Oisin Deyja from Montreal: Have you any conjectures as to why the minimal presence of English Poetry from other English-speaking nations, such as Canada, Australia, or South Africa, in both the academic and publishing environments here in America? Need it be a concern at all?
Robert Creeley: I think it's a concern for sure—echoing this country's lack of interest in the poetries of other cultures and countries generally. It's as if our imagination of the world had tunnel vision, was monofocal. I think a bleak but large instance is the recent war on Iraq in that there was neither interest nor concern to understand either that culture or its people. Paradoxically, the closer to home—other poetries in English—the more the resistance, except, possibly, to the British, though that too has increased significantly in the last thirty years. We use large, generalizing anthologies to cover the hole, call it—but I doubt we have any active attention.
Padma Rajaoui from Berkeley: Is it my imagination, or are poems more likely to be true and autobiographical than other writing? I know fiction is often drawn from life and true circumstances (stories in the media, the author's life), and such. Yet no one expects it to depict the authors' actual experiences. And yet I and others often expect poetry to be from the poet's life. And it seems it often is. I know it must vary from writer to write, but what is your general impression? thanks!
Robert Creeley: I don't think your question has a simple answer. I remember Irving Layton (old friend and exceptional Canadian poet) sending me once a poem he'd written called "Elegy for Fred Smith." It had his characteristic grace and obviously he felt strongly about this friend's death. So I write a note in sympathy, as one would. Then he told me there was no "Fred Smith" and that he'd just been trying on the "elegiac" form. Robert Duncan, another great friend and poet, put it, "I tell the truth the way the words lie." Like it or not, I got fixed on "sincerity" in Pound's emphasis (via Kung's "Only the most absolute sincerity under heaven can effect any change") and so had "to tell the truth." I think Coleridge "told the truth," "The Pains of Sleep," for example. But "truth" is also an imagination as well as whatever else.
Tim Jones from Austin: Mr. Creeley, How do you, with your new writing, view the relationship between the poem on the page and the SOUND of the poem? Is there an inherent connection between the two and do you always find the connection when you're writing a new poem? I know some poets such as Bunting, Zukofsky and Pound find this an essential connection, do you think this true of poets you selected for the Poets American Poetry Anthology? Thank You
Robert Creeley: For me personally, like they say, the tonal and rhythmic elements of poetry are crucial. Pound, whose advice meant a lot to me, said, "Listen to the sound that it makes." I did, intently. Bunting gave me high marks for the use of "sound" and Williams spoke of my having an exceptional "ear"—both very generous. Anyhow, for me the coherence is managed basically in the "sound"—but don't forget how many other modes and manners of poetry there can be. "Poetry, a made thing..." says Duncan—that "made thing" can be fact of many determinants. As to the Best American Poetry 2002 anthology, there I was reporting what caught my respect and attention as I read through a mass of the year's writing—some of it found "sound" essential and some didn't (and used rhetorical frames, or syntactic patterns, or something else instead). There's no one way.
Magdelyn Hammond from University of Maryland: Mr. Creeley, I'm writing my dissertation on poets who work in collaboration with artists, and I would love to know about your own process of collaboration. How do you view your relationship with the artist you are collaborating with? Why are you drawn to collaborative projects? Do you write differently when working in collaboration? How do you feel about publishing the poems you've produced in collaborative projects without their visual counterparts? What do you see as the relationship between the poem and the visual art (text v. image)? Thank you in advance for addressing these questions. I look forward to your answers.
