For Love

by Robert Creeley

love

Genres: Poetry

160 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1962

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

[Bill Kerwin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Robert Creeley isn’t my favorite poet; in fact, he isn’t even my favorite Black Mountain poet (both Paul Blackburn and Robert Duncan sing with more sweetness and grace). Still, there’s something about his knotty, gnomic verses that keeps drawing me back, like the surviving fragments of some Attic Athenian or obscure troubadour. Although I only tentatively grasp what they are about, sensing I have entered into the middle of some conversation which history will never recover, I feel there is something within them—about the search for love and self, about the relationship between man and woman—that I wish to understand.

I don’t think I am alone in not understanding many of Creeley’s poems, for while reading For Love: Poems 1950-1960—the first major collection, the one which caused him to be noticed—I observed that many of the poems in the book that I most thoroughly understand (“After Lorca.” “I Know a Man,” “Oh No,” “A Wicker Basket,” “Kore”) are the ones that are most heavily anthologized. An anthologist likes to know where he stands, after all.

Yet I admit that, as I wandered through the collection a few times, many more small songs began to reach out to me, little knots of pain and love, and they began to sing.

Here are three of the many that sang to me, one from each of the three chronologically organized sections of the book.

THE RHYME

There is the sign of
the flower—
to borrow the theme.

But what or where to recover
what is not love
too simply.

I saw her
and behind her there were
flowers, and behind them
nothing.



THE TUNNEL

Tonight, nothing is long enough—
time isn’t.
Were there a fire,
it would burn now.

Were there a heaven,
I would have gone long ago.
I think that light
is the final image.

But time reoccurs,
love—and an echo.
A time passes
love in the dark.



LOVE COMES QUIETLY

Love comes quietly,
finally, drops
about me, on me,
in the old ways.

What did I know
thinking myself
able to go
alone all the way.

[Cosimo · Rating 4 out of 5]

I sleep in myself

“Oh wisdom to find fault with what/is after all a plan.
Oh saggezza nello scoprire l'errore/in quello che dopotutto è un progetto”.

Poeta, insegnante e viaggiatore, Robert Creeley non concluse gli studi ma completò l'apprendistato poetico accanto a Charles Olson e fu direttore della rinomata rivista “Black Mountain Review”. Ebbe una vita tragica fin dall'infanzia e avventurosa. Nei suoi versi esplora la complessità dei sentimenti e l'indecifrabilità dell'amore, così come gli aspetti enigmatici della conoscenza. Introspezione, paesaggi autunnali, spinta ossessiva verso la sfida all'esperienza sono elementi fondanti del suo lavoro sul linguaggio poetico. Nulla appare calcolato o inautentico nella parola in contrappunto. Il suono e il ritmo prevalgono spesso sul significato, poiché “vi sono sensi/che creano un oggetto/col loro semplice sentirlo”. Il tono quotidiano e l'uso frequente di enjambements in una cadenza ordinaria sembrano segni di una vicinanza a William Carlos Williams, mentre la concisione e il silenzio in funzione enfantica rimandano a Ezra Pound. Nei versi di Creeley la bellezza è affidata all'evidenza delle cose, alla sottrazione di discorso e descrizione, alla ricerca di una naturale immediatezza e di una mutevole biologia verbale.

“I think i grow tensions/like flowers/in a wood where/nobody goes. Each wound is perfect/encloses itself in a tiny/imperceptible blossom, making pain/. Pain is a flower like that one, like this one, like that one, like this one”. “Io penso di coltivare tensioni/ come fiori/ in un bosco dove nessuno/ va. Ogni ferita è perfetta,/si concentra in un minuscolo impercettibile germoglio/provocando dolore./Il dolore è un fiore come quello, come questo qui, come quello là/come questo”.

[Jonfaith · Rating 3 out of 5]

My face is my own, I thought.
But you have seen it
turn into a thousand years.
I watched you cry.

I have known stress as of late. It rents my slumber. It distracts my reading eye. I only want malty Oktoberfest and Godard. I settle for pizza. Compromise. Sated. Sad.

