The Iowa Review
Volume 38
Issue 2 Fall
Article 65
2008
Two Cheers for Creeley (And Hardy and Herrick):
A Note on the New "Selected Poems"
David Hamilton
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Hamilton, David. "Two Cheers for Creeley (And Hardy and Herrick): A Note on the New "Selected Poems"." The Iowa Review 38.2
(2008): 184-191. Web.
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DAVID
HAMILTON
Two Cheers for Creeley (and Hardy and Herrick): A Note on
theNew Selected Poems
Robert
Among
favorite
many poems,
in Mirrors,
appeared
Creeley's
of mine
one
that has
the first
long been
a
volume
following
a poem
in
(California
1982). "Versions,"
three parts that Creeley
in
his
included
Selected Poems (California
1991), is one that Benjamin Friedlander has excluded from the new,
came out from California
revised and extended
Selected which
this
his
first Collected Poems
year and has been much reviewed
Friedlander
faced acute problems.
died
before Friedlander's
sulting,
had to accommodate
Friedlander
out Creeley's work
the earlier volume.
pages.
Given
those
and commented
upon. Of course
he had been con
Creeley, whom
work was complete.
four new
collections
too,
Then,
that rounded
keeping his Selected to about the size of
In fact, Friedlander's
is shorter, by twenty-eight
we
shouldn't
be surprised to find a
limitations,
while
to
favorite absent and so not carried through as significant
personal
I find the new Selected poorer
Creeley's
lifelong work. Nevertheless,
for the absence of "Versions."
Its epigraph reads "after Hardy" and
the poem begins:
Why would
come
she come to him,
to him,
in such disguise
to
look
look
again
again?
vacant
with
at him?
eyes?
and why the pain still,
the pain?
still
as
useless
if to begin
again
to them?
again?
begin?
what had never been?
184
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I confess
Hardy
ference
the epigraph
attention
caught my
as had,
which
for I had been
seems
obviously,
Creeley,
to some of his admirers.
(or worse)
a matter
His
lines
reading
of indif
look almost
a mark Creeley resorts
their dashing nod to Dickinson,
to from time to time but nowhere else that I have noticed with quite
was more his poet, he once said in a note
this profusion. Dickinson
formal with
a contribution
I suggested
Moore.
Marianne
remembering
we
of
find
word
and
the
dashes,
Beyond
repetitions
phrase, some
or
not
so
in
with
variations
each
of pace
stanza,
thing
slight,
slight
are characteristic
and effect; such moments
of his work.
when
That third stanza reminds me of a night inAnn Arbor around 1970,
at least ten years before Mirrors came out, when Creeley's
reading
went on and on because he could hardly get through, or perhaps
a poem,
in avoiding finishing
in emphasizing
took delight
process
over product,
then beginning
pausing,
again: "and
by beginning,
why / the pain still, and why the pain / still, and why the / pain /
still, and / why the pain, the pain still / the pain, the pain / still the
that night. For some
pain," on and on though with earlier poems
some
must
it
have been painful, for
for others an
anxious-making,
as Williams
used
delight. A sense of "measure,"
in the air, a measure more
than
found
and
sought
a
cer
to
in
and
that
of
because
revision,
always subject
large part
not only that most alleged
about meaning,
tain, wary tentativeness
oddly, dramatic
the word, hung
"meanings"
are
ambiguous
by
nature
but
that
our
uncertain
moral
standing in the world may make us tentative about what
to say. At least something
think we mean
close to that is how I
and ethical
we
thought Iwas hearing Creeley then from my backrow vantage, and
it is a sense that book after book by him has kept alive.
More
than a touch of that dancing,
let-us-feel-it-out-together
is in this poem too with
its "pain still," "pain? / still"
uncertainty
stanza of "begin again?
and the inversion in the following
/ again
not
exact
Then
there's
the
the
but
begin."
repetitions
rhyme,
only
of "eyes" to "disguise" and
also the beautifully periodic complement
the more muted
is of an entirely different
"begin" and "been," which
one
as
to
too
if
be
would
much.
