CREELEY REMEMBERED

Robert Creeley, who died yesterday at 78, wrote poetry with a spare minimalism that clarified, condensed and dissolved the distance between thought and feeling, between the real world and the imagined, between language and meaning. He was often more explicit than Samuel Beckett and much more approachable, but no less dense or elusive. Listen to him reading two poems: "Whatever" and "Thinking." They show both the difficult and the easy Creeley. When he spoke of the human condition, he never offered false hope:

THE MIRROR

Seeing is believing.
Whatever was thought or said,

these persistent, inexorable deaths
make faith as such absent,

our humanness a question,
a disgust for what we are.

Whatever the hope,
here it is lost.

Because we coveted our difference,
here is the cost.

In a review of "Life & Death," a book of Creeley's poems published in 1998, Tom Clark described his late poetry this way:

The poems have the sound of a mind with time on its hands and nowhere left to go. A life passes unhurriedly before one's eyes -- melancholy, oblique, fading in and out like the late rays of sun slanting through the condo's slatted blinds, as the poet meditates upon "What one supposes/ dead is . . . Will one fly away on angel wings,/ rise like a feather, lift/ in the thin air."

The sound of a mind with time on its hands and nowhere left to go. That's as fine a description as I've seen.

Postscript: A reader writes: "Robert Creeley was a gentle, generous and wonderful person. I had the pleasure to hang out with him. He and Pen [Penelope Highton] were lovely together. I will miss a dear friend. As Bob would say, 'Onward!'" -- Hank Barthel

Another writes: "As a young student, some thirty years ago, I came to know Bob Creeley. I took classes with him at Buffalo, and spent time hanging out at his place on Fargo Street, above a small grocery store. Bob was a gentle and extremely
generous soul, with steel within. His poems have literally walked me through life, and I'll never forget him or stop reading his work. He is an essential postmodern American." -- Jerry Kelly

Still another: "I was an undergraduate who wrote about Bob Creeley and had the honor of meeting him subsequently in Buffalo. The thing that impresses me the most about him is the generosity of the man in arranging my visit even though we only communicated via email prior to the visit. For a foreigner from Singapore who has an interest in American Lit, this was a better intro to Americans than any guide book. In these days of anti-Americanism, America can well do with such ambassadors of goodwill and generosity. Onward (in peace)." -- Gerard

March 31, 2005 9:41 AM |

Categories:

Me Elsewhere

'WILD SIDE' STILL ROCKS 

Nelson Algren was one of the great American authors of the 20th century, it is no exaggeration to say, and among the most neglected. Consider his underrated classic, "A Walk on the Wild Side." The title -- popularized and co-opted as an idiomatic phrase by Hollywood and Madison Avenue (institutions Algren loathed) -- is familiar to most anyone who speaks English or knows Lou Reed's lyrics. But the novel itself? Hardly.

BUSTER KEATON REVISITED 
Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat is not a biography. "This book is merely a fan's notes," Edward McPherson writes in the introduction, although his publisher ignores the disclaimer and calls it a biography on the cover. In fact, the book is a bit of both, a difficult combination to bring off unless you're David Thomson, who set the standard with Rosebud, his penetrating rumination on the life and career of Orson Welles, which was nothing if not a distillation of every obsessive thought he ever had about the myth and the man and all his movies.
LAUREN BACALL, STILL SALTY AT 80 
When Lauren Bacall writes that her singing voice ranges "somewhere between B minus sharp and outer space," she's being candid and funny. It's not every stage star with two Tony Awards for best actress in a musical whose vocal talent offers so little promise. (OK, Harvey Fierstein excepted.) Still less would one admit it.
THE STARS ACCORDING TO BOGDANOVICH 
Peter Bogdanovich's superb collection of movie-star profiles and interviews -- a sequel to Who the Devil Made It, his interviews of top film directors -- begins with an affectionate tale about Orson Welles that reminds us just how intimate the author's connection to Hollywood's greatest has been. But contrary to what we've come to expect from dime-a-dozen celebrities and celebrity interviews not worth two cents, the tale avoids bromidic egotism and journalistic platitudes.
SAMMY'S WHITE DREAMS 
Four decades ago Lenny Bruce sentenced Sammy Davis Jr. to "30 years in Biloxi," stripping him of "his Jewish star" and "his religious statue of Elizabeth Taylor." Now we have two new biographies of Davis that spring him from ridicule, if not from doubts about his legacy, and restore a measure of dignity to a black entertainer whose huge fame and success never overcame his devout wish -- indeed his lifelong effort -- to be white.
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