In the Land Of the Blind

The most common biographical narrative for modern artists is the Proustian one, from innocence toward disillusionment. For one titan of modern poetry, it moved in the other direction. Robert Creeley’s final “Selected Poems” (University of California Press, 360 pages, $21.95), which supplants a popular volume of Creeley’s early work by the same title, encompasses the life’s work of an angry young poet who became a gracious mentor to a generation.Robert Creeley was born to a physician father and a nurse mother in Arlington, Mass., in 1926. The 2-year-old Creeley lost his left eye when a sliver of coal entered through an open car window. Not long afterward, his mother innocently took young Bob to the hospital for a checkup. He never saw that eye again.Creeley’s Harvard education was interrupted by his entry into the American Field Service, where in Burma he discovered marijuana and donned an eyepatch. In short order he acquired a wife, Ann Mackinnon, and a child. As Ekbert Faas’s 2001 biography of Creeley recalls, their early, protean life together forced Ann to ask Creeley, “When will you get famous, so we can get out of here?”Thankfully, Creeley quickly found a companion in letters, the New England poet Charles Olson. Olson’s encouragement — along with Creeley’s growing involvement with the magazine Origin — led him to concentrate on his prose, which he then believed would be his artistic focus. The stories were passable, and even spawned a novel about a lonely year with his wife in Mallorca, “The Island.” Yet Creeley’s earliest efforts in verse, transparently a pastiche of early influences like Olson, Ezra Pound, Hart Crane, and William Carlos Williams, showed extraordinary promise. Whichever came first, finding himself as a man or finding himself as a writer, it was in poetry where Creeley’s writing burned with psychological insights his contemporaries only approached on tiptoes, or through historical personification. This direct and unflinching quality of his represented a hard rebuke to the staid 1950s before they were even over, and to the confessional movement the previous era had produced.Yet as Creeley progressed as an artist, he took steps backward as a person. A heavy drinker since his days in the service, Creeley loved to talk, eventually arguing himself into liaisons with the wives of several fellow poets, including Kenneth Rexroth’s third wife, Marthe. Sometimes his intensity won him friends: After getting in a fistfight with Jackson Pollock at the East Village’s Cedar Tavern, they were introduced by the bartender and, within minutes of the altercation, were exchanging pictures of their families. Creeley met Kerouac when Allen Ginsburg forced Creeley to wake him up one day in San Francisco; they were inseparable until Creeley left the West Coast, never to see Jack again.Even in his roughshod youth, Creeley was an incredible writer of letters, carrying on at extreme length with contemporaries such as Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov. His 10-volume correspondence with Olson, published by Black Sparrow Press, includes enough low gossip and elevated thinking to fuel a steam train. When he was angry, the ink never stopped flowing. Yet “Selected Poems” proves that if Creeley’s process was occasionally erratic, the results never were. After a challenge by a prospective publisher that he hadn’t written enough poems toward a forthcoming volume, Creeley’s rejoinder was to turn to the typewriter, throwing classic poems such as “I Know a Man” on the floor over his shoulder:As I sd to myfriend, because I amalways talking, — John, Isd, which was not hisname, the darkness sur-rounds us, whatcan we do againstit, or else, shall we &why not, buy a goddamn big car,drive, he sd, forchrist’s sake, lookout where yr going.Creeley excelled at the level of the line, channeling everyday American speech into incantatory verse. In his poems of the 1950s, collected in the monumental “For Love,” Creeley reached his creative zenith with a straightforward approach to the expression of his obsessive inner workings, one that mocked the confessional poets with stark honesty and a burning motor. Creeley never embraced the sardonic quality of contemporaries such as James Tate and John Ashbery, preferring instead to engage with the demons within rather than those without. In the years following the 1960 publication of Donald Allen’s “The New American Poetry,” Creeley may have been the most imitated poet in America. But his often-quoted “form is never more than an extension of content” belies the rigid structures into which he bound his thoughts. Creeley is an icon of the so-called “post-avant-garde” precisely because the forms were a seamless vessel for his idiosyncratic introspection — he makes it appear so effortless.His poem “Anger,” about fighting with his second wife Bobbie, ranks among his finest, no more affecting than in its exhausted ending:All you say you wantto do to yourself you doto someone else as yourselfand we sit between youwaiting for whatever willbe at last the real end of you.That the subject Creeley most often sought to approach was love continues to gall his critics, who usually fail to notice that his love poems — really elaborate investigations into marriage, friendship, and hatred — propagate a most unromantic eros. It is in Creeley’s later work where Ben Friedlander, the academic and poet who compiled this volume, makes his only stumbles. Since Mr. Friedlander worked so closely with Creeley, it’s hard not to feel Creeley’s own influence here, and while meditative work such as the morbid “Emptiness” is a worthy epitaph for Creeley’s passing, other efforts suffer in comparison to the starkness of his earlier poems. In these late poems, there is a powerful sense of the gratitude for the things Creeley took for granted in his younger days: to Creeley’s third wife, Penelope, his children, his friends living and deceased, and the young poets he mentored in his years as an academic before his death in 2005 at the age of 79.This is, however, a minor matter — all these poems pop with humor and energy, and Creeley’s fearlessness as he aged in exploring different, even ancient, forms testifies to his relentless energy. When stripped utterly of pretense, Creeley found his greatest realizations, using a life filled with conflict and despair as more than just inspiration — these were experiences that could only be understood through art. The results are new forms for new ideas, a suitable enough definition for a worthy avant-garde.Mr. Carnevale is a writer living in New York.

In the Land Of the Blind

In the Land Of the Blind

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