Robert Creeleyin Conversation with Leonard Schwartz
24 November, 2003, transcribed by Angela Buck |
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LS:Born in 1926, Robert Creeley is the winner of a Bollingen Prize in Poetry in 1999, a Lifetime Achievement Award conferred by the Before Columbus Foundation in 2000, and a Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award in 2001. From Black Mountain to wherever we are now, Creeley remains one of our most enduring and vital poets, “vital” spelled energetic and alive. His latest book just out this fall is If I Were Writing This from New Directions. I have him on the phone from Providence, Rhode Island where he is a distinguished professor at Brown University. Welcome, Robert.
RC: Thank you, Leonard. I hope the various beeps and gurgles (from the phone line) don’t throw us off. ¶
LS: “Beeps and Gurgles” might make a good title for a new book.
RC: Yes, “and things that go bump in the night...” ¶
LS: Many years ago you wrote that form is never more than an extension of content.
RC: (Laughs) I was really young then, Leonard. ¶
LS: (Laughs) All these years later in your new book, If I Were Writing This, does that still seems true?
RC: Well, content is never more than an extension of form and form is never more than an extension of content. They sort of go together is the absolute point. It’s really hard to think of one without the other; in fact, I don’t think it’s possible. What I meant, whatever that means, is that what’s coming to be said — it’s like William Carlos Williams’ wonderful insistence, “How to get said what must be said...” — that need, that impulse, that demand, is what I would call the content’s finding a form for its own realization, recognition, substantiation. ¶
LS: I’ve always taken that remark of yours as a call to particularism, that is to say, each poem demands its own form.
RC: Yeah, it’s so uniform! ¶
LS: In that sense, you certainly can’t write by formula, only form. I wondered if you could read from your new book? RC: Yeah. It’s a pleasure. Shall I read a sad occasion, a poem in the memory of Allen Ginsberg? I used a title of Walt Whitman’s, “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer,” which is itself a wonderful poem, a poem about sitting, listening to a lecture by someone who was obviously well-informed, saying things of real import, but the listener becomes restless, the man is talking about the heavens, and the restless man goes outside and looks at the sky, the heavens. And that’s sort of parallel to my sense of what Allen was doing. |
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LS: So moving. How many years did you know Ginsberg?
RC: He said we’d met some date like 1949 or even perhaps the year before at a party of a friend I’d known through friends at Harvard — Allen apparently knew them through the same man who’d been at Columbia — Walter Adams. But I have no recollection, probably was dead drunk. At any case, I do remember dearly meeting him the first evening I had come to San Francisco, which would be 1955, no, 1956, a little less than a year after the great gallery reading that they’d all given. I had come to crash on the dear Edward Dorn’s family and, the very first night — Ed was working at the Greyhound bus station as a baggage clerk, as was Allen — when Ed went off to work at midnight, Allen came off work and came over to Ed’s place. We talked a good deal of the night and that was where I really date my active friendship with him, from that time, from that night. ¶
LS: I think of you and Ginsberg as two of the major, maybe the two major poets of the fifties —
RC: We had a lot of “major poets” in those days! ¶
LS: True. Well, those were the glory days, I think.
RC: (Laughs) Major Ginsberg. Major Creeley. ¶
LS: (Laughs) Ginsberg is noted for the long line and the length of his breath, and yours for the short line and concision of expression. So you make an odd couple.
RC: Well, then of course, there was Charles Olson, you remember. ¶
LS: I do remember Charles Olson. Well, not personally, never had the pleasure.
RC: He was terrific. ¶
LS: Absolutely. There’s another aspect to your work that’s always fascinated me and it comes up in the new book, as well, If I Were Writing This. Robert Graves said a long time ago in his book, The White Goddess, that all religions are by definition, patriarchal and worship a male divinity figure, and that poetry is, by definition, matriarchal and worships a female divinity figure, for whom the best poets make us experience the revelation of. Does Graves and his book mean anything for you?
RC: Yeah. I remember knowing him happily in Mallorca. I came just after Bill Merwin had left, and the pleasant person who had taken over Bill’s job, Martin Seymour-Smith, he and I had connected, like they say, first as pen pals. And then myself and family had come to live in Mallorca on Martin’s and his wife Janet’s advice. So I happily met Graves not too long after. I remember Martin loaning me a copy of The White Goddess, that first edition with the version of the dedicatory poem which I really liked extraordinarily. It gets changed, sadly, from my point of view, in the second edition. That aspect is certainly part of [my] poem. It was Graves, too, I might add, who sooner or later, not altogether disparagingly, called me something like a “domestic poet confined by my household muse.” ¶
LS: A domestic poet? Depends on what you’re doing at home, I think.
RC: Robert Duncan pointed out: who rules the hearth has an extraordinary amount of power, and the hearth — not just the three meals a day, but the sense of that presence and person — has been extraordinarily dear to me. The “violence and betrayal” I can probably do without. ¶
LS: Virginia Woolf did suggest early on that the good writer has to have an androgynous mind, so certainly, for us, it would have to be a question of becoming women in order to write.
RC: Yes, I feel that. Shall I read that poem, then? ¶ LS: Please.