Robert Creeley: To begin with, let me note a few links where one can see (albeit it has to be a limited fact for the art) some instances:
http://www.2river.org/2RView/2_2/poems/anamorphosis.html (Francesco Clemente)
http://www.2river.org/2RView/2_4/2_4.pdf (Robert Indiana)
http://www.conjunctions.com/archives/c32-rc.htm (Archie Rand)
Just a few years ago there was a substantial exhibition of many of these collaborations called In Company: Robert Creeley's Collaborations (with catalog of the same name). Finally to answer at least some of your questions, I think of collaboration in this instance as a "reading," one way or the other, and sometimes both, of the work, the artist's of mine, mine of the artist's (which last is the case in those instances I've given. It proves in that way a company, it's an empathetic gesture—not a criticism or judgment. Now and again it is a mutual act—the work I did with Cletus Johnson was such, for example. But mostly it's A's response to B or vice versa. Otherwise you probably know of Magritte's great painting "Ceci n'est pas une pipe," which you can see here:
http://perso.wanadoo.fr/wibo/nedry/supinfocom/p2/zoom/strator/magrittebg.htm
Foucault writes very attractively of the problems, or cases, to be distinguished in what either the visual arts or the verbal arts present (represent) as reality in his discussion of this painting. One is in each case seeing things, but the conversion is not at all of the same kind. I think of Zukofsky's quote, something like, 'what's dumb with show I'll plain with speech'—in fact, the visual and the verbal (or literary) factors are almost at loggerheads. So that too makes it all an interesting place to be!
Alice from NY: Do you have particular settings in which you find it easier to write (at home, coffee shops, trains, etc.)?
Robert Creeley: "Home is where the heart is," likewise one's poetry or writing generally, at least in my case. I like to feel completely open when writing, undistracted—but, better put. secure, altogether without need for defense—so that I can forget "myself" and simply take place (find place) with whatever I am doing. One pleasure in having lived here in this old time part of Buffalo is that I can walk out into the street, to put out garbage or answer the door or get the paper, in all states of dress including pajamas sans any thought at all. I live here—so really whatever feels to be such a place—it can be finally anywhere—is where it's most simple for me to write.
Derek from U Mass: Do you believe that the reader is as smart as you, as Eliot thought, and thus you have no need—even though you may do it—to explain what you're doing in your poems? Or, are you concerned with the potential reader who may miss the point of your work?
Robert Creeley: In my case, as Charles Olson put it, 'explanation is prior to composition," i.e., I have had to get that nature of thinking done before I set out. The thing is, or so I feel, one's following a lead, a line, a tune, a possibility—and once that act begins, there's no chance to stop and consider who is or is not going to get it. Even when I am writing a poem, say, more or less addressed to public interest and condition as this recent one—http://www.counterpunch.org/creeley03132003.html —
it's still what's coming to be said that keeps me going, almost like jumping rope in this case—and it's fun! I know there's much I write and have written which is felt to be "difficult" and so it may well be, but for me it was this need and pleasure, to get it said. Anyhow I don't think it's a case of who is or isn't smart, or how smart, etc. That's not where it's at, like they say.
Molly Brack from Iowa: How much does the editorial process enter into your work? In other words, do you have particular people who you rely on to read and comment on your work? Do you primarily make decisions about your poetry yourself?
Robert Creeley: I make the decisions myself, finally, and always have. There were the "few golden ears" Allen Ginsberg speaks of—he says he wrote "Howl" not worrying about the possible critics but for "a few golden ears." People I trust to hear what I'm saying and how I'm saying it—and to tell me straight where they think things are getting blurred. So it's those particular readers, when they can manage it, Penelope, and in the old days Olson, Duncan, Paul Blackburn et al. But it's still me who has got to make the choices—and because I rarely rewrite, they have to be made on the spot.
A. Thompson from Tulsa, OK: Which poets do you allow to see your unfinished work?
Robert Creeley: Pretty much anyone—but I don't really have much "unfinished work" in the sense you imply, i.e., longer works. In fact, the one such I wrote recently was "Histoire de Florida" and that actually was written while I was otherwise responsible for a workshop at the Atlantic Center for the Arts—each of us wrote something for each days session and I figured I should do something too. Then the problem was not to hog the time—I loved reading it to them as I'd write it.
Bev from NJ: Is Helen Vendler's characterization of your work, that "things are wasted, faded, faint, trembling, wavering, blurred, darkening" and that yours is a "way of avoiding bathos" consistent with how you see your writing? I take objection to her statement that your writing style is "fatally pinched." Thank you kindly for your reply.