Then both senses of
register,
sticking
are
on a
shot
left
through, transfixed,
rhyme
"pinned and wriggling"
wall by the eye-rhyme "pain" and "again" which rings with overtones
of doggerel as Creeley
smiles on a schoolmarm's
insis
(or worse)
tence on rain drumming mainly
in our brain again. "Again" seems
185
one of his favorite words, which, once you notice, you
keep on see
ing. Rather than end, really, we breathe and begin again and again.
above all else, are to be found amusing
Lyric traditions, continuous
not jilted; they take their stand in
loved
but
yet indulged,
warily
or Hardy, only to stumble
the background
like Dickinson
quietly,
forward occasionally
like that other Hardy, Oliver. "Versions" seems
most related to the poet's Poems of1912-13, written
for his dead wife,
as
Emma, and very likely
Stephen Burt has suggested to "The Voice,"
its own repetition,
"how you call to me, call to me." It has the
feel in fact of a good many of those lyrics and is all the more impres
sive for its succinct and deft abstraction
in its
of them. Dialogical
address to the English poet, it says, as it were,
"I've been listening
with
and would
of yours." The third
capture in my lines the bittersweet
in
section echoes the first
its halftones
and undertones,
and in eight
more
lines, locates more Hardy:
The
weather's
and
the
where
out
still
clouds
they
grey
gather
once
walked
together,
greeted the world with
a faint happiness
watched
in the
it die
same
place.
that rhyme, faintly in the first instance, with a little more
Quatrains
of
half
torque
rhyme in the second. Grey weather,
gathering clouds,
lovers walking
together, happy, but only faintly, in the same place,
is their place, be it Buffalo or Wessex.
which
I have
skipped
over
the second
section
of which
I am
less fond.
in the anti-poetic
finds the poetic
and hears
Creeley
in
murmurs
his
echoes
and
the
of
this
always
anti-poetry
poetic,
is tipped toward the prosaic side: "Why be / persis
small section
to? / Why?"
But
/ no truth / to tell / or wish
tently / hurtful?
even here there's cadence; the pause-laden
the
passage undermines
Assuming
implied
in the
balance
There's
certainty of a rhetorical question.
a
the
second-in
of
and
and
next-to-last
touch
lines,
length
greater
of rhyme.
186
a clich?
to say that Creeley's
best work came early,
that nothing
later equals For Love (1962). I find that doubtful.
It is an
issue though with which Friedlander had to contend. Apparently,
he
was encouraged by Creeley to rethink the earlier Selected and to come
It has become
to his own
As
conclusions.
Simic
of Books, the 1,300-plus pages
Collected Poems will overwhelm
observes
in the New
York Review
up the now two volume
readers and a much
slimmer
that make
most
carry Creeley along among them. Itwas bold and signifi
cant work that Friedlander was asked to do, and he did it boldly. The
three volumes
that conclude Creeley's
earlier Selected, Mirrors, Memory
Selected will
are represented
in Friedlander
Gardens, and Windows,
by thirty-five
poems. Creeley had chosen forty-seven poems from those same three
to
volumes. Bearing inmind that Friedlander had four more volumes
of pages or fewer, we may expect some
me
trimming. What
surprises
though is how often Friedlander delet
ed Creeley's
selections
and replaced them with his own. Nineteen
of Friedlander's
choices were not Creeley's
and so are offered now
in the same number
deal with
as correction,
set aside
and that is over half. Moreover,
Friedlander
of Creeley's
that's a hair under two thirds,
selections;
thirty-one
two
out
that
of
three
times, Friedlander has a better idea
suggesting
of Creeley
than Creeley. Those
exclusions
include "Versions" and
a poem that either Creeley or editors at California
"Small Dancers,"
chose to represent the entire earlier Selected Poems by printing
it on
the inside front flap of its dust jacket.
Set
the
of
theme
a cadence
with
love's
sweet
old
song?
No harm in
The
emotional
nor
in remembering
you
can
or want
all
to.
Let the faint, faded music
pour forth its wonder
and bewitch whom itwill,
still
dancers
under
the moon.
