Before he was five, Robert Creeley had lost the use of an eye in a freak accident and his father to a heart attack; not surprisingly, his poetry conveys an acute sense of the body’s frailty and the anguish of isolation, yet it also records the joys of love and family life. His verse is instantly recognizable—brief in its individual lines and overall length, and often so terse as to be opaque—while concerned to trace the puzzlements of the mind and heart as they move through experiences of intense intimacy. Much influenced by jazz musicians and action painters, Creeley stressed the process of writing over any finished product.
More By This Poet
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
that never the ease,
even the hardness,
of rain falling
will have for me
something other than this,
something not so insistent—
am I...
Somewhere
The galloping collection of boards
are the house which I afforded
one evening to walk into
just as the night came down.
Dark inside, the candle
lit of its own free will, the attic
groaned then, the stairs
led me up into the air.
From outside, it must...
Self-Portrait
He wants to be
a brutal old man,
an aggressive old man,
as dull, as brutal
as the emptiness around him,
He doesn’t want compromise,
nor to be ever nice
to anyone. Just mean,
and final in his brutal,
his total, rejection of it all.
He tried the sweet,
the gentle,...
The World
I wanted so ably
to reassure you, I wanted
the man you took to be me,
to comfort you, and got
up, and went to the window,
pushed back, as you asked me to,
the curtain, to see
the outline of the trees
in the night outside.
The light,...