogether occupied with Schiller, inwardly and outwardly; the stranger did not say anything for a long time. Schiller brought the issue of 'Thalia' which contained a fragment of my Hyperion and my poem “to Destiny” and gave it to me. Since Schiller then left the room for a moment, the stranger then picked up the journal fro the table by me, thumbed through the fragment, standing by my side, and said nothing. I felt myself blushing all over. Had I known what I know now, I would have gone as pale as a corpse.

(Holderlin, letter dated November 1794 to Christian Ludwig Neuffer, at pp. 11-12, The Poet’s Vocation (University of Texas Press)).

The stranger was Goethe. Understand that at that time Goethe was widely considered the best mind and best writer in all of Europe. This social disconnect tells how disconnect, incompletion – the heart of the fragment – is organic, is natural to our lives. Consider the ringing effect of the incompletion embedded in these pieces by Holderlin, and how similar in spirit or tone this is to some of the pieces of Creeley (who indeed wrote a book called “Pieces” and marked by the use of graphical dots to intersperse pure fragments):

I overnight in the village

Alp air

Down the lane

Home reunion. Native sun

Boating,
Friends men and mother
Slumber

(Holderlin, “To My Sister,” trans. Sieburth, p. 223).

The sense of a quest for human lived essentiality, coupled with a silencing so explicit that it interrupts the text.

A timid child, I planted you

Lovely plant! how changed we see each other now

Splendid you stand there

like a child.

(“The Tree,” p. 225).

The enormous implicit pathos in the comparator, in the current status of the poet’s adult scarred self who says this.

He remains nowhere.
No sign
Binds.
Rarely

A vessel to grasp him.

(p. 229).

The heartfeltness of this, implicit in the form. Whole breakage.

I want to build

And raise new
The temples of Theseus and the stadiums
And where Perikles lived

But there’s no money, too much spent
Today. I had a guest
Over and we sat together

(p. 245).

How beautiful, the turn from the impossible impracticality of the mythological reconstructive dream, to the impossible scarcity of the practical reality. When Holderlin went insane some speculated that maybe he faked it, did it on purpose and wasn’t actually crazy, because he needed to hide out and protect himself in this way because he had gotten implicated in a political scandal involving his school days friends who were idealistic and did not like the government. I do not think that was the case. We have some memorable images of Holderlin, reported by his friends, which are valuable to include within our daily thoughts as we continue to negotiate this landscape of Wal-Marts and Dialysis Clinics and the intricacies of this rented landscape not much different from Holderlin’s. The writer Matthison in Stuttgart reports in late June 1802:

pale as a corpse, emaciated, with hollow wild eyes, long hair and beard, and dressed like a beggar.

(Sieburth, introduction p. 6).

Mr. Schelling describes to Mr. Hegel in summer 1803:

I was shocked by his aspect: he neglects his appearance in the most disgusting fashion . . .

(p. 9). On September 11, 1806, another watcher:

He did everything he could to throw himself out of the vehicle, but the attendant in charge pushed him back in again. Screaming that he was being abducted by military guards, Holterling [sic] scratched the attendant with his enormously long fingernails until the man was completely bloodied.

(p. 10).

Surely too crazy to write after that, right? You be the judge — Holderlin wrote sometime between 1822 and 1826, as quoted by Wilhelm Waiblinger, who visited him at his room in the house of the kindly carpenter Zimmer:

In lovely blue the steeple blossoms
With its metal roof. Around which
Drift swallow cries, around which
Lies most loving blue. The sun,
High overhead, tints the roof tin,
But up in the wind, silent,
The weathercock crows

. . .

Yet so simple
These images, so very holy,
One fears to describe them

. . .

May a man look up
From the utter hardship of his life
And say: Let me also be
Like these? Yes. As long as kindness lasts,
Pure, within his heart, he may gladly measure himself
Against the divine. Is God unknown?
Is he manifest in the sky? This I tend
To believe

. . .

poetically
man dwells on this earth. But the shadow
of the starry night is no more pure, if I may say so,
than man, said to be the image of god

. . .

Is there measure on earth? There is
None

. . .

People’s
Laughter seems to grieve me,
After all, I have a heart.
Would I like to be a comet? I think so.
They are swift as birds, they flower
With fire, childlike in purity. To desire
More than this is beyond human measure

. . .

If a man look into a mirror
And see his likeness, as if painted,
It is his likeness. Man’s image has eyes,
But the moon has light.
King Oedipus might have had one eye too many.
The sufferings of man seem indescribable,
Inexpressible, unspeakable

. . .

But what do I feel, now thinking of you?
Like brooks, I am carried away

. . .

It leads young men along their paths,
Charmed by rays like roses

. . .

Life is death, death a life.

(“In Lovely Blue,” Sieburth trans. pp. 249-250, slightly altered by me).

