The Man in Black Rock: Creeley at 75
By Ted Pelton
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Francesco Clemente, Robert Creeley 2001, oil on canvas, 2002, 46” x 93.”
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Steady, the evening fades
up the street into sunset
over the lake. Winter sits
quiet here, snow piled
by the road, the walks stamped
down or shoveled. The kids
in the time before dinner are
playing, sliding on the old ice.
The dogs are out, walking,
and it’s soon inside again,
with the light gone. Time
to eat, to think of it all.
“Buffalo Evening,” 1983
“Onward,” he always signs at the ends of letters and emails — not Samuel Beckett’s “I can’t go on; I’ll go on,” but a true thrill in the necessity, always looking to the new.
Poet Laureate of New York State from 1989-91, winner of the Bollingen Prize, member of the Board of Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets, most recently, recipient of a Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award. Maybe the most well-loved American poet of our age. And Buffalo resident since 1966, having written about living on streets familiar to any Buffalo dweller — Fargo and Summer — and for the last fifteen years calling home a reclaimed firehouse in Black Rock.
We’re downtown, at the Market Arcade for a Buffalo Film Seminar showing of Once Upon a Time in the West. Both of us have arrived alone. Pen, says Bob, speaking of his wife, is visiting New Zealand, her home, where she and Creeley met while the poet was there on a Fulbright twenty-five years ago.
I’d called a couple friends before coming out, but no one was in the mood to see a thirty year-old spaghetti Western. I was.
“Would you mind the company?” I say, employing a well-worn Creeley phrase. The company — one’s peers, fellow practitioners, and travellers.
“I’d like the company,” says Bob.
The movie is a scream. An outrageous 1960s spaghetti Western: myths blown up large and overacted, silent gunfighters of unreal skill in garish billboard colors, dead bodies everywhere, killers and their desert insanity.
Creeley punctuating certain moments, sitting beside me with a popcorn tub, with a mock rah-rah fist pump. “Onward,” he always signs at the ends of letters and emails — not Samuel Beckett’s “I can’t go on; I’ll go on,” but a true thrill in the necessity, always looking to the new which are repeats of the old things, which makes this Sergio Leone movie such a great occasion. Everything in the movie is utterly over the top, already a copy of a copy, so far inside the genre as to refer only to the genre.
In the last scene, Charles Bronson avenges an old grudge against an evil Henry Fonda — as Fonda gasps his last breath, Bronson sticks a harmonica in his teeth.
“Bob Dylan,” Creeley wisecracks.
The film ends and, after a brief audience discussion, it’s time to leave. Dylan’s troubadour poetry. The mythic American West, its displacement of male sexuality into violence, viewed through the lens of a European director.
“So many propositions,” Creeley says.
Like a kindly uncle, he asks me as we leave the theater if I need a ride home.
One feels a flatness in our times. Everything pre-digested, pre-packaged, our words coming to us shrink-wrapped in cellophane so they feel new as we speak them even though what you hear coming from people’s mouths is all too often hackneyed slogans. Money keeps its dominion over our lives. The US President is no friend of the arts or deep reflection and leaves the thoughtful feeling bereft. What is poetry’s role in such times as these?
“There is some inherent capability of poetry not just to recognize-as-identify but to respond to and apprehend shifts and moves in the public psyche that in other situations might take years,” says Creeley. “People, sadly, after the World Trade Center pointed out almost sentimentally — and why not — the recourse to poetry, where you’d find it pinned to walls, you’d find it everywhere. There wasn’t anything vatic or mystic about it. Poetry simply enabled people to get things said.”
