April 01, 2005

Robert Creeley died of respiratory complications yesterday. I could tell you how great his poetry is, or you can read for yourselves. first seen at metafilter.
  • broken links to poems at the link above, try here.
  • Today's just dia de la Muertos, innit?
  • seems that way! memorialfilter I guess.
  • One of my very favourites. RIP.
  • In related news, Phillip Lamantia passed away a few days ago. I watched his memorial pour out of the church today and saw a collection of SF's finest poets gathered on Vallejo St -- including Lawrence Ferlinghetti in a bicycle helmet.
  • In related news, 7.5 billion people didn't die today... who'd a thunk...
  • :)
  • Debaser: I'd heard that, but I'm not quite sure I believe you. What are their names, so I can call them and verify?
  • What I took in my hand grew in weight. You must understand it was not obscene. Night comes. We sleep. Then if you know what say it. Don't pretend. Guises are what enemies wear. You and I live in a prayer. Helpless. Helpless. Aloud I speak.... -- Robetrt Creeley, from "Song" And here's another by him.
  • Goodbye Now I recognize it was always me like a camera set to expose itself to a picture or a pipe through which the water might run or a chicken dead for dinner or a plan inside the head of a dead man. Nothing so wrong when one considered how it all began. It was Zukofsky's "Born very young into a world already very old..." The century was well along when I came in and now that it's ending, I realize it won't be long. But couldn't it all have been a little nicer, as my mother'd say. Did it have to kill everything in sight, did right always have to be so wrong? I know this body is impatient. I know I constitute only a meager voice and mind. Yet I loved, I love. I want no sentimentality. I want no more than home. Robert Creeley
  • Goshamighty bass player Steve Swallow made two discs of Creeley's poems set to music. Shiela Jordan sings on the first, Creeley himself reads on the second.
  • Sorry, Sheila Jordan.
  • I was at a conference where he spoke (a panel on Black Mountain College). He was uncomfortable sitting at the panelists table and instead chose to sit next to me. I was flattered beyond belief. He made funny comments through the whole thing, short and murmured observations. So gracious and able to see through the crap.
  • Wrong Side of the River I watched you on the wrong side of the river, waving. You were trying to tell me something. You used both hands and sort of ran back and forth, as if to say look behind you, look out behind you. I wanted to wave back. But you began shouting and I didn't want you to think I understood. So I did nothing but stand still, thinking that's what to do on the wrong side of the river. After a while you did too. We stood that way for a long time. Then I raised a hand, as if to be called on, and you raised a hand, as if to the same question. -- Stanley Plumly
  • The Rhythm It is all a rhythm, from the shutting door, to the window opening, the seasons, the sun's light, the moon, the oceans, the growing of things, the mind in men personal, recurring in them again, thinking the end is not the end, the time returning, themselves dead but someone else coming. If in death I am dead, then in life also dying, dying... And the women cry and die. The little children grow only to old men. The grass dies, the force goes. But is met by another returning, oh not mine, not mine, and in turn dies. The rhythm which projects from itself continuity bending all to its force from window to door, from ceiling to floor, light at the opening, dark at the closing. -- Robert Creeley
  • Silence I will stop listening to it. Becauase everything I forget falls into the sea. Into the sea's solitary heart wherein dwells a restless silence. -- Ivan Onate, trans Steven J. Stewart
  • The People Are a Temple And souls are candles, each lighting the other. -- Gennady Aygi
  • 7-5-7 Though battered, shattered, broken by waves, the full moon reassembles her bruised face.
  • Again (Wrightsville Beach) Crusoe again, confounded, confounding purposes just cruising, looking around and around for edges of the familiar, place he was in back then, wherever -- all the old sand and water. How much he thought to be there, he can't remember. Shipwreck wouldn't seem thinkable, at least until after it happened, and then one begins at the edge, the beach, going forward, backward, until one finds place again. Oh, gosh, there's mother! Or brother, sister, father -- some friend of long-standing, anyone who still is there, can be securing. Of course, you're -- and you look so well! Even years slip past in the background. The water, waves, sand, the backdrop of the houses because it's all been developed -- Friday's Diner, Crusoe's Condos -- it's all as it would be, the locals, the tourists, whoever got here first and what they could make of it. But the old story is real too, the footprint, the other, anyone's fears of anyone, the displacement when for the first time one sees some other is there, not just imagined, and won't necessarily agree with anything at all one wants, won't in that sense go away. -- Robert Creeley
  • Shortly before Creeley's death, he gave this interview.
  • America America, you ode for reality! Give back the people you took. Let the sun shine again on the four corners of the world you thought of first but do not own, or keep like a convenience. People are your own word, you invented that locus and term. Here, you said and say, is where we are. Give back what we are, these people you made, us, and nowhere but you to be. -- Robert Creeley
  • Echo Broken heart, you timeless wonder. What a small place to be. True, true to life, to life. -- Robert Creeley
  • What the Gravedigger Needs Teuva, Finland overalls rubber boots leather gloves iron spear to loosen up the frozen ground lantern spade length of rope board to prevent mourners falling in bicycle to go from grave to grave -- Rachel Loden
  • Chasing The Bird The sun sets unevenly and the people go to bed. The night has a thousand eyes. The clouds are low, overhead. Every night it is a little bit more difficult, a little harder. My mind to me a mangle is. --Robert Creeley
  • Valentine for You Where from where to the thought to do -- Where with, whereby the means themselves now lie -- Wherefor, wherein such hopes of reconciling heaven -- Even the way is changed without you, even the day. -- Robert Creeley