187
No
in the emotional?
harm
of
the Creeley
fit their program,
keepers
doesn't
tional
is just the note
to discard
since it
it be that here
legacy would
this memory
faded music
though
under,
Could
prefer
of old sweet
song, of emo
it will, of dancers
whom
bewitching
the moon?
oh-my-god,
The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1975-2005 was also published
in the last year. It reprints as a preface a note called "Old Poetry"
that Creeley wrote first for So There: Poems 1976-83. His preface takes
some lines by Oliver Wendell
Holmes
(!) as an epigraph and works
to a lyric of Robert Herrick's before ending with this dedica
the way come a
tory line, "With love, for Herrick and Zukofsky." Along
few assertions with answers
that imply doubt: "A Nation of nothing
around
owns it? 'He is the president of regulation...' How did
for regulation. That follows an assertive passage in
but poetry...' Who
that go?" So much
which
reflects
Creeley
It felt
of
others
dismissed.
which
we
paradoxically,
nonetheless
no
sufficient,
seemingly
Yet,
istic, felt finally a contempt
European,
to have
American
particularly
sequence
not
on his earlier more
programmatic
viable
my
were
leanings:
no
tradition,
elders
exceptionally
contested
intimidated
if
chauvin
for the poetry of that old world,
still
con
the
us.
the schools of poetry that wish to draw on Creeley chart an
Generally
ail-American,
actually only North American,
actually only U.S. course
to
to
from Whitman
to Olson
Pound and Williams
and
Zukofsky
each writer by insisting that our New is The
Creeley that diminishes
New and plays up "the American Grain" of the work over its other
elements.
this new preface
Perhaps Creeley thought when he wrote
that American
exceptionalism
plays as poorly in poetry as it does in
in the nineteenth
that however
understandable
it
politics,
century
was outdated by late in the twentieth,
and that without
letting go
of Zukofsky, he could cherish Hardy and Herrick.
If so, he stood by
that thought by reprinting it as "Preface" to the second volume of his
Collected Poems. Here
Trust
to good
is the Herrick
verses
then;
They only will aspire,
When
pyramids,
as men,
Are lost i' th' funeral fire.
188
poem
toward
its close:
And
all bodies
when
to be
In Lethe
Then
With
numbers
only
life are
endless
meet,
drowned,
sweet
crown'd.
Perhaps Herrick's
repetitions
foretell the eventual Creeley,
seem
th',"
quaint?"i'
heads
would
shots
of simple words,
"when" and "then,"
and the little poetic licenses that now
"crown'd"?are
small
keepsakes,
like
arrow
found by a boy in some old field freshly plowed. Not that he
to sling
really hunt with them, now that we have graduated
and beebee guns, but he might pocket them gleefully.
Friedlander's
Selected and the completed
of Creeley's
publishing
several
substantial
reviews, admiring
inspired
if not always equally of Creeley: August Kleinzahler
in
Collected Poems have
of his work
the New York Times Book Review, Susan Stewart in The Nation, Charles
as mentioned
in the New York Review of Books, Stephen Burt in
Simic
Perloff in an essay online
of Books, and Marjorie
the Electronic Poetry Review. There is plenty of web discussion
too. Perloff is wonderfully
clear eyed in her opening placement
of
the London Review
from
ticking off ways he
Creeley,
he is commonly
associated:
is unlike
any of the poets with
whom
Olson,
Duncan,
Levertov, Zukofsky,
or
Corso.
She
goes on with wit and
Oppen, Reznikoff,
Ginsberg,
to
one
in
L.
M.
discover
of Creeley's
Rosenthal,
generosity
early
nay-sayers,
a
reading
worth
exploring,
that
"Creeley's
restraint
and cool control
is the last stand of genuine
against the
sensibility,
violence
and ruthlessness
of twentieth-century
civilization."
