I ask Creeley about Williams

Interview and discussion in April 2000:

FILREIS:
Now back to Williams, your initial response to Williams—-according to something you said at Camden in December [1999]-—was that what mattered to you in reading Williams, particularly The Wedge, was that the work was driven by anger. This is what, at least, Ron Silliman posted to the Buffalo poetics listserv afterwards. And then he went on to comment at how Williams had a huge impact on him as well, but it was a very different Williams. So, if anger is not quite operating as much, what’s your Williams now? How does Williams animate you now?

CREELEY:
Back to Ron’s point, that that wasn’t the Williams he read, he reads the later Williams.

FILREIS:
The Desert Music.

CREELEY:
Yeah. Which is not an unangry poem, so to speak. But it certainly isn’t nearly as angry as the poems he was writing in the thirties or twenties. Spring and All, for example. Or the "Descent of Winter," or "March First." Many of the early poems are really angry, and their emotional base is their revulsion and anger at the world he finds around him.

FILREIS:
So, now when you look back at Williams, how does it feel?

CREELEY:
Well, it feels very much like my own life. I, when young, felt a dismay, let’s put it, that such things as the Holocaust or the Second World War or the depression or many other factors in one’s real life, that these could be so unremarkable to the body politic, that it seemed not to matter.

Through the agency of my terrific wife, I sent an article, I think it was called “Bush Goes Green” from the New York Times to this listserv that a friend of ours sends us, you know, Barbie dolls and things women have to do to protect themselves in parking lots, lots of actually useful information, but the list has had a certain smugness. So, I zapped out this Bush article—Texas is 50th in education, and so on—and instantly comes back a letter: “Don’t send any more of this to me. I’ll vote for Bush no matter what.”

So, I was disappointed that one would vote for someone who commits to have his state have 25% of its population with no insurance, who would willfully do so, and fight to preserve that situation. I still feel anger in that way.

But again, back to the verse, think of the classic phrases humans make: X wants to make his peace with the world. The resistances of Lawrence’s, the day of my interference is done, the recoil outstrips the advance, et cetera.

I remember one time, terrifically, I had the chance to ask Kenneth Burke at a community meal we were all at up in Orono, there was a moment when I had him to myself, so to speak, and I asked him quickly: what advice would you have for someone as myself who is getting old. And he looked at me and said: Don’t boast. You won’t be able to back it up.

Therefore, it isn’t don’t get angry, don’t use anger as a primary emotion. It’s extraordinarily hard to sustain. It always was incidentally.

from the other side of these words

A few evenings ago I had the honor of introducing Burt Kimmelman before he read his poems at the Writers House. The reading was terrific and will soon be available in both video and audio recordings on Burt's PennSound page. I had read his book Somehow, taking particular pleasure in its formal and thematic homages to William Carlos Williams (and to early Oppen and to Creeley, I should add). I grabbed--perhaps too easily--a poem that would bespeak Kimmelman's method of complicating the simple subjective lyric: "Self-Portrait." Everything after "not" in the third line and especially after "but" in the fifth line makes a problem of the seemingly simple "lean[ing]" from subject toward object and the seemingly simple "here I am" presence in what might otherwise be a conventional romantic(ist) gesture. The poem succinctly points to an alternative to itself and to its mode; there's a gesture--indeed a gesture--on "the other / side of these [very] words." A simple complication. I quoted the poem in my intro and Burt then very nicely provided some book-making, bibliographical backstory - not discounting my reading so much as pointing me gently in another direction. I appreciated that. It turns out that the poem is the key or starting point to the book Somehow and was involved in its very design. And perhaps "the other / side of these words" is the dimension of the visual arts. It turns out that the poem expresses ut pictura poesis and is a poem-about-painting, words doing equivalent work of the visual: a portrait in words of an actual painted self-portrait. It was not about poetic selfhood in the first place. My misreading will make sense when you watch the video embedded above.

four new Creeley recordings

Thanks to the work of Henry Steinberg, we've just added four new recordings of Robert Creeley reading his poems: "The Dishonest Mailman," "Please," "After Lorca," and "The Ballad of the Despairing Husband." We've also included links to four YouTube video clips of the same reading. Go to PennSound's Creeley page and scroll down to the bottom.