I want to note something that Mr. Waiblinger said in his own writing. Mr. Waiblinger went and visited Holderlin many times when Holderlin in his insanity was staying in a room for free at Zimmer’s house. Waiblinger wanted to be a poet himself, a novelist, so what he did is, he adapted over Holderlin’s life into his novel and made the poor crazy Holderlin the hero and main character, named Phaeton, in his novel. The reason we have the “In Lovely Blue” fragment which I just quoted from above is because Waiblinger inserted it into his book. Literary historians believe that this quoted text in Waiblinger’s novel is actually a verbatim text of one of Holderlin’s pieces of paper found lying around his small room at Zimmer’s. What frightens me the most is the following statement by Waiblinger:

He [i.e., Holderlin] would cover all the paper he could lay his hands on with writing. Here are a few pages taken from his papers which give a good idea of his terribly distraught state of mind.

(Sieburth p. 281).

And thence follows “In Lovely Blue.” I think you know what shocks me about this. If true, what it means is that there were many other pieces of Holderlin’s Zimmer-era writing lying around, which one assumes got thrown out into the garbage because, hey, after all, even as Waiblinger said, they were junk, right, ravings of a madman, grotesque and indecipherable. Right? Fuck no. To me “In Lovely Blue” is just as good as the other stuff he wrote. It scars my heart to think about how there might have been many other pages of writing of its equivalence that were all destroyed due to simple cultural ignorance. For the German philosopher Heidegger, “In Lovely Blue” was a key text. He wrote a whole book about it. And then, in excruciating irony, it is the same Heidegger who fails to be able to help save Celan in his last months:

His [Celan’s] last weeks, in late winter and early spring of 1970, seesaw between despair and determination.

He travels to Stuttgart to read at a Holderlin celebration. German listeners reject his clipped, cryptic lyrics--in one poem the lines seem symptomatic: "Yet we could not / darken over to you." During a small seminar in Freiburg, he actually reproaches Heidegger for inattentiveness. Later: "Celan is sick--incurable," says the philosopher . . .

. . .

April 19-20: Sometime during this night, Celan walks across from Avenue Emile Zola to Apollinaire's darling Pont Mirabeau and drowns in the Seine, though since his youth he's been a strong swimmer. April 20th, eve of Pesach the festival of freedom, is also Hitler's birthday.

(Felstiner, APR Beckett article).

But do not get hung up on the depressive ironies of this. I want to indicate how, behind all this, one returns, again and again, to a very simple, basic human situation: namely, the person, the poet, in a humble setting, not falsified by fame, not dead, still alive in this frangible human moment, perhaps with a few friends, in Whitman’s words a few camerados, maybe a few other poets he or she vaguely or well-knows, and inside this humble setting without fame or prospects and enshrined by nothing more than the daylight, or the light of a desklamp at night, these figures, be they Jesus, or Holderlin, or Williams, or Creeley, or grouchy Heraclitus, make a piece of statement, something said, whether never written (Jesus only spoke) or never spoken (Emily was too shy to speak, she only wrote down), in these situations, we dwell on this earth poetically, in Holderlin’s words. In a discussion with Alan Riachat the University of Waikato in Hamilton, New Zealand on July 26, 1995, reminiscing about his poem “I Know a Man,” Robert Creeley recounts how it was 1955

and the Eisenhower era. I remember it was written in San Francisco and I remember that I was literally at wit's end, so it is a curious double. Noone said this to me but I'm saying it to myself for sure. My marriage had fallen apart. I'd left Black Mountain, had come to San Francisco, I was crashed for a time on Ed Dorn and his wife then Helene and their family. I'd just met Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg. I'd just connected with my terrific peers, and I was living in this little apartment on Montgomery Street off Broadway, but the point is I had no prospects, in one old-fashioned sense, but the whole world was mine!

Here we see how for Creeley, the upbeat or nondepressive element of existence appears to be tied into the social environment of the poets. This may explain why many of us have had the recurrent experience of visiting a used bookstore and locating an especially obscure and long-desired book by a writer such as Charles Olson or Paul Blackburn or Louis Zukosky, and finding a short and immaculate introduction at the front of book by Creeley. He has, it appears, enjoyed the pleasures of merely circulating, to use Wallace Stevens’ phrase, in the world of the poets, and has, in that respect, perhaps been less lonely at some points than some others of us. Yet it is very clear from his writing that he has experienced and does experience loneliness which has been perhaps much greater than that avowed by many of us. Here is the poem which I referenced earlier which, in one notation, Allen Ginsberg found humorous, but which I have always found to be deeply scary:

Most explicit—
the sense of trap

as a narrowing
cone one's got

stuck into and
any movement

forward simply
wedges once more—

but where
or quite when,

even with whom,
since now there is no one

quite with you—Quite? Quiet?
English expression: Quait?

Language of singular
impedance? A dance? An

involuntary gesture to
others not there? What's

wrong here? How
reach out to the

other side all
others live on as

now you see the
two doctors, behind

you, in mind's eye,
probe into your anus,

or ass, or bottom,
behind you, the roto-

rooter-like device
sees all up, concludes

"like a worn-out inner tube,"
"old," prose prolapsed, person's

problems won't do, must
cut into, cut out . . .

