{"id":1085,"date":"2005-03-31T09:41:54","date_gmt":"2005-03-31T17:41:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp\/2005\/03\/creeley_remembered\/"},"modified":"2019-05-21T08:34:12","modified_gmt":"2019-05-21T12:34:12","slug":"creeley_remembered","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/2005\/03\/creeley_remembered.html","title":{"rendered":"CREELEY REMEMBERED"},"content":{"rendered":"

Robert Creeley<\/span><\/b><\/a>, who died\u00a0yesterday at 78, wrote poetry with a spare minimalism that clarified, condensed and dissolved the\u00a0distance between thought and feeling, between the real world and the imagined, between language\u00a0and meaning. He was often more explicit than Samuel Beckett and much more approachable, but\u00a0no less dense or elusive. Listen to him reading two poems: “Whatever” <\/strong>and\u00a0<\/span>“Thinking.”<\/strong><\/span><\/a> They show both the difficult and\u00a0the easy Creeley. When he spoke of the human condition, he never offered false hope:<\/p>\n

THE MIRROR<\/em><\/b><\/p>\n

Seeing is believing.
\nWhatever was
\nthought or said,<\/em><\/p>\n

these persistent, inexorable deaths
\nmake faith as such absent,<\/em><\/p>\n

our humanness a question,
\na disgust for what we are.<\/em><\/p>\n

Whatever the hope,
\nhere it is lost.<\/em><\/p>\n

Because we coveted our difference,
\nhere is the cost.<\/em><\/p>\n

In a review of “Life & Death,”<\/span><\/b><\/a> a\u00a0book of Creeley’s poems published in 1998, Tom Clark described his late poetry this way:<\/p>\n

The poems have the sound of a mind with time on its hands and nowhere left\u00a0to go. A life passes unhurriedly before one’s eyes — melancholy, oblique, fading in and out like the\u00a0late rays of sun slanting through the condo’s slatted blinds, as the poet meditates upon “What one\u00a0supposes\/ dead is . . . Will one fly away on angel wings,\/ rise like a feather, lift\/ in the thin\u00a0air.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The sound of a mind with time on its hands and nowhere left to go.<\/i> That’s as fine a\u00a0description as I’ve seen.<\/p>\n

Postscript:<\/strong> A reader writes: “Robert Creeley was a gentle,\u00a0generous and wonderful person. I had the pleasure to hang out with him. He and Pen [Penelope\u00a0Highton] were lovely together. I will miss a dear friend. As Bob would say, ‘Onward!'” —\u00a0Hank Barthel<\/em><\/p>\n

Another writes: “As a young student, some thirty years ago, I came to know Bob Creeley. I\u00a0took classes with him at Buffalo, and spent time hanging out at his place on Fargo Street, above a\u00a0small grocery store. Bob was a gentle and extremely\u00a0generous soul, with steel within. His\u00a0poems have literally walked me through life, and I’ll never forget him or stop reading his work. He\u00a0is an essential postmodern American.” — Jerry Kelly<\/em><\/p>\n

Still another: “I was an undergraduate who wrote about Bob Creeley and had the honor of\u00a0meeting him subsequently in Buffalo. The thing that impresses me the most about him is the\u00a0generosity of the man in arranging my visit even though we only communicated via email prior to\u00a0the visit. For a foreigner from Singapore who has an interest in American Lit, this was a better\u00a0intro to Americans than any guide book. In these days of anti-Americanism, America can well do\u00a0with such ambassadors of goodwill and generosity. Onward (in peace).” — Gerard<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Robert Creeley, who died\u00a0yesterday at 78, wrote poetry with a spare minimalism that clarified, condensed and dissolved the\u00a0distance between thought and feeling, between the real world and the imagined, between language\u00a0and meaning. He was often more explicit than Samuel Beckett and much more approachable, but\u00a0no less dense or elusive. Listen to him reading two poems: […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1085","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-main","7":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbvgEs-hv","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1085","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1085"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1085\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35381,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1085\/revisions\/35381"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1085"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1085"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1085"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}