Saturday, January 2, 2010

Reflections on Creeley in Death



For the beginning is assuredly
the end– since we know nothing, pure
and simple, beyond

our own complexities.


--
W.C. Williams, Paterson


The death of a poet offers a peculiar moment of reflection, wherein the poem itself becomes a final manifestation of the substance of a writer’s lifelong engagement with language – the record of the shared memory of the poet and his reader. Poems resurface, resonant artifacts of his life and acts on the page, various articulations of a particular voice that coalesce to form a complete body of work. The posthumous reading replaces the formerly living body of the poet with the literary corpus; the constellation of experience, lived and written, is finally embodied in the work itself.

Not simply an inactive record of past experimentation, the work is a self-reflective body, a palimpsestic representation of the whole of a poet’s oeuvre. Nearly five years after his death, Robert Creeley’s work shows no evidence of growth, per se, but is instead representative of a consistent, lifelong engagement with a process of projective introspection. The outside always in conversation with the inside, the particulars made always into the general, Creeley’s poems – from the beginning to the end of his career—are examinations of the complexities of perception, as it occurs momently.

Published as On Earth, Creeley’s last poems are the condensation of a life of such examination. A poet without a masterwork, with only one widely anthologized poem, Creeley’s legacy lies in a deftly executed poetry of
pieces, the divers articulations of particular experiences in a precise language of simplicity. On Earth consists of poems that could have easily appeared in the minimalist experiments of his early career. Time, a pervasive theme, is relevant to Creeley’s poems only in its seemingly circular motion. Less circular, in fact, than an overlapping spiral: moments in time seem to exist alongside one another, echoing, speaking in a context of the poetry itself, rather than in a precise temporality. Take, for example, “Which Way”:

Which one are you
and who would know.
Which way
would you have come this way.

And what’s behind,
beside, before.
If there are more,
why are there more.


Creeley’s questions are punctuated as statements, the implication being that the answer is contained within the inquiry. The employment of this device is an echo of the earlier work; the recurring questions of place, time and human presence, their interactions and effects upon a personal consideration of being-in-time, are approached in their incomprehensibility as self-evident. For Creeley, the precision of language in his poems becomes a means of deciphering the mysteries of content. The question is, has always been, how to make sense of the self in an uncertain setting of expanding space and time. The rarely voiced “I” is referenced only in reflective terms: Creeley’s speaker-self approaches the problem of personal reconciliation through an examination of the unknown externalities of his circumstance. Thus the interrogation of the “you,” its identity, its arrival and point of departure, the trajectory of its movement, is an articulation of Creeley’s curiosity as it pertains to the unknowable. The “you” is one among many unknowns, the manifestation of a projected uncertainty of identity.

An earlier poem, “The Measure,” indicates an early articulation of just such an uncertainty:
I cannot
move backward
or forward.
I am caught

in the time
as measure.
What we think
of we think of ---

of no other reason
we think than
just to think---
each for himself.


The focus shifts to the “I,” its stasis within the confines of time and solitary contemplation. Creeley considers the position of the individual, voiced here as both “I” and “himself,” in terms of an equally static “we.” The immobility of the self-conscious speaker is projected onto an external collectivity, so that the particular aspect of the self is made general. In this case, externality is less representative of a mysterious unknown than a shared inability among the we-self to know anything beyond the I-self’s own thought. That is to say, the only known is the paralytic sense of isolation, a shared condition that unites speaker (“I”) and reader (“we”).

As in “Which Way,” Creeley uncovers the relations between space, time and perception, as they speak to the consciousness-in-isolation. The later poem, however, exhibits a precision of observation that is reflective of a more focused understanding of circumstance. That is to say, the later work represents a condensation of the various aspects of confusion that plague the speaker, reconciling, at least in part, the tensions of fragmentation that characterize his body of work as a whole. The questions are far from resolved, yet the accumulation of experience offers a sharpened clarity of observation – in age, Creeley is able to strip away the excess, articulating his preoccupations with an economy of language that speaks to a maturity of voice not present in the earlier work. Creeley’s growth, then, is exhibited not in a change of theme or tone, but instead in an increased precision of thematic articulation.

Without a sense of finality in any one poem, Creeley’s body of work is a collage of interactive verse, early and late poems conversing on the shared plane of a fragmented collectivity. His beginning is reflected in his end, everything unknown but the fact of the unclear self, composed of self-evident complexities. Thought, space, time, processes of perception – these are all questions, answers in themselves, striving toward a clarity that presents itself only Creeley’s precision of language. Nothing is resolved, not even in death, so that the confused body of Creeley now lives in the confused body of his work.