That
one feels constantly
the hesitation
in his lyrics is the apt note of
our time and a remarkable
to the doctrinaire
counterpart
certainty
in the camps surrounding
of so many
him and aspiring to include
or exclude him. Rosenthal's
comment,"
reading is a "melodramatic
one
not
to dismiss
Perloff proposes,
but
since it reads Creeley's
which damns him in the eyes of many, as
"minimalism,"
a struggle, often "stuttering"
as Donald Hall once suggested,
for
what another master hoped "would suffice." And so we can braid a
hesitant
sense
of highly disciplined,
into
constantly
self-critiquing
thought
sense
evident
of
difficult
which
Perloff
measure,
goes on
Creeley's
in an early poem from For Love. Toward the end of her
in Creeley's
essay, Perloff records her disappointment
protesting
late in life that theory was becoming
the enemy of poetry and so
to examine
189
turning away from the Language Poets who had adopted him as one
"a 'simple' lyric poet who looked
of their forebears, calling himself
to experience
one who might have
and to tradition for inspiration,"
like a sensibility,
(imagine it!) something
in his last decade or so, he made
with
poets,
experimental
American?and
younger
also
poets
from
but
not
coterie
immediate
with
the
Bidart
to box
larger
endorsing
British?poetry,
Frank
and Sharon Olds,
McHugh
sure he allied himself,
and
Forrest
as if he wanted
him
into
scene
a wide
Gander
to warn
of
not just
postwar
variety
of
to Heather
his more
a corner.
it a late
that the timing of these moves makes
life folly and her phrasing,
"he made
sure," since it characterizes
as
the
cautiously
calculating,
though, having never met
Creeley
I question
her hint
to know. Still it is possible
I'm in no position
that he simply
and arrived at a different
"Trust to
deepened, matured,
judgment.
man,
for good verses?not
indeed, he may have thought,
not
not
fertile ground
programs?form
poetry's
philosophy,
theory,
are
to
as
where arrowheads
be found. Or
Chaucer put it in what
yet
was an axiom already in the fourteenth
century:
verses"
good
For
out
Comyth
of olde
al this
feldys,
ne we
as men
corn
sey,
from
yer
to y ere....
brings to mind another of my Creeley favorites, and anoth
er poem Friedlander
"A Calendar,"
from Memory Gardens,
excludes,
a title that nods to Allen Ginsberg
a
in book that includes, among
other lyrics, one "For Ted Berrigan."
Chaucer
from the Toothpaste,
appeared first as a chapbook
in
House
West
located
then
Iowa. It
Press,
Branch,
a poem for each month,
like an old Book of Hours, with
"A Calendar"
later Coffee
offers
as well as to Chaucer.
and Emerson
among them to Wyatt
as
Chaucer's
deft
and
literal modernizing
of
month,
April,
begins
Chaucer's most famous lines then glides into paraphrase
and varia
nods
tion
in the course
starters
190
of four stanzas worth
how Chaucer's
pentameter
in full. Notice
for
quoting
loses a foot per line in Creeley:
When April with his showers sweet
the drought of March has pierced to the root
and bathed every vein in such liqueur
its virtue
When
thus
sunk
moves
such bleakness
snows
under
after
the flower...
harshness
faded
gone with
week
becomes
then
restlessness
after
rain
had
no
week
now
days had been,
covered
them,
to see,
sun
in rain
resolves
comes
to be
to wash
all
clean
and soften buds begin to spring
from
battered
branches,
patient
earth.
Then into all comes life again,
which times before had one thought dead,
and
all
is outside,
and
so
it once
I don't
wasn't
include
again,
nothing
in?
does
begin.
more
see how
I could
in these
beautiful
these
which
old
seems
poets
not
ever be persuaded
that Creeley's
heart
lines and that his allegiance
did not
from whom
to be what
the
he
avant
could,
garde
as here,
wants
begin
to hear.
at the very the end of her essay, when Perloff reminds
Accordingly,
us that it will be for readers of the future to define their
Creeley?
it is out of his hands now?I
find a hint of license for Friedlander
to hold true to the program:
to make Creeley
the Creeley a more
school finds it needs. To do all he can, that is, to
theory-based
forward Creeley's
and deny his Herrick. Which
is why I
Zukofsky
will hang onto Creeley's
earlier Selected.
191