The world is a round but
diminishing ball, a spherical

ice cube, a dusty
joke, a fading,

faint echo of its
former self but remembers,

sometimes, its past, sees
friends, places, reflections,

talks to itself in a fond,
judgmental murmur,

alone at last.
I stood so close

to you I could have
reached out and

touched you just
as you turned

over and began to
snore not unattractively,

no, never less than
attractively, my love,

my love—but in this
curiously glowing dark, this

finite emptiness, you, you, you
are crucial, hear the

whimpering back of
the talk, the approaching

fears when I may
cease to be me, all

lost or rather lumped
here in a retrograded,

dislocating, imploding
self, a uselessness

talks, even if finally to no one,
talks and talks.

(“Age,” in Selected Poems, p. 332).

One reason why Creeley may have done so much work in terms of connecting with other poets and being available, giving interviews and editing and prefacing the books of other writers, is because of his inner loneliness. This might sound like a banal observation but the reason I say it is because I do not detect false pretension or desire to get to the top of the heap of the fame-game in his poetical sociability; instead I detect a desire for community, what Thich Naht Hanh calls sangha, as opposed to solitary loneliness. I will never forget my wife Jenni’s joy when Robert Creeley wrote her back by email and let her do an email interview of him. This is so distinguishable from the political lamentable mechanics of poetical-social interaction found in the case of certain other “heavy hitters” in the game. And yet, his approach, or the affect in his text, in poems and outside of it, has never been especially slushy or sentimentally emotive; there has always been a detectable New England reticence and even dryness to it, reminiscent of white snow fields in Maine or of the texture of wood as seen through dry kitchen windows in early winter afternoon in some of the tempera works of Andrew Wyeth. This is discernable in the reticence of personal autobiographical spillage in Creeley’s works, as compared, say, to Ginsberg. My memory of writings that I have read by participants in the early 1950s Black Mountain school experiment of Charles Olson which was located outside of Asheville, North Carolina, as they relate to Creeley, consists of impressions of him as someone awkward and uncommunicative at times, strange in the classroom, profoundly not at ease with himself; of him seen with rows of issues of the Black Mountain Review or some such “Little Magazine” lined up, as I recall, below an open window and they were getting rained on; and then, also, a salacious gossipy reminiscence by one confrere having to do with frequent excursions to the one small bar in town and a very bad car crash incident that occurred on campus. In other words, a personal human autobiographical situation as fraught and pain-laden as yours or mine. I also read somewhere of him coming to blows with the poet Paul Blackburn overseas somewhere. It was shocking to me to read anecdotes of Creeley actually getting drunk in bars and getting into fistfights, and perhaps I abuse my discretion as a critic in even alluding to such incidents here, but I wish to do so because it allows me to perceive him as a figure as common as myself, as a “real person.” This is because in his poems, with their powers and formal controls, there is a sense of a personality opposed or an antinomy to this biographical personage. But enough of that. I will leave it at this, to quote from Creeley’s introduction to Paul Blackburn located on John Tranter’s wonderful Jacket website, as follows:

I’d like to speak personally of this extraordinary poet, and take that license insofar as these poems are personal, often bitterly so. I wonder if any of us have escaped the painful, self-pitying and meager defenses of person so many of them invoke. What we had hoped might be, even in inept manner worked to accomplish, has come to nothing — and whose fault is that, we ask. Certainly not mine? Having known both of these dear people, and myself, I have to feel that there will never be a human answer, never one human enough.

. . .

Elsewise Paul certainly did drink, did smoke those Gauloises and Picayunes, did work at exhausting editing and proofing jabs for Funk & Wagnalls, etc., etc. It’s a very real life. The honor, then, is that one live it. And tell the old-time truth. Of course there will be human sides to it, but Paul would never argue that one wins. To make such paradoxic human music of despair is what makes us human to begin with. Or so one would hope.

I would encourage you to click over to Jacket and read the rest of this article, as well as Blackburn’s poem-on-poetry “Statement,” and I would also ask you to consider this poem:

“It would be —
a mercy if
you did not come see me . . .


I have dif-fi / culty
speak-ing, I

cannot count on it, I
am afraid it would be too em-
ba
rass-ing
for me .”

— Bill, can you still
answer letters?

“no . My hands
are tongue-tied . you have . . . made
a record in my heart.
Goodbye.”

(Paul Blackburn, “Phone Call to Rutherford”).

This poem was written after Blackburn tried to call Dr. Williams and had that brief conversation with him over the telephone. This was late in Dr. Williams’ life after he had had a succession of mentally debilitating strokes. The strokes were incremental, occurring here and there over time, gradually taking away his ability to write. The poem is inexpressibly touching. This period of very great difficulty also produced wondrous works from Williams. Dr. Williams had to spend periods of time in hospitals, or sanitoria, because of the acute psychological depression which this decline in health caused him. It was also during this period, according to his biographer Paul Mariani, that he felt compelled to tell his wife Flossie about certain indiscretions he had committed decades prior. The poems he wrote during this time come from an inner position of what Rilke called “exposure,” as in being psychologically and spiritually naked, fraught, and exposed. I want to say that it is this psychological or spiritual condition of which Yeshua was thinking when he was reported to have said “blessed are the poor in spirit, for they will see god.” It is also this condition of spiritual poverty which the 20th century mystic Simone Weil might have had in mind when she wrote, in her posthumously collected fragments found in the book “Gravity and Grace,” the following:

In order to have the strength to contemplate affliction when we are afflicted we need supernatural bread.

