What do you think?
Rate this book
Away
Robert Black Sparrow FIRST First Edition, First Printing. Published by Black Sparrow Press, 1976. Octavo. Hardcover. Signed by Robert Creeley on title page (Flat). Book is like new. A nice, signed copy of this prolific collection of poetry from Creeley with illustrations by Bobbie Creeley. 100% positive feedback. 30 day money back guarantee. NEXT DAY SHIPPING! Excellent customer service. Please email with any questions. All books packed carefully and ship with free delivery confirmation/tracking. All books come with free bookmarks. Ships from Sag Harbor, New York.Seller 324644 Poetry We Buy Books! Collections - Libraries - Estates - Individual Titles. Message us if you have books to sell!
- GenresPoetry
256 pages, Hardcover
Published September 1, 1976
22 people want to read
About the author
Robert Creeley
330 books117 followersRobert 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.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
June 23, 2013
It seems wrong-headed to add more words to Robert Creeley. Each of his words is so carefully measured and placed, often with - to my ear - invisible additional witheld words that would let me grasp the meaning of these poems rather than grope for it. So let's leave it at this instead:
The Plan is the Body
The plan is the body.
There os each moment a pattern,
There is each time something
for everyone.
The plan is the body.
The mind is in the head.
It's a moment in time,
an instant, second.
The rhythm of one
and one, and one, and one.
The two, the three.
The plan is in the body.
Hold it an instant,
in the mind -- hold it.
What was said you
said. The two, the three,
times in the body,
hands, feet, you remember --
I. I remember, I
speak it, speak it.
The plan is in the body.
Times you didn't want to,
times you can't think
you want to, you.
Me, me, remember, me
here, me wants to, me
am thinking of you.
The plan is the body.
The plan is the body,
The sky is the sky.
The mother, the father --
the plan is the body.
Who can read it.
Plan is the body. The mind
is the plan. I --
Speaking. The memory
gathers like memory, plan,
I thought to remember,
thinking again, thinking.
The mind is the plan of the mind.
The plan is the body.
The plan is the body.
The plan is the body.
The plan is the body.
The Plan is the Body
The plan is the body.
There os each moment a pattern,
There is each time something
for everyone.
The plan is the body.
The mind is in the head.
It's a moment in time,
an instant, second.
The rhythm of one
and one, and one, and one.
The two, the three.
The plan is in the body.
Hold it an instant,
in the mind -- hold it.
What was said you
said. The two, the three,
times in the body,
hands, feet, you remember --
I. I remember, I
speak it, speak it.
The plan is in the body.
Times you didn't want to,
times you can't think
you want to, you.
Me, me, remember, me
here, me wants to, me
am thinking of you.
The plan is the body.
The plan is the body,
The sky is the sky.
The mother, the father --
the plan is the body.
Who can read it.
Plan is the body. The mind
is the plan. I --
Speaking. The memory
gathers like memory, plan,
I thought to remember,
thinking again, thinking.
The mind is the plan of the mind.
The plan is the body.
The plan is the body.
The plan is the body.
The plan is the body.
January 29, 2022
Broken heart, you
timeless wonder.
What a small
place to be.
True, true
to life, to life.
- Echo (from THIRTY THINGS)
With PIECES, Robert Creeley interrupted the pattern or repetition or “echo”. His apparent goal being to escape the monotony that poets and poetry of his time. (Why the echo of / the old music / haunting all? Why // the lift and fall / of the old rhythms, / and aches and pains. // Why one, why two, / why not go utterly / away from all of it. – “Such Strangeness of Mind” from PIECES)
With AWAY, Creeley restores the pattern, the repetition, the “echo”. His apparent goal remains the same. The difference can be discerned by the age-old saying: "feed a cold, starve a fever." The undiagnosed illness that is plaguing poetry was first treated as a fever. As such, Creeley starved it in PIECES. But the illness persisted. That is, if Creeley decided to change his approach, which he did, he must have concluded that his first treatment failed – that is, it failed to yield the desired results upon the afflicted patient (poetry - his poetry or all poetry?)
Treating the undiagnosed illness as a cold, Creeley feeds it in AWAY. Arguable to excess. At times, Creeley feeds AWAY to such excess that the reader fears the poetry may sacrifice his patient in his crusade against the plague. The reader who fears for the patient would be well advised to place more faith in the poet. The poet’s treatment is very deliberate. It is not, for example, the juvenile scribbling that Sylvia Plath warns against in her Journals - “It is raining. I am tempted to write a poem. But I remember what it said on one rejection slip: After a heavy rainfall, poems titled RAIN pour in from across the nation.” (The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, pg. 9) Indeed, if the poet writes a poem about rain and then follows it with another poem about rain, it is deliberate...
Raining here
in little pieces
of rain.
Wet, brother,
Behind the ears,
I love your hands.
And you too,
rain.
