Selected Poems

by Robert Creeley

Here, in a new selection of 200 poems from five decades, is the distinctive voice of Robert Creeley, reminding us of what has made him one of the most important and affectionately regarded poets of our time.

Genres: Poetry, Literature, American

Hardcover

First published May 4, 1991

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

[Jonfaith]

Impulses stir
To write a review
Using
The clipped,
Broken

What use is such unfinished verse, what does matter with coffee breath, a taillight out and a strange dream about a girl once dated?

Bobbie--take me away, perhaps to Indiana. Jon just read these poems, purchased last week in Syracuse. The elegy for the author's mother bruised me. I can't admit to similar damage elsewhere in the collection. Somehow this Bobbie onetime muse of Creeley eases into the sidelong, a refrain echoes rainfall and a tossed comment bleeds detail. The reader is free to ponder and unlace.

[Ted Burke]

There's a collection of verse by a great American Poet, Selected Poems 1945-2005 by the late Robert Creeley, and I'm obliged to go out and buy it. My paperback editions of his books are, sad to say, falling apart with that rare affliction for poetry volumes, poetry books with a cracked spine.It's a fine time to remember Creeley's mastery of the terse lyric poem, a major characteristic in a time when "lyric"for most writers mean lazy associations, odd line breaks and a verbosity that is more about extended a line than treating a subject.

Myself

What, younger, felt
was possible, now knows
is not - but still
not chanted enough -

Walked by the sea,
unchanged in memory -
evening, as clouds
on the far-off rim

of water float,
pictures of time,
smoke, faintness -
still the dream.

I want, if older,
still to know
why, human, men
and women are

so torn, so lost,
why hopes cannot
find better world
than this.

Shelley is dead and gone,
who said,
"Taught them not this -
to know themselves;

their might could not repress
the mutiny within,
And for the morn
of truth they feigned,

deep night
Caught them ere evening . . ."


Robert Creeley's poetry was the terse vocabulary of a man who feels deeply and yet has hardly a voice to equal the sensations that warm or chill his soul. It is the poetry that exists at the margins of and in the spaces between the huge language blocks of what is commonly deferred to as eloquence: they are thoughts, full formed and fleeting in their unmediated honesty of a first response to a new things or upsets, a poetry where heart and mind have no natural boundaries.



America

America, you ode for reality!
Give back the people you took.

Let the sun shine again
on the four corners of the world

you thought of first but do not
own, or keep like a convenience.

People are your own word, you
invented that locus and term.

Here, you said and say, is
where we are. Give back

what we are, these people you made,
us, and nowhere but you to be.




I sometimes consider the poet to be a film editor of perception, isolating key images and spoken lines in their spaces and arranging them in sweet and near silent succession where mood and sentiment are restrained but clearly present, nakedly expressed, without embarrassment.The surprise of his poems is that he seems to bring you to the "thing itself", without the contextualizing and taming rhetorics that buffer our responses; this is his ability to move you in ways that never feel like coarse manipulation. Creeley's was a vision with sharp-stick wit, the straightest line to a truth no one will admit seeing.

Thomas Gunn called it a "eloquent stammering." I can't think of a better superlative.

[Caspar "moved to storygraph" Bryant]

acutally i'm slightly lying because I found an older creeley in Copenhagen so that's what this is. he's remarkable really very & takes the obvious route a poet wouldn't think of. sharp as sharp anything, like an Ammons with a different touch, a WCWism . have a look at everything on the poetryfoundation those are bangers. Esp look at his breaks, which are so far ahead & still to learn with. locate auden in what follows!


THE LANGUAGE

Locate I
love you some-
where in

teeth and
eyes, bite
it but

take care not
to hurt, you
want so

much so
little. Words
say everything,

I
love you
again,

then what
is emptiness
for. To

fill, fill.
I heard words
and words full

of holes
aching. Speech
is a mouth.

[Steven Godin]

The quieter the people are
the slower the time passes

until there is a solitary man
sitting in the figure of silence.

Then scream at him,
come here you idiot it's going to go off.

A face that is no face
but the features, of a face, pasted

on a face until that face
is faceless, answers by

a being nothing there
where there was a man.

[chacierrr]

A good and fine book. McClure, WCW, and Creeley are all special reads, special visions of the world, and the body that stands within all the chaos somehow.

———

The face
was
beautiful.

She was
a pleasure.
She

tried
to please

[David Johnston]

every word and line break distracts the intuitive reader. very few words are used. it was recommended by one of my professors years ago.

[Claxton]

I wanna love Creeley & the whole Black Mtn thing -- I have tried. I just don't get his greatness; I don't dispute it, I just don't get it.

[Donovan]

For me, a poetic belly-flop.

[Erika]

After reading this collection, I sense both an emotional depth and walls created between writer's firsthand knowledge and reader's curiosity. There is a lot of stream-of-consciousness writing, at times jagged and non sequitorial, and a lot of negative space in his writing that leaves quite a bit of room for the reader's imagination or interpretation to run wild and unguided. It's not categorically bad, but it's a little unsettling for me to read writing like this with my current aesthetic. I enjoyed most of the first half of the book, but the majority of the second half was lost on me. I think Creeley's writing here thrives on the omnipresent obscurity and the distance this creates between himself and his readers. Not all of his poems, however, accomplish this negative effect. Some stand-out (in a good way) poems here are:

After Lorca
The Immoral Proposition
A Marriage
Ballad of The Despairing Husband
Somewhere
The Door
The End of the Day
Love Comes Quietly
The Rhythm
Something
There Is


and a few others, but those are a good place to start. If youre looking for Williams-esque descriptions of things or places, this is not the book for you; if you want incongruent juxtapositions, or something with an intangibly cryptic quality, or to frame things more positively, a mysterious quality, this may be what you want to pick up at the bookstore next time.

