Love and frangibility: An appreciation of Robert Creeley

American Poetry Review, The, May/Jun 1997 by McHugh, Heather

A Position

Despite the sonic sense its title makes, it is to visual and temporal fields that Echoes recurs with most characteristic frequency. Really to appreciate the tenacity with which Creeley addresses these senses, we ought to keep in mind the seminal early poem "The Window," for it anchors everything in the maker's eye-the eye in whose liquid glance a world becomes moving, the eye from whose globe a world takes shape:

THE WINDOW

Position is where you put it, where it is, did you, for example, that

large tank there, silvered, with the white church alongside, lift

all that, to what purpose? How heavy the slow

world is with everything put in place. Some

man walks by, a car beside him on the dropped

road, a leaf of yellow color is going to

fall. It all drops into place. My

face is heavy with the sight. I can feel my eye breaking.

This poem is extraordinary, I'd say, for its palpable sense of responsibility. In this poem's world, physical relativity leads not to moral relativity (an excuse for remoteness or resignation) but rather to moral implication. The ethical depths of which poetic ambiguity is capable have never been sufficiently understood or credited; generally the moderns and their offspring suffer from reduction in the severe and moralizing eye of those theoreticians who see, in the relations between aesthetics and ethics, only a single blunt instrument.

Looked at closely, this poem is an etude in that precise and psychoprosodical art which keeps a line-break subtle. I say psycho-prosodical because a line can seem calculated to lead a reader toward presumptions which, in the wake of the line break, he will have to relinquish. A poem changes a reader's mind. And one of the ways it does so is through this play of sentence (the unit of thought in English syntax) against line the unit of poetic disposition). Sometimes predisposed, sometimes postdisposed, the trail of anticipations and reconsiderations is, in fact, the meaning of passage: for passage is something we have to navigate, through all its straits and turns.

Look how much that first line-break ("Position is where you/") disposes us to supply an ending in advance. The construction resembles the loose vernacular form of a definition: TO position is TO put something JUST RIGHT, and tautology, if not the most exquisite of lexical exercises is at least, irrepressibly, a most familiar colloquial one. But what arrives after the poem's very first line-break delicately changes the status of the word "where." Creeley is a writer who seizes out of the vernacular the secret value or hidden implication. Were he to hear a hapless graduate student say "Unpacking is where you expose its hidden agenda," Creeley would seem to be the kind of listener least interested in moralizing-either to point out infelicities of grammar, to take the jargon for a given, toward tendentious ends. Characteristically he highlights not the right way, but the right OF way: the grounds on which language "places" things, the claim it stakes, the way a saying is incumbent on a seeing, and so on-that road along which things are seeable or sayable at all. And in Creeley's eye, that road itself is moving.