Levertov here and there

We don't have any recordings of Denise Levertov yet in PennSound, but Levertov appears, one way or another, here and there throughout our archive. Robert Creeley talks about her (with me at the Writers House). Ken Irby reads one of her poems. John Weiners in 1965 at Berkeley reads a poem dedicated to her. Albert Gelpi talks with Leonard Schwartz about the letters of Duncan and Levertov. And a letter Duncan wrote Levertov as he was finishing the poem "Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow" is discussed in passing in our Duncan PoemTalk episode.

Creeley on prosody and pacing

Back in 2000 I interviewed Robert Creeley in front of a live audience of 80 people or so at the Writers House. The recording (video and audio both) of the interview have long been available, but recently Michael Nardone has begun to draft a transcription. Note that it's not by any means finalized yet. Toward the beginning of the discussion Creeley brought out a small laptop which had loaded in it a software program called "Libretto." It was a primitive version of the much better voice transcription programs or voice recognition programs now available. In this early version a rudimentary avatar would speak a piece of text fed into it. Creeley was experimenting with prosody and wanted to dehumanize (for instance) the ballad stanza, to hear the words performed without subjectivity--as a machine would sound them. In this part of the transcript we find Creeley struggling a bit with the machine. Once it works, we hear the ballad (but it is by now unrecognizable so we've left out the verse itself in the transcript) and then Creeley discusses. (Here is a link to the audio segment transcribed.)

CREELEY:
It will come. I still have to get the appropriate file. I just took two verses from actually a very — it doesn’t use the syncopation quite at all very much, but I am also interested in pacing, what the intervals apparent are. Again, as I say this voice is in no way expressive or interpretive. I was visiting in a pleasant school, masters school, in just Dobb’s Ferry in New York and one pleasant teacher there, a Chinese-American, said “Sounds just like my uncle.” So here we go.

Wait a minute.

Speak.

COMPUTER MONOLOGUE READS:
[INAUDIBLE]

CREELEY:
Wait a minute I’m sorry. Let’s start again.

FILREIS:
In the room, if Aaron does some—-

CREELEY:
Let me just stop this. Abort.

I haven’t got the speaker turned on.

I’m an old man. I’m totally confused.

FILREIS:
He’s an old man with a libretto playing a voice synthesizer.

CREELEY:
Be that as it may.

FILREIS:
A cool old man, Bob.

CREELEY:
Come on, speak. Why do you never speak?

I don’t know. Maybe it’s tired.

FILREIS:
That ended that argument once and for all.

CREELEY:
Wait a minute, we’ll try again. Come on, I want to get it louder.

Louder, louder.

As loud as it can go.

Patience. Resume.

Speak

COMPUTER MONOLOGUE READS:
[Computer reads poem.]

FILREIS:
That was monotonous Robert Creeley.

CREELEY:
This program also allows you to slow down the tape and shift the pitch. It’s rudimentary. This is noted as a US English male H.L.

FILREIS:
H.L.?

CREELEY:
H.L.

H.L. Mencken or something.

Okay, that’s enough.

FILREIS:
All those lines are end-stops?

CREELEY:
Yeah.

[TRIUMPHANT COMPUTER SOUND]

FILREIS:
Whenever you don’t want Bill Gates, he appears.

So your sense of the line, your sense of rhythm at the level of the line. I wanted to ask you a couple of questions about William Carlos Williams. Was that In the American Grain that voice?

CREELEY:
Yeah, I wanted something that would not, I wanted something that would not express or read into the language overly. I didn’t want it to be necessarily a drab voice, but I wanted it to be a saying of the words that would be dependent upon their pattern than my interpretation of it.

To me one of the problems in poetry, at least one that my particular company spent a great deal of time on, was the question of the register of the text and how that might be used as an information for the person reading it, presuming he or she would be hearing it in his or her head or reading it aloud.

Olson, for example, spends a lot of time on this problem. Duncan, literally toward the end of his life, acquires what’s then a state-of-the-art word processor so he can actually set his text and have it actually reproduced as the text of the published book. Groundwork, it seems to me, it was not In the Dark, but Before the War is thus composed. Denise Levertov has the same concerns. Paul Blackburn, et cetera.

I don’t why it became such a remarkable question for us. But it really is a difference between our company and that just previous. The Objectivists, for example, seem to have these concerns but do not particularly involve them in their own recital or their own reading of their own work.

FILREIS:
Yesterday you said that for a long while, at the beginning, you were using a typewriter, and a particular typewriter that you needed. And then you mentioned that Allen Ginsberg had genially advised you to get rid of the typewriter so you’d be maybe more mobile. Did, at first, the acquisition of the typewriter as the means of writing have anything to do with Williams, for instance, who was addicted to his typewriter?