Robert Creeley: I sure know what Helen Vendler is referring to. We both come from the Boston area, like they say, and "fatally pinched" is all too insistent a prospect if you have what my mother called a "lower middle class" status and all. I think it's taken real time to manage a passage through the early years of my life, coming of age in WWII, feeling very inadequate to the world as I found it, growing up fatherless, one eyed, and so on. Yet I was lucky in that solutions, if that's the word, seemed to keep coming at very unexpected moments—like just now being hired at Brown at age 77. That's happy! Or getting an unexpected scholarship to Holderness School at 14 because my sister Helen had persuaded my mother, the Acton, Mass town nurse, to apply for me. Anyhow Helen Vendler is not out to get me—she has other work to do—and my writing is not her interest. I don't not read her critical work therefore—I just haven't, but I know from her students, those I've met, she's a classically inspiring teacher with, expectably, very strong opinions. I liked her very much when we met and had a necessary time together a year ago—it was a pleasure just that I felt so simply at home with her.
Andy William from Phoenix: When did you begin writing poetry?
Robert Creeley: Probably early in college—first published poem is 1946, I think. I first wrote prose—the stories in The Gold Diggers published (by my wife and me as The Divers Press) in 1954. I had not thought to be a poet but I liked doing it, it came easily. Then editors, to whom I sent work trying to keep their attention while I wrote another story, would like it and publish it, and that was encouraging. It was also fun and always has been. Somehow I don't have to think about it.
Randy from Washington, NJ: What duty does the poet have to the audience? And whom do you see as the audience when you're writing your poems?
Robert Creeley: I think of what Whitman said, "To have great poets, there must be great audiences." It works both ways but "duty" doesn't seem the useful word in either reference. Poets are quite literally the 'voice of the people,' they are product of a culture, a community, a rhetoric, a political habit, a 'world' felt as common even if it is one in which one lives seemingly alone. I remember a European friend telling me he could always spot Americans because they always seemed to be by themselves—unlike the Japanese, for example, who move in comfortable clusters. So the book which most emphasizes my own loneliness and isolation, For Love, is also the book which has had the largest audience and the most influence on other writers. I was very surprised to find so many younger men, then, 'identified' with it. I had been speaking so necessarily to myself, I felt. Who would have thought so many others were listening?
Toni Banks from Allentown, PA: What's the best biographical piece that's been written about you? Which is most accurate? Or maybe it will be you answering these questions from the general public!
Robert Creeley: To me the best is Tom Clark's Robert Creeley and the Genius of the American Common Place—not just because the frame is a long interview with his commentary and analysis. His perception of who I am and what I've done is very specific and detailed. It's not just a puff or generalization. Amazing what he gets into such a compact format! The book also has my own "Autobiography"—and pictures, etc. I remember Hugh Kenner said of it, it will be the ground for any further such study or summing up.
Sue Kline from Lutherville, MD: How do you know when a poem is truly finished?
Robert Creeley: Perhaps you remember what Williams says in "The Desert Music"—it's literally the text of an interview Mike Wallace did with him—and it goes something like, "Why/ does one want to write a poem?// Because it's there to be written." One knows a poem is finished when one comes to the end of that "writing," when there's no more to say or do, when whatever need and energies compelled and provided for it have gone. "Fled is that music..." It's done.
Fran from Huntsville, AL: Do you see Olson and Williams as the fathers of your poetry? Do you see others who may fit this description?
Robert Creeley: Williams was very much a crucial elder, a model for what I hoped to learn to do. Olson was a brother, a companion, a close and defining friend. You have the ten volumes so far published of our correspondence to make the point most clearly. He is an influence then as a friend is, who can give you an objective sense of what you're doing—he was a great reader in that way, the best. Williams was something else—albeit at times very and dearly close. But I never thought to depend on him for response as I would in the friendship with Olson. In my Collected Essays I start with a section called "Heroes/Elders" and there you'll find Whitman, Hart Crane, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Louis Zukofsky, Basil Bunting and Gertrude Stein. It's a bit deceptive in that those w