Robert
Creeley Remembered
--
I
Know a Man
As
I sd to my
friend, because I am
always talking,--John, I
sd,
which was not his
name, the darkness sur-
rounds us, what
can
we do against
it, or else, shall we &
why not, buy a goddamn big car,
drive,
he sd, for
christ's sake, look
out where yr going.
-
Robert Creeley -
Robert
Creeley, one of America's
most celebrated poets and a leading figure in the literary avant-garde, passed
away on Wednesday in Odessa, Texas. He was 78.
His
works helped define an emerging counter-tradition to the literary establishment,
a postwar poetry originating with Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Zukofsky
and then expanding through the lifeworks of Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Allen
Ginsberg, Denise Levertov, Edward Dorn, along with other writers, musicians and
visual artists.
Creeley
worked as a teacher at the legendary Black Mountain College in North Carolina
and was the editor of the Black Mountain Review for two years. Upon
moving to San Francisco in 1957, he acted as a link between the Black Mountain
poets and the Beats, many of whom he had published in the review.
To
Learn More About Robert Creeley, Click
Here .
Photographer
and Poet, Jeremy Hogan, sends in a heartfelt
"Thank You"
for
Robert Creeley
Two
years ago, I hadn’t heard of you, when some Irishman standing in a parking
lot on a hot summer suburban mid western night mentioned your name. He spoke of
your poetry with such reverence. Then I read that you loved the Irish way of story
telling. But, as with so many of America’s best creative minds, you may have
been appreciated even more by those looking at America as outsiders.
Yes,
it was an Irishman who told me about you. I wish I could say it was my high school
English teacher but it wasn’t. The emotions expressed in your poems about
life or the struggles and the visions of the bard in all of us aren’t taught
in classes at Harvard or easily expressed…can a privileged son or daughter
or the American elite really speak from experience or what it is really like to
live as a commoner in this land…this land where more and more of us working
people live, often subsisting on Wal Mart or McDonald’s wages while their
jobs are sent overseas…I am sure there are a few working class kids that
do get into Harvard…and hopefully, they are men…the Crimson president
still says women are not equal…so I am sure he does not realize the potential
of the working class poet either. Fortunately, there are some Harvard professors
that disagree with him so perhaps there is hope that once day we will live up
to the founding documents of this nation…but don’t ask my family. None
of them went to college – they were busy being sharecroppers and migrant
farm workers during their youth. Wanting to be a photographer, I found my way
through college - thankfully in my early youth I didn't have any common sense.
And like in your writing, it is also my childhood I so often return to in my own
writing.
So, this Irishman,
being working class, a Union electrician actually, was telling me about his own
old man in such a way that only poets tell. He described with such vigor and compassion
that his working class old man was hard. Once some youth were disrespecting his
old man, taunting him, they thought he wouldn’t kick their asses. And he
did. He came our of his Irish flat and kicked their asses himself. They weren’t
laughing then.
However,
I generally don't agree with violence unless in self defense – and by this
I mean someone doing something to me first in such a way my self defense is an
act of self-preservation – and only then it should be a last resort and not
taken lightly and then perhaps avoided altogether – however, were I to punch
every perceived enemy preemptively I’d not only be extremely paranoid and
dangerous, I’d be in jail…but there is certain poetry to respect and
to dignity of the poor for this is usually all they own. Which certainly, is not
something easily understood by many people fortunate enough to have a Harvard
education – and even with my own state college education sometimes I have
to remind myself where I came from so as not to forget. The muse gives her gifts
freely without regard to money, or power or influence…just ask any son of
the great who has tried to live up to the fruits of his creators only to find
himself screaming, swallowed by the shadow.
If
our kings, though most are not philosophers as Plato had wished, understood this,
then when they became governors, CEOs and presidents they would seek to abolish
inequity knowing that equality is really what the consumer wants and needs –
otherwise why would they buy that big house when we really need so little to be
happy. I think you understood that the notions of Plato needed to be destroyed
since they no longer work – you helped to create a new form of expression
and the beat poetry movement. I know your poems weren’t overtly political
– but what is more political than the hearts and minds of America’s
greatest poets. We know how language shifts and changes through time, so how do
we really understand philosophy except through the expression of our own time
and place in this space time continuum we call life.
With
no disrespect intended for the rich, and yes some of them have earned it (just
look how W has aged lately, and listen to Powell trying to protect his good name
today in regards to the apparent non-existence of WMDs – as if we didn’t
know all this time). I cannot wish bad on any one, because believing in equality
and the interconnected nature of the universe it is to wish it upon myself. So,
I’ll deny any notions of wanting class warfare, I prefer peace and dialog
- which our own self-proclaimed kings don’t seem to understand very well
(I say self-proclaimed - because far too many of the poorest among us do not see
the point voting anymore when only the rich can afford such idealistic notions
as Freedom and Democracy – which cannot exist when a multitude still are
symbolically enslaved - what else can one call trying to live on minimum wage).
So,
someone from Harvard, or Yale or perhaps University of Chicago where some neo-cons
were educated - may have a fancy vocabulary, expensive clothes, a nice car…but
they may never be the poet you were and still are because your words will live
as long as humans remember them – and this is why books of poetry of old
are usually filled with the poems of dead, rich, white men. Who owns the presses…surely
not the poor, the forgotten or the oppressed? But, I read your poems are in a
Norton Anthology – so as hopeless as things seem - there is hope.
Anyway,
people forget the past so easily and I can’t imagine living through all of
what you did, losing an eye, your father at 5, during the heart of the Great Depression
(my grandfather when around 5 age lost his own father during the depression as
well – and they lived on a farm – which I hear you did for awhile as
well). And you lived though Hitler, WWII, the invention of the A Bomb, the 60s,
civil rights, desegregation, assassinations and Nam and the 70s, the 80s and the
90s the worst attack on our nation and the new war on terror in this new millennium
with its rollback of our constitutionally guaranteed civil liberties and now this
war in Iraq that may go on until who knows when. Yet, in your poetry, it was your
childhood you came back to so often…so I suppose you had your education long
before you saw fit to drop out of Harvard.
So
long Robert Creeley and I thank not some state school board approved anthology,
not my high school teacher for helping me discover your poetry - I am sure she
would have liked to have seen me off to Harvard as well: but I thank a working
class Irishman for letting me know about you – you did love the Irish story
tellers so well. You are one of our best voices of the American experience which
is often an interior dialog when so much around us is unreal, manufactured and
untrue in these current times. And lastly, I thank you, first of all for taking
time to remember and share those things that make us who we are, the intellect
and the breath or your muses and more for all your poems about the inner beauty
of the emotional landscape conveyed with such economy of expression.
March
30, 2005
Jeremy Hogan
To
learn more about Jeremy Hogan, Click
Here.
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