Robert Creeley: If I Were Writing This

Robert Creeley: Relentlessly Human

If I Were Writing This by Robert Creeley; New Directions Books, 2003;
104 pages, hardcover, $21.95.

For five decades Robert Creeley has sounded a poetic voice of as much intelligence
and common sense as any American poet. His intensely honest revelations about the
qualities of emotional experience, and how they are bonded to language, have gained
him an international reputation as one of our best-loved and most reliably human
poets. His most recent collection of poems, If I Were Writing This, verifies his
standing.
Creeley once said in conversation that, although he grew up in Massachusetts, he felt
great kinship with Maine people who prefer to "say as little as possible as often as
possible." To this purpose he has over the years spent a great deal of time here, as a
visiting faculty member at UMaine and in a house in the midcoast, cultivating with
endless fascinating talk the idea that the less said, the better. A result of this approach
is his unrelenting effort to find the simplest way to express bewilderingly complex
experiences, and a hallmark of his poetry is brevity - short lines, short stanzas.
In If I Were Writing This, Creeley at 76 brings brevity to bear again on his
experiences of age, surroundings, the fast-approaching end of life, and the peculiar
qualities personal memories take on. He bids farewell, as we say, with characteristic
fondness to close personal friends who were some of our most influential poets,
including Allen Ginsberg. "For Gregory Corso" opens simply:

I'll miss you,
who did better than I did
at keeping the faith of poets,
staying true.

An unusual number of poems in this book are dedicated to individuals, and many
directly address family members and friends. "Yesterdays" explicitly recounts events
long past but vivid in mind. "Emptiness" crystallizes the welter of feelings associated
with the end of a sister's life, occurring in much-loved Maine. Throughout the book,
Creeley's highly concentrated language discloses the intensity with which he felt the
Beat '50s, the tumultuous '60s, and the unsettling settling of '80s and '90s Middle
America.
From the 1940s on, Creeley's poems have never been what you'd call light reading,
and it's still true of If I Were Writing This. But this collection has the advantage of an
expansive backdrop - most of Creeley's life - and there's a sense he feels a sort of
freedom, now, to approach not only complexity with simplicity, but also simplicity
with simplicity. And so in this book densities of feeling and language are powerfully
interwoven with homespun, perfectly real sentiments, and even with what used to be
called "wisdom" (which the poet reveals he has by denying, altogether believably, that
he has it).
If I Were Writing This is no doubt a kind of general farewell, and while I imagine
there's more yet to come, Creeley in this book gives us a moving view from the edge.
As always.

Robert Creeley died in April 2005.