There is still an active poetry scene in Buffalo, centered around the L:A:N:G:U:A:G:E-based writings of Charles Bernstein, the digital poetics landscape delineated by Loss Pequeño Glazier, and UB Poetics students’ experimentations in- and outside these suggestions. But, for better or worse, French theory and/or a kickin’ harddrive with a network connection seem almost required equipment in the current environment. Creeley’s knowledge of Buffalo scenes suggests a much deeper swimming hole. He freely recalls several decades of poetry’s importance locally, particularly in the city limits. It began with a poetry collection at the University, gathered in the 1950s with the arrival of poet William Carlos Williams’s papers. It continued as UB’s English department hired, under the guidance of then-chairman Al Cook, a great number of writers and critics in the 1960s, who in turn attracted a plethora of poets and poetry students. This was when the University had Main Street as its only campus. Denise Levertov, John Wieners, Gregory Corso, Charles Olson, Ted Berrigan, Amiri Baraka and Ed Dorn all taught, studied, or simply lived in Buffalo during this high moment, in addition to more permanent faculty like Creeley and John Logan. When avant-garde legends Marcel Duchamp and John Cage visited in 1968, an article in Life magazine called Buffalo “the Acropolis of the avant-garde.”
“There was an extraordinarily benign climate for lots of younger poets. One virtue of the sixties was simply that the division of things was not nearly as emphatic, with neighborhoods and territories, because all the action was in the city. The great thing in the community is that poetry did not mean instantly an academically-based or -qualified literary activity. It was much more communal. It had much more to do with hymn singing or stories, it had much more to do with a convivial, communal sense. It was also one of the obviously useful bridges between classic black and white — it was a meeting place, and it wasn’t overseen in some didactic sense by various academic authorities.”
Buffalo residents have always had a peculiar relationship to this legacy. The average citizen remains unaware of its history, as well as of the fact that Buffalo is still seen among cognoscenti throughout the U.S. as a poetry city. It’s true, perhaps, that poets are much like harmonica players in Creeley’s friend, painter John Chamberlain’s line: “terrific, but there’s not much use for them.” But it’s also true that poets long ago conferred a greatness onto Buffalo that the rest of the citizenry can’t quite get themselves to believe. Local poets always have been, and remain, warriors against the city’s sense of its own irrelevance.
“I remember one of my students telling me this story when Allen Ginsberg had come to read at UB. And she said the night he was reading, she told her roommate, you know, did she want to go this terrific reading? Allen Ginsberg was going to be here! And the woman said, ‘Oh, no, he’d never come here.’”
Bob is telling this story as we sit at an oak dining room table in his converted firehouse. A large, boldly colored print to my left catches my eye. It’s by Jasper Johns. The walls are adorned with a history of post-war American culture — etchings by Jim Dine, poster-sized photographs by Elsa Dorfman, broadsides, tapestries, objets d’art. A world of art that has funnelled through Creeley into our too-humble city for longer than most undergraduates have been on this planet. The poor girl. Saddled by some unaccountable fear of having landed in obscurity, she missed out on what she might have had.
“So she didn’t go,” laughs Creeley wistfully, celebrated practitioner of a neglected art.
Graybeard though he is, Creeley keeps a travelling schedule that would daunt a mid-career salesman. In October, 2001, I saw him at The Loft in Minneapolis while there for a small press book festival. He gave a retrospective reading of his work to a house of about 300. After, as always, he gave me his list of where he was off to next. Blurs of place-names: Seattle, Vermont, New York City, Los Angeles, next summer a seminar in St. Petersburg, Russia. Nearly always, the long-term itineraries include stops in Maine, where he and Pen keep a second house. Creeley spends more time in airports than a seventies-era hare krishna.
When I ask him about it, he dismisses this constant activity as “show-biz.” The working artist, whether you’re Allen Ginsberg or Neil Diamond, has to tour, and will stay on the road as long as there’s paying customers. But there’s something more to it than this, as I see in Minneapolis. Flocks of young people come up to Bob for autographs and to tell him what his work has meant to them, some of their eyes brimming with tears of barely conquered shyness. “The company,” not a business but a loose collective of the like-minded, transcending geographical boundaries, linked by words, is always accepting of new members.