I guess the second question is: what was it like when you got rid of the typewriter?

CREELEY:
Well the typewriter, initially, was a great way of freeing oneself from the personalism of one’s own handwriting. I was distracted by the way I wrote. Not that I wrote incompetently but I began to be, you know, obsessed with the nature of my handwriting, which was certainly not the point of what I was doing.

I wanted something that would instantly, so to speak, objectify these words I was putting in strings. I wanted to have something, again, that would not be informed by my personal disposition in handwriting. I wanted the words to be objectified, to be actualized so to speak by being generally characterized as typewriter fonts permit, and be there on the paper as something apart from my head or my personal, physical touch. I wanted them to exist in that sense by themselves. Nothing particularly vatic or mystic. I wanted to be able to look at them the way I would look at them on a page of print, let’s say.

FILREIS:
So what happened when you got rid of the typewriter?

CREELEY:
I think by that time, let’s see that’s ’63 or so, by that time I had been writing more or less—I began writing, particularly, let’s say, in the late ‘40s, so it had certainly been fifteen years of habit. At that point, what was far more useful to me was a means of collecting and/or composing in any kind of physical circumstance.

You know, if you have suddenly an impulse or some inquiry of some way of wanting to get something done and you have to go look for the typewriter, it’s awkward. So that this ability to use quick handwriting, that was very, very useful.

the Stevens wars

Charles Bernstein commissioned me to write a piece that would bring Wallace Stevens' reputation among contemporary poets up to date - from 1975 to the present. The essay I wrote, as has been noted here before, was published in the fall 2009 issue of Boundary 2. Here is a PDF version of the entire article, called "The Stevens Wars."

In it I discuss the varying responsiveness to Stevens in the writings of (in order of appearance) Susan Howe, Ann Lauterbach, Michael Palmer, Charles Bernstein ("Loneliness in Linden" is a rejoinder to "Loneliness in Jersey City"), Lytle Shaw, Robert Creeley, Jack Spicer, Peter Gizzi, John Ashbery, John Hollander, and again Susan Howe as a very different sort of response than that of Hollander.

Here is the passage of the essay on Peter Gizzi:

Gizzi is one of our most important contemporary Stevensean poets, yet he is adamantly non-ideological about it. Periplum and other poems gathers early work from 1987 to 1992 and Stevens is everywhere, although in the background. Epigraphs from Dickinson, Spicer, James Schuyler, Oppen, Ashbery, Rilke, Rosmarie Waldrop and Keith Waldrop assert the preferred literary company and don’t so much suppress the presence of Stevens as express a remnant of outmoded embarrassment (Stevens and Dickinson? Stevens and Oppen?) and a debt more pervasive than dedications can allow. The great sequence “Music for Films,” written in Provincetown in August 1990, looks and sometimes reads like the Oppen of Discrete Series but is more interestingly Gizzi’s attempt at his own “Variations on a Summer Day” (1940), floating, chartless, using weather as device for directionlessness and (momentary) lack of poetic ambition.

Some Values of Landscape and Weather (2003) is Gizzi’s most Stevensean volume. Again the landscape-and-weather trope provides a means of laconic improvisation, a going which way the wind blows, a subject as a cloud, “imitation[s] of life” that can use terrestrial being as an excuse for impersonality and dislocation. Gizzi here is in Stevens’ floating middle period: “Landscape with Boat,” “Of Bright & Blue Birds & the Gala Sun,” “The Search for Sound Free from Motion,” “Forces, the Will & the Weather,” “Debris of Life & Mind,” even the dour “Yellow Afternoon.” The ironic word-level sonority of “A History of the Lyric” has Harmonium in it, however—

There are beetles and boojum
Specimen jars decorated

With walkingsticks, water striders
And luna moths

A treatise on rotating spheres.

Gizzi’s whole project might be captured in that phrase: “a treatise on rotating spheres”—what Jordan Davis calls a “shorthand sublimity” at the level of the line combined with a knowing engagement with the pathetic fallacy for the purpose of pushing the human to the top of abstraction and thus away from sentiment.

