The Rain -- Robert Creeley

Guest poem submitted by Aseem Kaul:

(Poem #1665) The Rain All night the sound had come back again, and again falls this quiet, persistent rain. What am I to myself that must be remembered, insisted upon so often? Is it the never the ease, even the hardness, of rain falling will have for me something other than this, something not so insistent - am I to be locked in this final uneasiness. Love, if you love me, lie next to me. Be, for me, like rain, the getting out of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi- lust of intentional indifference. Be wet with a decent happiness. -- Robert Creeley

Every time I sit in my room watching the rain falling against the window,
letting my mind wander, this is the poem I'm most reminded of. I can't think
of a poem that captures more accurately that sense of floating restlessness
- the feeling that there is something deeply important to be deciphered out
of the gentle patter of the rain and the sight of the little droplets
trickling down the pane. How, in some way that you can't quite explain, the
rain is a metaphor for your life, the secret key to an uncertain happiness.
An emotion that is at once an overwhelming longing and the intuition of
beauty.

It's a truly exquisite poem - every line, every word sounds exactly right,
yet the overall thought is fragmented, barely hinted at. There's a sense of
earnest questioning here ("what am I to myself / that must be remembered /
insisted upon / so often?") but also an instinctive knowledge of what
happiness would feel like or how it could be brought about ("Love, if you
love me / lie next to me").

Robert Creeley died last Wednesday (30th March 2005). As I think about his
legacy, there's much in the write-ups that accompany his other poems on
Minstrels (Poem #552, Poem #1400) that I find myself agreeing with. What
will always make Creeley special to me, though, is his ability to "be, for
me, like rain / the getting out // of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the
semi-/ lust of intentional indifference.". His ability, in short, to "be wet
/ with a decent happiness."

Aseem.

The Sentence -- Robert Creeley

Guest poem sent in by Don José

  "We'll definitely be running more of Creeley's work in the
  future...."  --thomas, 20 Sep 2000

I figured, after three years, I'd step up!

(Poem #1400) The Sentence There is that in love which, by the syntax of, men find women and join their bodies to their minds --which wants so to acquire a continuity, a place, a demonstration that it must be one's own sentence. -- Robert Creeley

Poem #552 needed some company.  I was introduced to Creeley this past summer
in a poetry workshop, my last undergraduate class at university.  Studying
him and his contemporaries (like Williams) definitely opened my eyes to
different styles, not the least of which was the attractiveness of sparse
rhyme; more accurately, perhaps, he uses rhyme where it is most effective.

And it's this that sets Creeley apart, I believe, his "efficiency of design"
as I explained in a critique.  Not a word is out of place; no line break is
unintentional; no punctuation left unconsidered.  He communicates multiple
thoughts with minimal words through his line break, thus the efficiency.
Also interesting, is how the form of his poems often "fit" the poem, if only
subtly ("Water" is a good example).  (His line break is quite deliberate --
to hear him read a selection will go a long way in elucidating this.  Some
performances are downloadable via
[broken link] http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/linebreak/programs/creeley/.)

As was described of Creeley in the bio of "Morning" [Poem #552], his style
of poetry relied on conversational American English.  He writes, "I love it
that these words, 'made solely of air,' as Williams said, have no owner
finally to determine them....for these words which depend upon us for their
very existence fail as our usage derides or excludes them.  They are no more
right or wrong than we are, yet suffer our presumption forever" (in his
preface to _Selected Poems_, 1991).

There were many poems I could have easily chosen for this selection, but did
this one if for no other reason than it is definitely one of my favourite
Creeley pieces.  Not all of Creeley comes through in this, but one can see
how not only does language convey the poem, it is also a part of the poem,
as Creeley joins together love with a sentence.  Short, to the point,
creative -- Creeley.  I'll leave dissection to the reader.

DJ

Morning -- Robert Creeley

(Poem #552) Morning dam's broke, head's a waterfall. -- Robert Creeley

As suggested by one of our subscribers, a change of pace.

Robert Creeley has been described as 'an Imagist of the emotions'. His poems are
like sharply etched miniatures - not a word out of place, not a phrase that
seems jarring. At the same time, his subjects are not the external objects that
Pound famously exhorted his Imagist brethren to 'show, not tell'; rather,
Creeley is more concerned with limning the nice distinctions of feeling and
sensibility, of heart and mind.

We'll definitely be running more of Creeley's work in the future (he's a poet
whom I've but recently discovered); today's poem is, I think, a wonderful
introduction to it. I especially love the line break before the word
'waterfall': it makes the reader pause before plunging into the final line, just
like water gathering itself up before tumbling over a precipice... lovely.

thomas.

[Bio]

Robert White Creeley
  b. May 21, 1926, Arlington, Mass., U.S.
  U.S. poet and founder of the Black Mountain movement of the 1950s.

 Creeley dropped out of Harvard University in the last semester of his senior
year and spent a year driving a truck in India and Burma for the American Field
Service. Soon after his return in 1945, he lived on a poultry farm in New
Hampshire and, by his own account, spent much time listening to jazz. Motivated
by a Boston radio program of poetry readings that he chanced to hear, he began
to publish his poems in small magazines. He lived in France in the early 1950s
and then moved to Majorca, Spain, where he started the Divers Press. In 1955,
after receiving a B.A. from Black Mountain College (North Carolina), he joined
Charles Olson on its faculty and was editor of the Black Mountain Review for its
first three years. The Review published poems by the then little-known Creeley,
as well as poems by various other faculty members and poets.

 Creeley's poems of the 1950s and 1960s reveal the influence of William Carlos
Williams. In For Love (1962), the collection of poems written between 1950 and
1960, Creeley emerged as a master technician. Like Williams' poems, Creeley's
are short and to the point. In his later books of poetry, most notably Pieces
(1968), Creeley's poems are equally self-contained. His poetry, characterized by
understatement, down-to-earth flippancy, and a studious adherence to economic
and precise language, has influenced many younger poets.

 Creeley taught poetry in several universities and from 1967 was a member of the
faculty of the State University of New York at Buffalo. His Selected Poems
appeared in 1976. Later collections include Later (1979), The Collected Poems of
Robert Creeley, Memory Gardens (1986), and Windows (1990).

        -- EB

[The Black Mountain poets]

 ... any of a loosely associated group of poets that formed an important part of
the avant-garde of American poetry in the 1950s, publishing innovative yet
disciplined verse in the Black Mountain Review (1954-57), which became a leading
forum of experimental verse.

 The group grew up around the poets Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, and Charles
Olson while they were teaching at Black Mountain College in North Carolina.
Turning away from the poetic tradition espoused by T.S. Eliot, these poets
emulated the freer style of William Carlos Williams. Charles Olson's essay
Projective Verse (1950) became their manifesto. Olson emphasized the creative
process, in which the poet's energy is transferred through the poem to the
reader. Inherent in this new poetry was the reliance upon decidedly American
conversational language.

 Much of the group's early work was published in the magazine Origin (1951-56).
Dissatisfied with the lack of critical material in that magazine, Creeley and
Olson established the Black Mountain Review. It featured the work of William
Carlos Williams, Paul Blackburn, Denise Levertov, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder,
and many others who later became significant poets.

        -- EB