. . .

Every kind of reward constitutes a degradation of energy.

. . .

Grace fills empty spaces but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void.

. . .

To love truth means to endure the void and, as a result, to accept death. Truth is on the side of death.

. . .

The good seems to us a nothingness, since there is no thing that is good. But this nothingness is not unreal. Compared with it, everything in existence is unreal.

. . .

We must leave on what side beliefs which fill up voids and sweeten what is bitter. The belief in immortality.

. . .

To come down by a movement in which gravity plays no part. . . gravity makes things come down, wings make them rise: what wings raised to the second power can make things come down without weight?

(Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (Routledge 1952), pp. 3, 7, 10, 13).

Understand that Weil died of self-starvation because she refused to feed herself in the midst of World War II. Understand this is not only her condition, it is also yours. I am sorry if I am being too preachy here. These are my reflections on the poetry of Robert Creeley, very honestly. I am trying to get at a point here. Please compare the last above-referenced quote from Weil to the following which concludes Rilke’s “Duino Elegies”:

Yet the dead youth must go on alone.
In silence the elder Lament brings him
as far as the gorge where it shimmers in the moonlight:
The Foutainhead of Joy. With reverence she names it,
saying: "In the world of mankind it is a life-bearing stream."

They reach the foothills of the mountain,
and there she embraces him, weeping.

Alone, he climbs the mountains of primeval pain.
Not even his footsteps ring from this soundless fate.

But were these timeless dead to awaken an image for us,
see, they might be pointing to the catkins, hanging
from the leafless hazels, or else they might mean
the rain that falls upon the dark earth in early Spring.

And we, who always think
of happiness as rising
feel the emotion
that almost overwhelms us
whenever a happy thing falls.

The idea of emotional and spiritual exposure, or poverty, which is possibly the sole means to be in the true sense of the word religious in a time when all statements in our culture as corroded and gelidly frozen over with Billy Graham dogma, however well-meaning it may be, is, I think, of the essence for the poet. Exposure has to do, not necessarily with a surplus of imagination, but with an impoverishment which is breathtaking:

The imagination is continually at work filling up all the fissures through which grace may pass.

. . .

In no matter what circumstances, if the imagination is stopped from pouring itself out we have a void (the poor in spirit).

. . .

We must continually suspend the work of the imagination filling the void within ourselves. If we can accept no matter what void, what stroke of fate can prevent us from loving the universe? We have the assurance that, come what may, the universe is full.

. . .

[T]o pray to god, not only in secret as far as people are concerned, but with the thought that god does not exist.

(Gravity and Grace, pp. 17, 19).

This is like the spiritual exposure I detect in the post-stroke poems of Dr. Williams:

St. Francis,
who befriended the wild birds,
be their aid,
those who
have nothing,
and live
by the Holy light of love
that rules,
blocking despair,
over this garden.

(from “The Mental Hospital Garden,” The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams Vol. 2, p. 265).

at the small end of an illness
there was a picture
probably Japanese
which filled my eye

an idiotic picture
except it was all I recognized
the wall lived for me in that picture
I clung to it as a fly

(“The World Contracted to a Recognizable Image,” id., pp. 415-416).

Very important: the barrenness, the indeterminacy of image in this poem, is the indicia of its spiritual authenticity, its truth, which per Keats, is its beauty. That is why Michael Schmidt is wrong to chastise Creeley for abstraction, vagueness or minimalism of the image. In a dark time, the eye begins to see, and as in a Caravaggio painting, against existential indeterminacy, fuzz or darkness, palpable nothingness, in that tableau, even the smallest of details stands out, even this one brass coat-button of the lolling youth, as a precious thing, as was the cheap poor picture on the wall apparently recognized by Dr. Williams perhaps as he was coming back to himself (to what remained of himself) out of one of his strokes. As any Japanese ink brush painter may know, when one is working with watercolor, i.e. the tableau is so delicate that every mark is permanent and none may be corrected — when the tableau is so exposed — the smallest detail, even a fuzzy half-baked ball of a tiny bird, is everything. This effect occurs time and again in Creeley’s poems, wherein against a very white page which seems to crowd in only from underneath but from both sides, and wherein there is a blank underlying swirling existential confusion or nothingness or vagueness, even the smallest most “minor” indicative or signifying gestures becomes as determinate as a watercolor brush-stroke. In Creeley's poems a lot of the effect of the brushstroke has to do with where and when he lifts the brush from the paper with each stroke — i.e. the linebreak, and for an extra flourish of whiteness, the double linebreak we call the stanza. In the following excerpts from Creeley's long poem on the painter Francesco Clemente, I have removed the line breaks — take a pen an mark where your ear would put them, then compare to the actual poem:

Sleeping birds, lead me, soft birds, be me inside this black room, back of the white moon. In the dark night sight frightens me. . . .

Stand upright, prehensile, squat, determined, small guardians of the painful outside coming in — in stuck in vials with needles, bleeding life in, particular, heedless. . . .