“In Company” was the title of an exhibition of Creeley’s remarkable history of collaborative projects with visual artists which debuted at the Castellani Art Museum of Niagara University in 1999 and subsequently travelled across the country. The show collected work done in concert with Creeley’s words by a litany of the great painters and visual craftspeople of our time: Francesco Clemente, Jim Dine, Susan Rothenberg, Alex Katz, Marisol, Robert Indiana, Joe Brainard, and dozens of others, some fifty in all. In interviews done for the CD-ROM of the exhibition, artist after artist told of the tremendously open experience of collaborating with the poet. Here, Jim Dine:
I didn’t know what to do when he sent me Mabel [Mabel: A Story, 1976]. I didn’t have any idea about what to do but I thought it was as good a chance to do what I wanted to do in etching as anything else. And Creeley embraced it — and this is a big point about Bob — because he embraces everything. If it’s you, he embraces it. I remember he said this [the etching series] is perfect and I thought what’s he talking about — what’s perfect about it. It has nothing to do with what I just read.
Yet the collaboration with Dine, like others Creeley has done, works precisely because of its distance from direct illustration, which is a trap for the writer and artist combining to produce a book. Dine and Creeley both retain their integrity as artists working together, rather than the illustrator describing the text, or vice-versa. Dine’s works rather respond viscerally, in the light of Creeley’s text.
Creeley has also worked the other way, responding to artists’ works. For a recent publication of Susan Rothenberg, Paintings From the Nineties, he authored the poem, “Possibilities,” whose fifteen five-line stanzas begin:
What do you wear?
How does it feel
to wear clothes?
What shows
what you were or where?
This accident, accidental, person,
feeling out, feelings out —
outside the box one’s in —
skin’s resonances, reticent
romances,
the blotch of recognition, blush?
Upon receiving the poem, Rothenberg called Creeley on the phone. “How did you know this about me?” Creeley replied, “I looked at your paintings.”
Creeley’s myriad involvements with other artists have grown in the last decade to include a number of sound collaborations. None would seem so unlikely on the surface as his recording with the rock band, Mercury Rev. But it’s not so unlikely when one realizes that Jonathan Donahue, Rev’s lead singer, is a former student of Creeley’s.
“Way back Jonathan, Suzanne [Thorpe, a former band member], who were old UB student friends, and one or two others, also from UB days, came up to Buffalo and I recorded several poems for them at their request, like they say. This was all sans any music — just voice. Then they set to and made a sound track and/or using my voice made a composite track with layering etc., so as to get to the final ‘So There,’ which is on a single called ‘The Hum is Coming from Her/So There.’”
Known for their thoughtful lyrics and ethereal sound, the band links Creeley’s home page from their website (www.mercuryrev.com) and feels such a kinship with the poet and his work that Donahue even invited Creeley to tour with them. It’s perhaps the one collaborative effort Creeley ever balked at. “I would be ‘Old Bob’ and could wander about the stage at will. It sounded too close to King Lear for comfort.”
One group Creeley has performed with live is the experimental jazz quartet of Chris Massey, Steve Swallow, David Cast, and David Torn. The five performed an energetic, wide-ranging, improvisatory show at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center in 1998, which in 2001 was released as the CD, Have We Told You All You’d Thought to Know.
The method of the compositions on the CD is for Creeley to open the mood for most tracks with a reading from his works — all newer poems including many from his collaborative book with photographer Elsa Dorfman, En Famille. The themes of the poems are familiar ones from Creeley’s recent years — family, mortality, the effect of passing time on friendships, stages of life and the fact that when we encounter each other we are often at different points on life’s trajectory, age and youth. The musicians then depart from out of Creeley’s verses into expansions of sound, his words becoming signposts for their musical explorations.
David Cast’s mysterious, Eastern-influenced tenor saxophone lines, atop a humming wall of percussion, bass murmurings, guitar noise and tape loops, create, in the context of Creeley’s words, the pains and uncertainties of emergence.