[Jeremy]

Creeley's expert brevity (compact lines and stanzas) have long fascinated me, so I brought this volume with me to Cambodia to fill up the empty corners of days. His brilliance is his ability to pen poems that are spare and mysterious, but somehow always tender.

I love getting the feeling that Creeley never had any enemies in life, and yet no one ever understood him. Can't say I understand all of his poems, but I enjoy damn near every one.

[Ryan]

"Yesterday I wanted to speak of it..."

The book of poems that changed my life. Everything I sought after this, in spirituality and love, was the end of a sentence I read with Creeley. God rest his beautiful soul.

[StrangeBedfellows]

��I'm not big on reading poetry, especially 20th century works. I have to admit, though, that Creeley offers up some thoughtful, well-crafted poems. I would never have picked this book up had it not been assigned reading, but I found some jewels in it that I enjoyed.

[Chris]

Be, for me, like rain

[Fredore Praltsa]

Most of these were just okay for me but it was cool to see him dedicate himself to a particular style (enjambment of lines and stanzas and words; elimination of many articles and simple verbs; avoidance of elaborate words) over many decades and to read the occasional bangers that resulted: "I Know a Man," "If You," "Love Comes Quietly," "The Language," "Oh Mabel," "Rachel Had Said," "Love ['There are words voluptuous ...']" (that last one is his refutation/complication of Imagism, which we needed <3).

Here he gives a small masterclass in the line break:

I love you happily
ever after.

Here's an example of what doesn't work for me:

... But the well

top's gone, and debris
litters entrance.
Yet no sadness,
no fears

life's gone out.

^ His elimination of words sometimes makes poems become like field notes hurriedly scribbled by some researcher; I'm not sure this is an ideal method of representation.

On the ego (and a reminder I need to read Zukofsky):

Want to get the sense of "I" into Zukofsky's
"eye"—a locus of experience, not a presumption
of expected value.

and < / 3 :

How that fact of
seeing someone you love away
from you in time will
disappear in time, too.

[Margaret]

Although he writes primarily in the lineage of William Carlos Williams, he does so with heart and humor that I see very rarely in Williams. And his later poems are nuanced and richly related to a much broader literary Canon -- yet still unique to Creeley.

[Aaron Val]

Incredible - Robert Creeley at his best

[Dani Fino]

Le daría 5 pero creo que para eso necesito estar tomándome un café con una cajetilla llena de cigarros y el clima lluvioso

[charlotte]

chasing the bird bby robert creeley son or paper bag by fiona apple daughter

[Patricia N. McLaughlin]

Creeley’s poetry reads like internal monologues of a solipsist, demonstrating that only his mind is sure to exist; that knowledge of anything outside his own mind is unsure; that the external world and other minds cannot be known and most likely do not exist outside himself, rendering any sense of audience irrelevant. Case in point:

HERE
Here is
where there
is.

And who knows where that is.

Favorite Poems:
“Words”
“For My Mother”

[Brian]

I was first introduced to Creeley by Don Stratton, professor of Jazz Theory at the University of Maine at Augusta, in 1994. Stratton had played with a lot of jazz greats like Charlie Parker, and illustrated the fact that Creeley's work had a lot of the same metric flow as a Parker solo. At times extremely obtuse and unwieldly, when you can break through and connect with a poem like

"Return"

Quiet as is proper for such places;
The street, subdued, half-snow, half-rain,
Endless, but ending in the darkened doors,
Inside, they who will be there always,
Quiet as is proper for such people-
Enough for now to be here, and
To know my door is one of these.

the sense of meter, metaphor and symbolism will drop your jaw to the floor.

[Emm]

THE LANGUAGE


Locate I
love you some-
where in

teeth and
eyes, bite
it but

take care not
to hurt, you
want so

much so
little. Words
say everything.

I
love you
again,

then what
is emptiness
for. To

fill, fill.
I heard words
and words full
of holes
aching. Speech
is a mouth.

[Jenne]

Everyone needs more poetry books, just about. I just love Creeley's small poems, especially the ones about going places or realizing a small truth without going on and on and waxing and waning and tripping and straining about it. Just small, important, worthwhile and sometimes stunning poems. Thank you, friend who made me realize this poet!

[kate]

My all-time favorite poetry book. I pick it up meaning to read a passage or two, and end up reading for hours.

[Jonathan]

A good, readable Selected Poems.

[Jenn Turner]

Black Mountain Poets - want to feel as though you've just been let in on a secret? Read Creeley.

[Jerry]

His poetry epitomizes the Black Mountain Poetry Movement, not in any set notions of, or guidelines for, poetry, but within the dichotic nature of his poems.

[Russ]

This book is a constant companion--One of the best selections of poems from the best poet--can't miss this one

[Kinsey]

Robert Creeley is one of my top favorite poets.

[Renee]

Be wet with a decent happiness.

[Carrie]

my favorite poet.