Under watery here, under breath, under duress, understand a pain has threaded a needle with a little man -- gone fishing. And fish appear. . . .

A head was put upon the shelf got took by animal's hand and stuck upon a vacant corpse who, blurred, could nonetheless not ever be the quietly standing bird it watched. . . .

Not lost, not better or worse, much must of necessity depend on resources, the pipes and bags brought with us inside, all the sacks and how and to what they are or were attached. . . .

Everybody's child walks the same winding road, laughs and cries, dies. That's "everybody's child," the one who's in between the others who have come and gone. . . .

Inside I am the other of a self, who feels a presence always close at hand, one side or the other, knows another one unlocks the door and quickly enters in. Either as or, we live a common person. Two is still one. It cannot live apart. . . .

Not metaphoric, flesh is literal earth. turns to dust as all the body must, becomes the ground wherein the seed's passed on. . . .

The truth is in a container of no size or situation. It has nothing inside. Worship —Warship. Sail away.

(from Creeley, “Clemente's Images,” available online).

I hope you can see in Creeley's poems, after reading the prior parts of this essay, what I believe to be echoes of “exposure” in the tradition I have indicated. It may be argued that in this particular vein of poetry, we lack the balanced iambic stability found in certain other traditions, for example some aspects of the steady-footed iambic pentameter tradition which Dr. Williams identifies in his introductory essay to the Illustrated Leaves of Grass as having been irreparably disrupted by Walt Whitman. There is something more halting and unstable in the voice-breath as it is measured out and broken across the lines and gaps witnessed in Holderlin or in Celan or in some of the poems of the later Williams or of Creeley. “So it must be when a variable foot is spoken of, an unstable foot.”

(Williams, from Introduction to Illustrated Leaves of Grass).

If all of our digging for gold never led us to gold but only to dirt, would we continue? Dr. Williams said, as to Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” that “[p]oets and scholars may well dig into it for their gold.” (id.) And so it would appear that much digging may, in fact, result in the obtaining of a little gold. Heraclitus said “[t]hose who seek for gold dig up much earth and find a little.” (Fragment No. 8). And yet it is so dangerous to believe that one has located gold. One becomes like Midas for whom the whole world became grotesquely gold when his eyesight touched it. Simone Weil would likely say that it is better for the searcher for treasure never to find the treasure for which he searches, so that he may realize that the bare dirt is treasure. According to Gospel of Thomas fragment 51: “What you are looking forward to has come, but you don't know it.” These are zen koans, aren't they? And again at fragment 18: "Have you found the beginning, then, that you are looking for the end?” Which statement must immediately remind us of Confucius’ comment when he was asked regarding the afterlife, to wit:

Zilu asked about serving the ghosts of the dead. The Master said, "Until you are able to serve men, how can you serve their ghosts?" When Zilu ventured to ask about death, the answer was: "While you do not know life, how can you [hope to] know about death?"

(Confucius, from The Analects).

Nietzsche indicated that one way to resist the impact of nihilism was to attempt to engage in the revaluation of all values. We can glimpse this in the statements of Simone Weil I have quoted above wherein she shows us how beautiful religious fervor may not only be related to, in our time, but may require, contemplation of “the thought that god does not exist.” We can find similar statements in the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas which I have liberally quoted in this essay, and which I will emphasize was by some estimations written within a couple hundred years of Jesus’ death and of which I am not at all surprised that the early roman church tried to destroy it given its seemingly scandalous content. But through its paradoxical reversals we do seem to glimpse an amazing metaphysical situation in which up is down, what we thought was indispensable is not, no-soul is better than soul, the beginning is the end, and to be lost is to be saved; I am sure I have bored all of you with my quotations from that document but let me be afforded leave for just one more:

If the flesh came into being because of spirit, that is a marvel, but if spirit came into being because of the body, that is a marvel of marvels. Yet I marvel at how this great wealth has come to dwell in this poverty.

(Gospel of Thomas fragment 29).

A reversal worthy of Weil. Or, from Williams:

We all need to pause before the contemplation of our lives before we can laugh or cry. We are dying for it, literally dying for it.

(Introduction to Illustrated Leaves of Grass).

In the poems of Creeley one sees a similar fixation on the immanent, the flower, the here:

Air of heaven sings.
Raspberries ripen. Air
is a familiar presence.

See the dog walk
across the street. He
is limping because you are looking.

(“For Allen,” Collected Poems (University of California Press 1982), pp. 499-500).

As to the berries in the poem, one cannot but hearken back to the "bramble blackberries" in Ginsberg's resonant shortie, "A Strange New Cottage in Berkeley." As to the limping dog? A buddhist might say that world is mind, that your looking creates the world. Some Buddhists emphasize the figure of the bodhisattva, someone who is so compassionate that he refuses to enter heaven, or nirvana, or a nothingness he is holy enough to accept, because out of the corner of his eye he sees a poor sick dog still in this world. There is another Buddhist story regarding a man named Asanga who desired with all his heart to meet the Buddha-one, the bodhisattva, named Maitreya. You might conceive of this deep inner yearning as being like the yearning of a poet to write a good poem or of a human being to be good. Asanga disciplined himself over many years to acquire patience and wisdom. One day, after about 12 years of this lifestyle, and still in his own view of himself coming no closer to meeting the good Buddha, writing the good poem, being the good person, he decided he had to go and take a wiz. So he got up and walked out of his cave on creaky knees into the bright sunlight, and along the path happened to distinguish the smell of rotting flesh from that of the outhouse. He looked where he heard some whimpering behind some bushes and saw a sick dog. The dog was very sick and had an open sore covered with worms.