The poet’s final words — “Is happiness this?” — concisely, as always with Creeley, compress life’s always provisional acceptance of its gifts into its own, gem-like reward. We have art to mark our places here, our pains and loves and uncertainties.
As I sd to my
friend, because I am
always talking, — John, I
sd, which was not his
name, the darkness sur-
rounds us, what
can we do against
it, or else, shall we &
why not, buy a goddamn big car,
drive, he sd, for
christ’s sake, look
out where yr going
“I Know a Man,” 1962
Type in Robert Creeley’s name at a
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Max Gimblett, drawing for
The Dogs of Auckland, Creeley/Gimblett, 1998. |
More is always coming and underway. Creeley read a part in a recently discovered screenplay adapted by Jack Kerouac from his novel, Doctor Sax, which will eventually be available on CD. More artists are working with Creeley on new projects. “The company” is thriving.
Long ago, nearly fifty years ago, Creeley was a crazy drinking buddy of Kerouac’s on San Francisco’s North Beach. Today, he has become one of the final survivors of the originary Beat Generation scene — that world predicated on the notion that poverty and saintliness were somehow connected, as they were for Eastern mystics or in the lives of the Catholic saints whose lives instructed Kerouac as he grew up as a young boy in the French-speaking section of Lowell, Massachusetts.
When someone wants nothing of you but to coexist in the traumatic excitements and tediums of daily life, when they are your friends and are driven by love rather than mercenary motives, life becomes simple and life’s residents, angels. This was the communal, Beat vision; as Ginsberg recognized the motto in Kerouac’s On the Road: “Everything belongs to me because I am poor.” The conversants in “I Know a Man” speak of buying a big car, but are already driving, talking, saving each other from accidents.
Is it stretching the conceit too far to say that Buffalo — where Creeley has lived all these years, a city fiscally impoverished but also known as the home of good neighbors — is a Beat city?
In such a place, one would imagine the most major celebrity living much as Robert Creeley does, in the same simple constellation of relationships that each of us have — occupation, family, friends — without airs.
Creeley recalls a recent reading at the Albright-Knox Art Museum in concert with exhibition, The Tumultuous Fifties. “There were a number of people who came from very old-time employments and habits. It had nothing to do with the usual imagination of that exercise. They came as neighbors, and that to me was immensely reassuring.”
While we can,
let’s do it,
let’s have fun.
“So There,” 1976
In similar spirit, the Buffalo poetry community celebrated Creeley’s 70th birthday five years ago with an extravaganza of readings and talks organized by the UB Poetics Program. From external events such as these as well as by the frequently mentioned act in his poems of looking in a mirror and seeing himself age, Creeley is aware of his own mortality and characteristically seizes the occasion as opportunity, recalling his forebears who have gone ahead before him.
“I remember Robert Duncan saying to me when I was about fifty and he was about nine years older and I needed glasses, you know, aging is very much like adolescence. Your body again becomes phenomenal. Just as you remember things changing, some of it a bit threatening, some of it fascinating. That just happens with age. From eyesight to hearing to memory to physical energies. But it’s not only a depletion.”
Now he remembers Williams Carlos Williams, in many ways, from the compression of his lines to his attentiveness to the commonplace, Creeley’s own poetic father. Williams confronted aging first as an obvious loss, reaching for things and not getting them and the like. “But then he writes a magnificent poem. ‘Memory is a kind of accomplishment,’ as he says. ‘The descent beckons as the ascent beckoned.’ And he’s off and running.”
A number of critics have pointed to Creeley’s most recent work as his strongest, his least cryptic and abstract, his most sustaining. The man in Black Rock is himself still running.
Ted Pelton is a fiction writer and Chair of the Humanities department at Medaille College, where he also directs the fledgling Creative Writing Program. He is also the founder of Starcherone Books (www.starcherone.com) and the author of a collection of short fiction, Endorsed by Jack Chapeau.
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