In Artificial Heart (1998), the book in which Gizzi came into his own poetically, the pronominal address is often generalized—points to the poet (even in the first-person plural “we”), an unidentified she (as in “The Idea of Order at Key West,” a muse or paramour a bit damaged over time but still ready for verse, a version of the subject: “She sang unwrapping her bandages”)—articles refer to general impersonal states of being (“the body remembers joy”; “The day static with stuck weeds”), and a communal, funereally functioning “they” who arrive at the end of poems—Ashberyian in this sense—to bring stories that were not told in this poem but might have been told had we not done our work of telling about something else. Gizzi’s “Will Call” ends:

It was an average day
An arrangement of place. A state of report
or a state of grace. For centuries weeds have hidden it.
Now autumn. Silence is what we make

of eyes, trees and growing vine. It pierces.
And these are the stories they will bring in boxes.

The ut pictura poesis of “Utopia Parkway,” dedicated to New York School-affiliated poet-painter Trevor Winkfield, is written out of Stevens’s poems about paintings (especially in Parts of a World) and the 1951 MoMA talk, “The Relations Between Poetry and Painting,” which in its turn had influenced O’Hara, Ashbery, Koch, and Schuyler from the start.

were lost, now found

The Center for the Humanities invites you to celebrate the publication of The Amiri Baraka/Edward Dorn Correspondence; The Kenneth Koch/Frank O’Hara Letters: Selections; Muriel Rukeyser: Darwin & the Writers; Philip Whalen’s Journals: Selections: Robert Creeley: Contexts of Poetry, with selections from Daphne Marlatt’s Journals. These comprise the inaugural chapbook series in LOST & FOUND, the CUNY Poetics Document Initiative.


Tuesday December 8th, 2009
6:30 pm, Martin E. Segal Theatre
The Graduate Center, CUNY
365 Fifth Avenue at 34th Street
New York City

Introduction
Ammiel Alcalay

Readings and Presentations
Stefania Heim, Claudia Moreno Pisano, Josh Schneiderman, Brian Unger,
special guests David Henderson, Bill Berkson, and others

Lost & Found is a publication project emerging from archival and textual scholarship done by students at The Graduate Center, with the primary focus on writers falling under the rubric of the New American Poetry. Since accessibility to archival material proposes alternative, divergent and enriched versions of literary and cultural history, the Lost & Found initiative takes the New American rubric writ large, including the affiliated and unaffiliated, precursors and followers.

Creeley near the end

A beautiful late reading given by Robert Creeley, CUE Art Foundation, January 18, 2005. We at PennSound provide the video and also the audio-only recording of this event.

"When I think of where I come from....of what a life is, or was...," the first poem in the reading begins. Creeley died in March of '05, just a few months later.

digitizing reel-to-reel tapes

Will Creeley sent us this great note after hearing the newest PoemTalk about one of his father's poems:

I saw word of this latest episode via PennSound's excellent & useful Twitter feed, and figured it was a good opportunity to say thank you again to Al, Charles and everyone at PennSound & Kelly Writers House for taking in our big cardboard boxes and digitizing the reel-to-reel recordings inside with such care and precision.

Being relatively handy with capturing digital audio, I figured I could convert the reels myself with Dad's trusty old Sony reel-to-reel player. It was not to be: When I first plugged in the player and turned on the power, thick gray Hollywood-style smoke started escaping from the set! Dramatic and slapstick, but disappointing. Once the smoke cleared, I knew I needed help - and graciously, that's where you guys came in.

It's a real pleasure for me, Hannah, and our mother to know that Dad's recordings are where he would have wanted them to be: online! As his many e-mail correspondents knew well, Dad was thrilled by the possibilities presented by the internet's ability to facilitate access and discussion - the power of inclusion! - and podcasts like PoemTalk demonstrate exactly the reasons for his excitement. Thanks again.

-Will Creeley

Creeley driving the car

We've just released the newest episode of PoemTalk. Click here for more.

which man is it that I know?

That's the late Stanley Kunitz taking a break at Poet's House in Manhattan. He happens to stop and pause beneath Robert Creeley's "I Know a Man," which has been inscribed on the large window. Ah, juxtaposition!

Finally, then! An answer to the darkly imponderable Creeley question:

the darkness sur-
rounds us, what

can we do against
it

The answer is: Stanley Kunitz!

segment, segment

Ben Friedlander is teaching a seminar on Robert Creeley this semester. Yes, just Creeley! For it, he's put together his own web edition of the Selected Poems. Although it is a work in progress, he has linked many of the poems to recordings we have on our PennSound Creeley page. Of course he can only link a recording of Creeley reading the poem when we on our end have segmented--into single poems--the many whole recordings of entire readings that we've so far added to our Creeley page. Ben's project has spurred us on to do more segmenting. He has identified some unsegmented whole readings by Creeley that he believes include the poet performing poems that haven't much been performed elsewhere; thus when we segment these sooner rather than later, Ben and his students--and everyone--will be able to hear more on the selected list. To say the least, I like this iterative process. Here's Ben's site (in progress).