There's a scarred security in this collection. Friendships and warm contact are a currency in a vague, steeled world of toil. There's still something possibly American at play, a tattered optimism.

Time is ever elusive. There's a posture to be pursued, a wind-tousled hilltop tree or a violin concerto on an alarm clock radio.

[Paul Secor · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was my introduction to Robert Creeley's poetry. I'd say that these were perfect poems, but perfection is boring and these poems are anything but boring.

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my favorite "period" of Creeley, when he really hit his stride, but before the somewhat spare formalism of Words.

[belisa · Rating 1 out of 5]

çok uzun sürdü, çok acılar çektim... :)
bazı şiirler çevrilirken çok şey kaybediyor...
çevirinin neden böyle olduğunu anlamak için araya çevirmeninin iki şiir kitabını alıp okudum
çevirmeni kendi şiirlerini bile sunarken özensiz, başkasının şiirlerini böylesine düz çevirmesi mantıklı geldi...
kendi şiirine çalışmayan başkasınınkine zaten çalışmaz...

meraklısına

[robert · Rating 5 out of 5]

RC...one of the gods of modern poetry....absolutely brilliant.

[Stephanie · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5...

[Sacha · Rating 3 out of 5]

To come at this book objectively, what would be the point? Intriguing rhythms and word order, strange and pleasing line breaks. Certain insights into love and aging caught my attention, voiced in a unique way. But, I have little desire to say much about the book. It simply wasn't something that made much of an impression on me.
Over the years, in my readings, I have come across Creeley's name too many times to mention, usually referenced by language poets. I was excited to read this book - and then I read it. Perhaps I am not perceptive, or perhaps I am emotionally dead. Whatever it is, I was hoping for so much more.

[Kristin Winkler · Rating 5 out of 5]

The great resurrection of the love poem lies in this book. Delicate, painful, sensual and celebratory, Creeley dissects the smallest symbols of love in all its forms. No one has taught me more about how words can interrelate in sound, meaning, meter and length, about how line breaks can shift and change meaning, and how less - much less - can mean so much more. Read this book aloud, in quiet solitude, and you will be overwhelmed.

[Hans Ostrom · Rating 4 out of 5]

In my view, Creeley was one of the most original American poets of his generation. The conversational, unpretentious free verse he developed is insightful and full of surprises, accessible but not facile.

[Isaac Timm · Rating 4 out of 5]

The last section, was just mind blowing. As whole I found For Love a work of transformation, many poems a mental puzzle that needed the right rhythm to unlock

[Sean A. · Rating 4 out of 5]

really compressed eternal and quotidian stuff. i would say all the poems r between three and four stars for me, but overall i'll give it the benefit of the doubt cus it ended well...

[Tatyana · Rating 4 out of 5]

"When I know what people think of me
I am plunged into my loneliness."
-- from "The End"

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

For love - I would
split open your head and put
a candle in
behind the eyes.

- The Warning

Once again, Creeley demonstrates his love for poetry by including allusions to the poets he admires, poets such as Hart Crane, Slater Brown (friend of poet E. E. Cummings), Federico García Lorca, James Broughton, Kenneth Patchen, Allen Ginsberg, Louis Zukofsky, and Stéphane Mallarmé...

(Slater, let me come home.
The letters have proved insufficient.
The mind cannot hang to them as it could
to the words.

There are ways beyond
what I have here to work with,
what my head cannot push to any kind
of conclusion.

But my own ineptness
cannot bring them to hand,
the particulars of those times
we had talked.)

- Hart Crane (for Slater Brown)

* * *

But when a rich man dies, they
drag out the Sacrement
and a golden Cross, and go doucement, doucement
to the cemetery.

And the poor love it
and think it's crazy.

