Thirty things

by Robert Creeley

Book by Creeley, Robert

Genres: Poetry

76 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 1974

About the author

Robert Creeley was an American poet and author of more than sixty books. He is usually associated with the Black Mountain poets, though his verse aesthetic diverged from that school's. He was close with Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, John Wieners and Ed Dorn. He served as the Samuel P. Capen Professor of Poetry and the Humanities at State University of New York at Buffalo, and lived in Waldoboro, Maine, Buffalo, New York and Providence, Rhode Island, where he taught at Brown University. He was a recipient of the Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award, and was much beloved as a generous presence in many poets' lives.

Reviews

[Eddie Watkins · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is Creeley at his most minimal-est, and possibly freest and even hippiest (I am no Creeley scholar, and in fact there's plenty of Creeley that leaves me indifferent). The entire book can be read in three minutes. Thirty poems (things) in three minutes. Ten a minute. And that’s a close reading.

I do not know the whole back story behind this book, but I do know it was written when he lived in Bolinas, a near poet’s utopia at the time, in the early 1970’s, from Fall through the New Year presumably, where he mingled with other poets who all addressed their poems to each other, and fed off each other, and I’m sure bickered and practiced sexual politics.

The book seems to have a narrative arc, beginning with his arrival, continuing with moments of bliss and precise relaxation, some emotional strife and backsliding, and ending with a kind of floating feeling of social goodness and full-spectrum acceptance. Throughout there is a radical openness to the moment, a perceptive rawness in time, and of course the mind and eye and hand of Creeley to get it down.

As he arrives:

As You Come

As you come down
the road, it swings
slowly left and the sea
opens below you,
west. It sounds out.

This gives me a tangible sense of walking/biking/driving down a curving (dirt) road and having my vision suddenly open to a large body of water. “swings” gives it music and motion. And “sounds” while being the body of water itself also opens my ears wide to a great opening where I go quiet and try to hear more.

My favorite, and the one most conventionally poem-like:

Surgeons

One imagines a surgeon to be.
The hands move so slowly,
the attention is so steady.

Then one imagines a change,
as if a truck were to leave the highway
and drive up a country road.

Men pick apples for money
in the fall. Surgeons are babies
that grow on trees.

This is an embodiment of a change in being and poetry practice he underwent at this time. The poem, Creeley, and the reader begin with self-sufficiency, a surgeon’s precision and absorption in the task at hand, but then all hop on or follow a truck (freedom, uncertainty, going somewhere) into an odd utopia where money, in the form of apples, grow on trees where surgeons are babies again, seeing the world anew.

A vision of a Golden Youth:

Hey

Hey kid
you.

Flesh filled
to bursting.

Then a poem entitled Kitchen where lace-like light patterns make of the room a paradise, but a clock’s ticking reminds of a better emotional moment and a neurotic sweeping of the floor ensues, trying to get back to that time.

A poem of technical perfection:

Photo

They say a
woman passes at
the edge of the
house, turning

the corner, leaves
a very vivid sense,
after her,
of having been there.

On second thought this might be my favorite. It is a photo in the mind, of a woman, but the woman isn’t there, she’s gone. It’s a still shot in motion, with a sense of free-fall. It creates an image of a photo in my mind, made of words, that could never be an actual photo, as there would be nothing in the photo, just the corner of a house. Wonderful mystery in motion here.

Throughout the book perceptions of spaces opening are wonderfully evoked. Physical spaces, and spaces of the mind. The following is the pinnacle of this mode:

Up on the top the
space goes further than
the eye can see. We’re
up here, calling
over the hill

An extraordinarily sensitive portrayal of a perceptual moment when time stops; when vision is all one needs. It takes me in a flash to similar trance-moments of my own:

Two

Light weighs
light, to the hand,
to the eye.

Feel it
in two places.

And the last poem, a vision embracing all, a utopian moment of all people blurring into one:

Colors

Colors of stars,
all you people. Cars,
lights, wet streets.

This evokes a rainbow at night viewed through a wet windshield, or wet glasses, seeing all people as stars, in heaven. A momentary heaven. A real heaven.

[Chelsea · Rating 3 out of 5]

not my favorite robert creeley! still beautiful -- the poems feel private, minimal to that paradoxical point of complete openness and total inscrutability. i love his minimalism usually, but this collection was actually a little too sparse for me, which makes sense given that it was written while immersed in a kind of isolating, intimate poetic community. this book feels like reading someone's private letters over their shoulder and, fairly, not quite understanding their meaning.