Creeley on Dylan

During my conversation with Robert Creeley in April 2000, he described his appreciation for Bob Dylan. Here's his 3-minute response: MP3.

Thanks to Jenny Lesser, the hour-long interview has been segmented topically. Go here for the recordings and see below for the list of topics.

Creeley tattoo

On this arm: the first stanza of Robert Creeley's "The Warning":

The Warning

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.

Click on the image for a larger view.

Thanks to Mike Van Helder.

drive, she said

The novelist and essayist Lynne Sharon Schwartz visited the Writers House recently as a "Writers House Fellow." She read from her 9/11 novel The Writing on the Wall on Monday evening; an mp3 is available, and so is streaming QuickTime video. The next morning she was back, and this time I interviewed her and led a discussion with an audience of about 50 people gathered at the House. This to can be heard and also viewed as video.

During the interview we talked in part about her essay called "Drive, She Said," which is a mostly implicit rejoinder to Robert Creeley's "I Know a Man":

drive, he sd, for
christ's sake, look
out where yr going.

Lynne is somewhat afraid of driving recklessly or fast; her father was the master of the road and she wants his inheritance, but she drives cautiously and slow and cannot get over the fear that a cop will pull her over, ask her to roll down the window and will say, "You're not your father's daughter." She seeks counsel from her therapist, but she neglects to say the most important thing about her driving anxiety--that it's founded entirely on a fear of her father's driving and her incapacity at the thought of being disconnected from him as a timid driver. The therapist preaches the therapeutic gospel of a communalist road, where we share interests even while driving our separate ways. Lynne would like to believe that, but she can't. Nor can she end the essay. She is after all her father's daughter. She's more Creeley-like than not, in the end, because her essay-memoir talks on and on and meanders until finally she's driving the essay forward in the mode of which she thinks she's afraid. To me it constitutes an interesting feminist response to the Creeley of that early Guy Talk/On the Road poem.

when asked about the sentence

en familie

A new PennSound podcast features Robert Creeley talking with me and others in April 2000. He was, that spring, a Kelly Writers House Fellow. During the conversation we talk about his love poetry; Bob Perelman asks him why if in his early writing he wanted to "Make It New" he seemed now to want to make it old; Stuart Curran asks about content as an extension of form*; Marjorie Perloff calls in from California; he plays a recording of his voice-recognition robot reciting his poems; etc. The event was originally webcast live.

* In "Projective Verse" Charles Olson quotes Creeley's remark that "Form is never more than an extension of content."

not bearded barbarians, per Rexroth

Kenneth Rexroth in the New York Times Book Review in 1961 on the new poets: Denise Levertov was tops, with Robert Creeley a close second, Charles Olson third (oh C.O. must have loved that), then three San Francisco-based poets, and then a few others. Creeley's poems: "Each is an excruciating spams of guilt." This is a 1960 story so naturally it's on my 1960 blog, here. (Speaking of Olson, I find our Olson PENNsound author page to be a goldmine. Have a good listen.)

words as they come to hand

Tony Green of New Zealand makes 3-dimensional word-things.I'm happy to list Tony's blog among my links and also here in this entry:
http://tony_green.typepad.com/. A must read/see. Tony is a "former academic, now freelance art historian,art critic,curator,poet, twice married, father of a homeopath, an accountant, a schizophrenic, a ballroom/latin dancer, a gymnast, & a university arts student."

I believe I first "met" Tony during Robert Creeley's visit to the Kelly Writers House in 2000. During two-day visits by Writers House Fellows. And Tony - who had heard Bob Creeley read in Auckland in 1976 and got to know him in Albuquerque in 1983 and in Buffalo and elsewhere in the 90s - participated in the live webcast of the interview/discussion with the poet which I led. I recall that Tony phoned us from New Zealand to speak with Bob. Here's a link to the mp3 audio-only recording of that discussion. Somewhere in this hour-long recording should be the conversation between the two.

I even - and proudly - own one of the Tony's pieces. I "teach" it when I teach my course on modern & contemporary poetry.