- After Lorca

* * *

Oh god, let's go.
This is a poem for Kenneth Patchen.
Everywhere they are shooting people.
People people people people.
This is a poem for Allen Ginsberg.
I want to be elsewhere, elsewhere.
This is a poem about a horse that got tired.
Poor. Old. Tired. Horse.
I want to go home.
I want you to go home.
This is a poem that tells the story,
which is the story.
I don't know. I get lost.
If only they would stand still and let me.
Are you happy, sad, not happy, please come.
This is a poem for everyone.

- Please (for James Broughton)

* * *

To sleep
in, live in,
to come in
from heat,

all form derived
from kind,
built
with that in mind.

- The House (for Louis Zukofsky)

* * *

Stone,
like stillness,
around you my
mind sits, it is

a proper form
for
it, like
stone, like

compression itself,
fixed fast,
grey,
without sound.

- After Mallarmé

Here, we see the poet experimenting with the use of abbreviated text (I Know a Man), with the superimposition of one poem atop another (Wait for Me)...

drive, he sd, for
christ's sake, look
out where yr going.

- I Know a Man

* * *

in short, make a
Oh well,

home for herself.
I said.

- Wait for Me

Two of my favourite passages come from the same poem...

I could not touch you.
I wanted very much to
touch you
but could not.

[...]

My face is my own.
My hands are my own.
My mouth is my own.
but I am not.

- A Form of Women

Another of my favourite passage...

I saw her
and behind her there were
flowers, and behind them
nothing.

- The Rhyme

My only disappointment with this collection is the poet's use of rhyme. Fortunately, the rhyming poems are few...

She walks in beauty like a lake
and eats her steak
with fork and knife
and proves a proper wife.

- The Bed

[anemoska · Rating 4 out of 5]

First off, most of the poems in this book is quick to read YET hardly to BRING IN MIND. What's good about in these poems, however, no matter how elusive they are to unravel, is the emotions to every certain line, passages, and occasionally the entire verse itself. Creeley is one of the poets I've ever undergone reading the whole poem a couple of times to thoroughly get to it. His way of articulating of sensations is merely stunning and enthralling.


The list of the titles in the book to which I find interesting:


A FORM OF WOMEN
THE SIGN BOARD
MIND'S HEART
THE FIRST TIME
LOVE COMES QUIETLY
THE SNOW

[Jared Joseph · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think I grow tensions
like flowers
in a wood where
nobody goes.

Pain is a flower like that one,
like this one,
like that one,
like this one.

[Nate Portnoy · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's like a cheese grater. Robert Creeley put stories or fragment or memories through a cheese grater. I enjoyed this so much.

[Anika · Rating 4 out of 5]

Birthday present from Wesley <4

[neslihan ౨ৎ˚⟡˖ ࣪. · Rating 3 out of 5]

“bırak kendimin soytarısı olayım”

[Elfy Elfy · Rating 2 out of 5]

çeviri şiir hakkında endişelerim vardı, kendi açımdan haklıymışım, kötü değildi ama bitirdim ama bir daha elime gitmez

[Sameen Shakya · Rating 5 out of 5]

For Love by Robert Creeley is not a collection of love poems. It is a collection of poems that ruminate on what it means to be alive.

I think that's a major theme for Creeley as a poet and as a man.

I found the poems in this book to be very pleasant but hard to review because aside from their pleasantness there's not much else to say. Not that they're boring but they're all the same level of good.

[cindy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found it in a used bookstore, all marked up and used. I think it's from the first time out in paperback. It's not as good as oblivion ha ha, but that's ok, since you aren't james tate you didn't have control over that.-I mean, not as good as Words, but still good, always good.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

A man of supple
yielding manner
might, too, discover
ways of water.

[Arda Arvas · Rating 3 out of 5]

güneşe
yükselen
ve yeniden alçalan sular
aynı şey

[Blair · Rating 5 out of 5]

So beautiful.

[Allyssa · Rating 4 out of 5]

from paul

[Phil · Rating 5 out of 5]

I stumbled across this little gem in a used book store and highly recommend it.

[T. · Rating 5 out of 5]

/ First read 2005 (borrowed from the library).