Having just emerged from strict meditation, and feeling a bit light-headed, maybe a bit off-kilter, and being alone, this man, Asanga, had no urge to hurt the worms (they were ripe white babyish maggots, atop of the wound) in caring for the dog, so, having no better idea of how to go about it (as the story goes), he got on his knees and skimmed the maggots off the sore with his tongue.

The moment he did, the dog disappeared and Bodhisattva Maitreya appeared in its place. Asanga said, "I have hurt my heart wanting to see you so many years. And you chose this moment to appear !?"

Maitreya replied, "I have always been with you, but up til now you weren’t able to see me. To put it in teacher’s terms, I might say it was necessary for you to purify your mind and develop your compassion sufficiently before it was possible for this to happen.”

Then the Bodhisattva asked Asanga to pick him up, put him around his shoulders and take him on a stroll through the neighboring village.

Once there, no one noticed anything unusual at all except for one old woman, who asked, "What are you doing walking around like that with a sick dog on you?"

As you come down
the road, it swings
slowly left and the sea
opens below you,
west. It sounds out.

(Creeley, “As You Come,” Collected Poems p. 539).

Notice the motion of this. Think of:

When over the flowery, sharp pasture's
edge, unseen, the salt ocean

lifts its form—chicory and daisies
tied, released, seem hardly flowers alone

but color and the movement—or the shape
perhaps—of restlessness, whereas

the sea is circled and sways
peacefully upon its plantlike stem

(Williams, “Flowers by the Sea”).

At the beginning of this essay I drew a distinction between the signified content of a poem, or its meaning; and the musical effect of the bodies of the words themselves, apart from what they meant. I wished to consider the musical form of a poem as something that might ease us from the pain of living, and mighty rescue the mind of the reader from the depressive content of death. And yet all’s one. Perhaps I should close with:

Broken heart, you
timeless wonder.

What a small
place to be.

True, true
to life, to life.

(Creeley, “Echo,” Collected Poems p. 548).

However to end in such a wrapped-up fashion would violate the aesthetic of the fragment we are expositing, no? The first of Creeley’s poems to have a dot in it occurs at page 15 of his Collected Poems. The next occurs at page 234. Then in the poems of his book “Pieces, “ which are collected at pp. 378-446, omigod but there are many. What is this “dot”? It demarcates, opens up a space, a rift, between the text above and the text below. It is like a terser version of Walt’s indolent dots:

His nostrils dilate . . . . my heels embrace him . . . . his well built limbs
Tremble with pleasure . . . . we speed around and return.

I but use you a moment and then I resign you stallion . . . .

(Whitman, in Schmidgall edition, p. 41).

The dots in Whitman’s text represent leave-offs in the words, but not necessarily for words that have been edited out, or erased, or lost. It is not like a Sappho fragment taken from a mummy wrapping, a thin strand of rotted papyrus wherein only the first word or two of each line is preserved, as in this translation/imitation by Ezra Pound:

Spring . . . .
Too long . . . .
Gongula . . . .

(Pound, “Papyrus,” from his volume Lustra).

Whitman’s dots represent intentional omissions, and then, only if we call them “omissions,” as they are not really omissions, but are actually the way that he wrote the text. His ellipses occupy a very curious metaphysical space indeed, when we consider that that is how he wrote the poem, after all, and it is not as if the poem originally had more words in it in the spaces where now are the ellipses (the dots). Likewise, for instance, in these beautiful stanzas from Hart Crane:

Friendship agony! Words came to me
At last shyly. My only final friends –
The wren and thrush, made solid print for me
Across dawn’s broken arc. No; yes . . . or were they
The audible ransom, ensign of my faith
Toward something far, now farther than ever away?

Remember the lavender lilies of that dawn,
Their ribbon miles, beside the railroad ties
As one nears New Orleans, sweet trenches by the train
After the western desert, and the later cattle country;
And other gratitudes, like porters, jokes, roses . . .

(Crane, from “A Postscript,” Complete Poems (Liveright 1986), p. 196).

Robert Lowell, too, in his poems, for instance in the poem “Skunk Hour,” often used ellipses as a formal device to indicate, or to be, an intentional leave-off:

A car radio bleats
"Love, O careless Love. . . ." I hear
my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell,
as if my hand were at its throat. . . .
I myself am hell;
nobody's here—

One gets the sense of the dots as representing a place where the language must leave off because the psychological pressure grows too acute or the expression too unspeakable. The dash at the end of the last line quoted above has the same effect. The transition from one chunk of text to another occurs in the silence indicated by the ellipses, instead of occurring articulately in more words. In Holderlin, we saw how there is a similar effect, but more unsettling or acute, in that there is not even the left intentional artifice-marking of the dots, the ellipses, the dash, to as it were signify to us, the reader, a coded message from the writer to the effect of, “yes, I know there is a gap here, don’t worry, it’s intentional, as you can tell from the dots.” Instead, the end or edge of the text prior to silence-transition is a raw space:

Philoctetes lives in memory

They go to the father’s aid
For they desire rest. But when
The useless doings of the earth
Provoke them and from the gods
Are taken
Senses, they then come
Burning

These without breath

For thoughtful god
Detests
Untimely growth.

