Creeley Reviews

My books are boxed in storage for the time being, so it's not possible for me to go back to Creeley at the moment, but I found online these reviews of Life & Death (New Directions, 1998) by Tom Clark and Forrest Gander. This essay by Marjorie Perloff is worth a read, too. Personally, I like to enter Creeley's work and go with where he's at. Reading him writing in the 50s is quite different from the voice of the 80s or 90s. But I'm interested in attention, what it's given to and how it's given, and with poets who persist in this treacherous art throughout a long lifetime, I always find much to think about. Dorn, Baraka, Kyger, Whalen, Creeley--all read together with others of their generation help me as a poet to see my own motives more clearly. They expand my capacities to hear and feel the intonations of experience and political engagement. It's not either/or, but always *and*, an addition to the textures of experience as looped through language. I guess I'm just a little more process focused rather than being inclined toward product, though I like the sort of samurai attention to the art that develops over time in these projective figures. The prosody is honed down to a "natural" or inwardly paced movement. I'm often surprised by what holds their attention, and how it is so stressed. They make themselves available to the impersonal, and that somehow lets what they do become a significant achievement--going beyond themselves. And that's where I want to be--out. Or inside out, as the case may be.