RC: (reads) Conversion to Her ¶
LS: Thank you Robert for that reading. What year did you write that?
RC: About three years ago, I think. ¶
LS: I noticed there’s a kind of return to rhyme. I guess there’s always been some rhyme in your work, but this new book really contains quite a bit of it.
RC: Quite a bit, but either the cant or the pitch or the structure curiously muted it. But, yes, it’s there insistently. ¶
LS: Yes, I can certainly feel Coleridge in your writing and that ambition and the success of that ambition in terms of an imagination.
RC: One of Coleridge’s terrific quatrains is something like seven lines long! He could terrifically spin his wheels. When someone pointed it out to me, I couldn’t quite believe it. I thought it must be a typo or something, but there are several extended quatrains in “The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner.” ¶
LS: The famous Creeley concision is certainly here in this book as well. There’s a poem entitled, “John’s Song.” I wondered if you could read that for us. RC: This is an homage, not an homage in the dull sense, but both a respect and an echo of John Taggart’s extraordinary means of writing. He spent a lot of time both listening and thinking as to how one could structure in terms of an actual music or echo, a physical overlay of that kind. And that’s been a preoccupation of his for a long time now. If one visits John at home, he has an exquisite sound system. So, for example, we sat down in this terrific room, and — wow, off you go! I love that way he paces, so a couple of years ago when friends in common were editing an issue of a magazine in his respect and asked for something, it’s what I came up with. There’s a sad information in the poem, but it’s certainly a respect of what John can do. I wish I could do it as well. John’s Song ¶
LS: The poem of Taggart’s I think of when I read this is that extraordinary piece of his, “Twenty-one Times,” where he takes the word, “napalm,” which is such a beautiful word, “napalm,” such a beautiful word coming off the tongue, with such a horrific meaning, and he just runs it through the poem twenty-one times, so that the aestheticizing quality of language is displayed for us over and against what the content names or what the word names. Of course, now we’re in a similar situation to the one in which Taggart had to write napalm twenty-one times. What is your sense of it, Robert? What is one to do in this mine field of language that has been created for us by the [George W.] Bush administration?
RC: I do think that we have to keep active and keep insisting, keep the circle unbroken. I think it became hard after the war was underway to keep that particularity with the same energy. I remember Amiri Baraka and I were reading with others for U.N World Poetry Day at Baruch College in Manhattan. Simultaneous with that reading was advice from Bush’s administration that the war had begun. ¶
LS: Absolutely. Words are all we have.
RC: Yes, in fact, Bush is a bleak instance of how powerful language can be. ¶
LS: That opens a whole series of questions I’d like to think about at some point with you, about the nature of repetition. On the one hand, in poetry, we have Gertrude Stein who is able to repeat something so many times, and yet it is always different. On the other end of the spectrum, the Bush administration strategy is repeat something over and over again until it becomes true.
RC: I know. Where have we heard that before? At least in my generation, it’s very familiar. I was visiting an old friend up in Toronto, the composer, Udo Kasamets, not too long ago, and he said he had lived under Stalin and then under Hitler, and the rhetorical means of the present administration were all too familiar. ¶
LS: Does that mean that Taggart’s strategy of repetition is not going to work in this case?
RC: No, well, it’s not repetition used for that malevolent purpose. It’s a repetition that gathers and locates, and accumulates its securities, its effects. The point is that one can’t blame the means for the effects that it can be used to create. ¶
LS: That’s a complicated question that we’re all working with at this point.
RC: Again, it’s very complicated for my generation simply because, thinking of Ezra Pound, for example, there’s the classic dilemma of his circumstance. ¶
LS: I wonder if you could read the title poem of the new book, If I Were Writing This? RC: Yes. Not to endlessly blab before, but this was actually written as the coda for a lecture given at the Skowhegan School of three or four years ago, the burden of which was: Is there any means to validate one’s art other than the gallery of the museum? People there would entertain the notion but didn’t really want to spend much time on it. Anyhow I ended with saying, given a poem, not just who’s writing it, but what is the authority that one presumes by even beginning to write or thinking to? For me, it was really like Lawrence’s sort of comfortably awkward way of putting it: not I but the wind that blows through me... Or Jack Spicer’s Martians, classically. So anyhow, if I were writing this: If I Were Writing This... ¶
LS: Such a successful poem even in terms of really even the political question we just discussed, the underthought of language is really what we have to maintain. And as you’ve mentioned, in terms of Jack Spicer, for whom the Martians write the poems, and he’s just taking down the dictation. Your poem states the ambiguity of whether the poem is writing me or I am writing the poem.
RC: I think Spicer’s quite right. One can characterize what’s coming through, so to speak, in a diversity of ways, but I think Jack’s is as apt and locating as any. The presumption that the ego is the primary driver of all that’s said is pretty naive. ¶
LS: That’s an important kind of realization that not all poets make: there’s never just one way to write poetry.
RC:(Laughs) Leonard, it’s like that habit people have of saying, “Oh! I didn’t mean to say that!” Well, what did you mean to say? ¶
LS:(Laughs) Right. Robert, this has been wonderful. It’s been great having you on, and I hope to have you again sometime very soon. RC: Thank you, Leonard. It’s a pleasure to talk to you. |
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