(Sieburth trans., pp. 159-161).

There is a mystery here. One does not know why the gaps occur. Was this intentional? Is this the sight of mental frenzy? Was this left incomplete? We don’t know, but it is enormously powerful. It is not an easy effect to pull off, this use of gaps, deployment of spaces, without indicative dots, ellipses or dashes. Most times when poets try to do it they look awfully affected. With Holderlin, however, you feel as though it is entirely unaffected, and even, more frightening or holy, that he was not entirely aware of what was occurring. Some very powerful fragments found written in George Oppen’s study and apparently made by him during his struggle with Alzheimers also have this unaffected effect. These fragments were included by Creeley when he edited The Best American Poetry 2002 and the note at the back regarding them states that the fragments were found “scrawled on envelopes and other small pieces of paper — posted to the walls of George Oppen’s study” and gathered into their present form after his death in 1984. (Best American Poetry 2002 (Scribner 2002), p. 213). Thus they perhaps show us some light from the space of Alzheimers, just as some of Lowell’s more fragmented work might show us light from manic-depression, or Hart Crane’s show us light from being gay in America in the 30s, or Holderlin’s, of being schizophrenic. May I quote a few fragments of the “Twenty-Six Fragments”?

I find I am forgetting
all the spoken of
and the numbers (i.e.
how to form them
_____________
also the numbers

. . .

We don’t really know what
reality is made of

. . .

In a play, the actors cry out
but in the poem the words
themselves cry out

. . .

Being with Mary: it has
been almost too wonderful
it is hard to believe

. . .

Our little bird: I
feel all my
boyhood in
him

. . .

Once the singing was
and is

. . .

Cortez arrives.
he is absolutely lost
at an unknown shore.
and he is enraptured

(this is the nature of poetry

. . .

Hopkins “my piece of being”

. . .

Poetry is the word that comes to music

(Best American Poems 2002, pp. 133-135).

If you know of more touching music than this, please, let me know, let me know, for I do not know of much that puts a tear in my eye so easily. Except perhaps this (to continue upon our theme of the fragment), the fragments, small scraps of unfinished writing, of Stephane Mallarme’s project toward writing a poem about his son Anatole who died very young. Paul Auster did a remarkable translation of them. Instead of Alzheimer’s, this time, the instigation for the fragmentary nature of the text, or set of texts, was the horrific fact of the child’s death, which overwhelmed Mallarme, and which he certainly could never finish into a poem, not even as he had his other “tomb” poems, for more distant figures such as Baudelaire or Poe. One might have almost said it would be an indecency, could he have finished them, the fragments of “Pour un tombeau d'Anatole.” They were also ably transferred to Amerenglish by William Marsh. Let me show you a few of these fragments, in Marsh’s translation. When I first read them they gave me an entirely different take on Mallarme, who in his other poems can be so much more formally finished that he is so much less emotionally fraught:

an infant dies to
us both—demonstrates our
ideal, child-man—anew!
father & mother quietly entrust existence
survive a son in
the two extremes—malassociating him
acquiescing separate—death is more—
nulling this tiny "self" denied

. . .

better is
he becomes —
that which was,
engraved qualities
dignity—etc.
the hours you
fought but never
fought past

. . .

ailing in springtime
mourned in autumn —
celestial soul —
— the wave-idea attacks

. . .

if he's reabsorbed
is a-
part it's he—or his brother
me shall i say it two brothers —

. . .

what's in refuge
your future in me become my
purity through life,
which i shall not touch upon—

. . .

the highest aim nothing but to
part pure from life you accomplish it
in advance in suffering all this--gentle infant so that
This will be counted
part of your due—your kin
have bought the rest by their
suffering the loss forever

(published online at Web Conjunctions).

I believe I read in Auster’s introduction (which I mislaid in L.A.) that these fragments are written like this because they are each on tiny sheets of paper, as from a vest-pocket notebook, that were all found in a little box after Mallarme’s death. As to the graphical form one is reminded of the notebook-sized poems of Kerouac, which literally organically were writ into tiny pocket notebooks he carried around. Mallarme’s amazing work in his “Tomb for Anatole” prefigures both the taut minimalist torsions of Rae Armantrout and the discovery after another death of another small box of scraps of paper each containing a fragment, this being the famous “Zettel” (in German, “box”) manuscript of Ludwig Wittgenstein:

Like everything metaphysical the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language.

. . .

(Thoughts, as it were only hints.)

. . .

A poem makes an impression on us as we read it. “Do you feel the same while you read it as when you read something indifferent?” — How have I learnt to answer this question? Perhaps I shall say “of course not!” — which is as much as to say: this takes hold of me, and the other not. “I experience something different” — And what kind of thing? – I can give no satisfactory answer. For the answer I give is not what is most important.

