"The last thing a man say swill be a word": Robert Creeley, On Earth
by Steve Williams

The genius of the book review is that, ordinarily, it allows the critic’s writing to happen in medias res, at some point along the as-yet unbounded arc of the author’s career. Emerson’s shock on first reading Whitman in 1855 is completely different from the shock of the student who encounters Leaves of Grass today. He or she picks up a text that is different not only in terms of its content—the 1892 “Deathbed Edition” that most of us read includes all of the poetry Whitman added after the shocking 1855 edition—but one that is also of a different tenor precisely because it is complete: Emerson’s excitement was to see who this strange young author was and what he would produce next. He would wait and see. The student today is excited only to see what he holds in his hands—no waiting on the dead.

Robert Creeley died on March 30, 2005. On Earth collects thirty-three final poems and an essay, “Reflections on Whitman in Age,” which appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review in spring 2005. Paradoxically, it is the unfinished nature of the book—the essay and poems together are well under 100 pages—that has to represent the completion of both Creeley’s life and his work; the literary corpus is more obviously implicated in the author’s physical body (and therefore the book review with the biography or the obituary) than it was when the young Whitman had to remind his reader that “Who touches this book touches a man.” What the book does most strikingly, perhaps, is that it eliminates the relationship of author to reader in which we, readers, wait, running through the contents of the new magazines in the library or scanning the bookstore shelves, for the next thing that will come to hold and transform us. The author no longer lives along with us, or a little ahead of us, after a “deathbed edition”—the work remains vital, of course, but in a dramatically altered relation.

Creeley’s work has dealt explicitly with mortality for some time now, as his recent titles—Echoes, Life & Death, If I were writing this—suggest. Creeley understands death, characteristically, as a limit:

One descends, one does not ascend. I say characteristically because of how immediately this sentence recalls the grammar of Creeley’s most famous statement on poetics: “FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT,” as Charles Olson quotes him in his epoch-making essay “Projective Verse” (the capitals, it seems, are Olson’s). The near-identity of form and content is a familiar theme in all of the more exploratory arts of this time and after, but what distinguishes Creeley’s thinking is the freedom allowed by “never more than.” Whatever form is, we know it has a particular scope and dimension, which exist in a specific, essential relation to something else called content. Creeley is known as a minimalist (in the general sense, though the Minimalism of Donald Judd, Carl Andre and others happened contemporaneously and involved similar precepts), but the particular succinctness of this statement is the anything but minimal precisely because by saying so little, only sketching the outline of the relationship, he leaves the rest open—for debate, for what, in fact, is the case. “His succinctness,” writes John Ashbery, “is like the unfettered flashing of a diamond.”

So form and content live together in the poem, just as life and death live together on earth. Creeley often chooses to express relations—I and you, here and there, now and then—over identities; the poem “Here,” from Thirty Things, reads in its entirety: “Here is/ where there/ is.” Here and there are not the same, even though, paradoxically, they occupy the same place. All this cohabitation is particularly moving given that it is also how people live, insofar as we share rooms, cities, the planet, and so on. But what seems more important now is that “never more than” relates form to content in the same way in which it relates death to the body, to a thing as it has existed through time. Creeley’s metaphysics is more of an infra-physics, and therein lies its particular difficulty:

In this conclusion to the poem “Caves,” and throughout the book, Creeley might revise William Carlos Williams’s maxim “No ideas but in things” to “No ideas but within things,” so intense is his imagination of material cores. Still, how does one get there? This place is, after all, inaccessible, “beyond any thought or habit.” There isn’t an easy answer, but in place of one I would suggest that what distinguishes these poems is an absolute faith in the poetic medium, form-and-content, as a means of getting in.

Creeley was one of a staggering number of poets born in the late 1920’s. It is not at all clear why it happened this way, except perhaps that their age exposed them to World War II while still leaving them fairly young when it ended. They would wrestle with the century’s greatest catastrophe, in one way or another, from the very start of their careers. The war “was a remarkable emphasis upon what the world apparently was content to be. Or, frankly, had come to be,” Creeley said in a 1995 interview . For his part, Creeley served in the Army Field Service in Burma before returning to Harvard, eventually to be expelled, lore has it, for dehinging the door into Dunster House. (“Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!” indeed.) At any rate, Creeley would become an important theorist and practitioner of what would become known as The New American Poetry, after Donald Allen’s 1960 anthology of the same name. Allen’s anthology grouped its members together in sections so as to emphasize their similarities (as Beat writers, the New York School, Black Mountain, etc.) at the expense of their differences. That being said, this group of writers did in fact present a variety of alternatives to the prevailing New Critical understanding of what a poem is—a “well-wrought urn,” in Cleanth Brooks’ phrase, a polished, stable object constructed so that each element served a central function, the expression of a generative emotion, based on what were seen as radical readings of Williams, Ezra Pound, and others. Now that the New American Poetry is not so new, however, one wonders “what comes next,” so to speak—but, I suppose, it is an unanswerable question. As Creeley’s poem “The Company” puts it, “This/ is the last day, this is the last,/ the last, the last.”

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