. . .

We see, not change of aspect, but change of interpretation.

. . .

“Why do you demand explanations? If they are given you, you will once more be facing a terminus. They cannot get you any further than you are at present.”

(Zettel, pp. 12e, 17e, 30e, 39e, 58e).

There is a beautiful story about Ludwig I would like to relate. It was said by one of his neighbor scholars at the British university where he was staying, that Ludwig would often show up in the middle of the night, bearing some scraps of paper. Ludwig would ask the recipient to hold onto these pieces of paper, consisting of his day’s work, so as to safeguard against the possibility that Ludwig’s own room might burn down while he was asleep. This is the fragment in extremis: the sense of fragility of the text becomes so great that the silence, the gap, moves in from the end of the abrupt little fragment of writing, invades the space of the mind, and makes one deposit the scraps of paper with a safe keeper. I have had that feeling as well. It is a recognition of the mortality of words. Words are carried by bodies, just as people are. Be their body a scrap of paper or some electronic code, it is subject to absolute destruction at some point in the revolving of the kalpas. Accordingly, perhaps one might rehearse, or pay fidelity to, this cycle of manifestation and destruction, by inserting the hiatus between words, or between short thoughts as did Ludwig. Perhaps the aesthetic of the fragment in this regard resembles the deep spiritual sense felt also by Keats, when he expressed:

When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain,
Before high piled books, in charactry,
Hold like rich garners the full-ripen'd grain;
When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unrelenting love: —then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.

(John Keats).

However, note that for Keats in this poem, he more concerned with capturing the world in his words before he vanishes, as opposed to the second-level concern (as it were), of what happens when the words (even if they may have caught the world successfully) themselves vanish. He seemed to consider this second-level destruction more severely once the tuberculosis that he accrued when he was caring for his dying brother Tom, began to kill him. That is where we see him writing his epitaph, which is certainly an ascription of the second-level dissolution: “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.” This concern is also glimpsed in the profoundly self-dissociative poem, called by editors a fragment, “This Living Hand”:

This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calm'd—see here it is—
I hold it towards you.

Which in turn reminds us (in its identification of dissociative mood with the hand, that most non-dissociated, most attaching of fleshly things) of a poem by Rilke which reverses the paradigm; in this case, the artistic artifact (the photograph), is dissolving more quickly, while the human dissolves more slowly:

In the eyes dream. The brow as if it could feel
something far off. Around the lips a great
freshness — seductive though there is no smile.
Under the rows of ornamental braid
on the slim Imperial officer's uniform
the saber's basket-hilt. Both hands stay
folded upon it going nowhere calm
and now almost invisible as if they
were the first to grasp the distance and dissolve.
And all the rest so curtained with itself
so cloudy that I cannot understand
this figure as it fades into the background—

Oh quickly disappearing photograph
In my more slowly disappearing hand.

(Rilke, Portrait of My Father as a Young Man).

Form equals function. Form is no more than an extension of content (Olson): reversed (as one might say a tarot card, an oracle, is "reversed"): Content is no more than an extension of form. Form is content. The dragonfly's wings skritter with iridescences because of the nature of their light cellophane-like pieces. Again, when asked why his poems looked the way they did, Kerouac was said to have pulled a pocket notebook out of his pocket. Creeley said he switched to writing by hand in notebooks around the time he wrote his book “Words,” and “altogether in [his book] ‘Pieces’”. (Interview with William Packard, from The Craft of Poetry (Doubleday 1970), p. 197). Then he says of the book he was then working on, “I want it to be one continuity instead of a single poem, a single poem, a single poem.” (id.) Hmm, does that mean the fragment, the small bits interspersed with dots, that one sees in “Pieces,” could represent not disruption but continuity? I go and thumb through his fat Collected Poems to see what the book looks like that comes after “Pieces.” Lots of dots! Not a break but a continuity, these dots, dots of heads, dots of selves . . . like pearls from a broken necklace rolling on the floor . . . like grains of sand by the shores of the Ganges . . .

*

Whip, rope, person, and bull—all merge in No-Thing.
This heaven is so vast no message can stain it.
How may a snowflake exist in a raging fire?
Here are the footprints of the patriarchs.

(Zen Buddhist Woodblock Prints, Ten Bulls, text from Bull Number 8).

*

The flower invites the butterfly with no-mind;
The butterfly visits the flower with no-mind.
The flower opens, the butterfly comes;
The butterfly comes, the flower opens.
I don't know others,
Others don't know me.
By not-knowing we follow nature's course.

(Ryokan).

*

Great stories matter —
but the one who tells them
hands them on
in turn to another

who also will.
What’s in the world
is water, earth,
and fire, some people,

animals, trees, birds,
etc. I can see
as far as you,
and what I see I tell

as you told me
or have or will.
You’ll see too
as well.

(Creeley, “Childish,” from So There: Poems 1976-83 (New Directions), pp. 110-111).

There is much to be learned from Robert Creeley. He is one of the living masters, because he would not call himself master. You should go read him.