You insist on rain
because you are
no less than water
no more than wet.
- Funny (pg. 598)
Here is the rain again.
I hear it
In my ear here.
- Out
But this is a unique example of patter, repetition, and echo in AWAY. There is another form of repetition that is more prominent, and that is the form that finds its outlet in a single poem, often in a single stanza, where a word or phrase is repeated to startling effect...
all right for you,
all right, you guys -
echoes, things, faces.
- Every Day
all the people,
all the ways of
getting here and
now, here and
now here.
- 1971
we love what we love,
what we have,
what we have to.
- Sitting Here
Nowhere in AWAY is repetition more prominent than in the longer poem “The Plan Is the Body”...
The rhythm of one
and one, and one, and one.
The two, the three.
The plan is in the body.
Hold it an instant,
in the mind – hold it.
What was said you
said. The two, the three,
times in the body,
hands, feet, you remember –
I, I remember, I
speak it, speak it.
The plan is the body.
Times you didn’t want to,
times you can’t think
you want to, you.
Me, me, remember, me
here, me wants to, me
am thinking of you.
The plan is the body.
- The Plan Is the Body
The ending of “The Plan Is the Body” is pure repetition, reminiscent of “Four” from PIECES...
The plan is the body.
The plan is the body.
The plan is the body.
The plan is the body.
- The Plan Is the Body
Before I die.
Before I die.
Before I die.
Before I die.
- Four
On of my favourite stanzas...
There is a world
Underneath, or
On top of,
This one – and
It’s here, now.
- “There . . .”
timeless wonder.
What a small
place to be.
True, true
to life, to life.
- Echo (from THIRTY THINGS)
With PIECES, Robert Creeley interrupted the pattern or repetition or “echo”. His apparent goal being to escape the monotony that poets and poetry of his time. (Why the echo of / the old music / haunting all? Why // the lift and fall / of the old rhythms, / and aches and pains. // Why one, why two, / why not go utterly / away from all of it. – “Such Strangeness of Mind” from PIECES)
With AWAY, Creeley restores the pattern, the repetition, the “echo”. His apparent goal remains the same. The difference can be discerned by the age-old saying: "feed a cold, starve a fever." The undiagnosed illness that is plaguing poetry was first treated as a fever. As such, Creeley starved it in PIECES. But the illness persisted. That is, if Creeley decided to change his approach, which he did, he must have concluded that his first treatment failed – that is, it failed to yield the desired results upon the afflicted patient (poetry - his poetry or all poetry?)
Treating the undiagnosed illness as a cold, Creeley feeds it in AWAY. Arguable to excess. At times, Creeley feeds AWAY to such excess that the reader fears the poetry may sacrifice his patient in his crusade against the plague. The reader who fears for the patient would be well advised to place more faith in the poet. The poet’s treatment is very deliberate. It is not, for example, the juvenile scribbling that Sylvia Plath warns against in her Journals - “It is raining. I am tempted to write a poem. But I remember what it said on one rejection slip: After a heavy rainfall, poems titled RAIN pour in from across the nation.” (The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, pg. 9) Indeed, if the poet writes a poem about rain and then follows it with another poem about rain, it is deliberate...
Raining here
in little pieces
of rain.
Wet, brother,
Behind the ears,
I love your hands.
And you too,
rain.
You insist on rain
because you are
no less than water
no more than wet.
- Funny (pg. 598)
Here is the rain again.
I hear it
In my ear here.
- Out
But this is a unique example of patter, repetition, and echo in AWAY. There is another form of repetition that is more prominent, and that is the form that finds its outlet in a single poem, often in a single stanza, where a word or phrase is repeated to startling effect...
all right for you,
all right, you guys -
echoes, things, faces.
- Every Day
all the people,
all the ways of
getting here and
now, here and
now here.
- 1971
we love what we love,
what we have,
what we have to.
- Sitting Here
Nowhere in AWAY is repetition more prominent than in the longer poem “The Plan Is the Body”...
The rhythm of one
and one, and one, and one.
The two, the three.
The plan is in the body.
Hold it an instant,
in the mind – hold it.
What was said you
said. The two, the three,
times in the body,
hands, feet, you remember –
I, I remember, I
speak it, speak it.
The plan is the body.
Times you didn’t want to,
times you can’t think
you want to, you.
Me, me, remember, me
here, me wants to, me
am thinking of you.
The plan is the body.
- The Plan Is the Body
The ending of “The Plan Is the Body” is pure repetition, reminiscent of “Four” from PIECES...
The plan is the body.
The plan is the body.
The plan is the body.
The plan is the body.
- The Plan Is the Body
Before I die.
Before I die.
Before I die.
Before I die.
- Four
On of my favourite stanzas...
There is a world
Underneath, or
On top of,
This one – and
It’s here, now.
- “There . . .”
July 27, 2020
Away marks an important turning in Creeley's work, and includes The Plan Is the Body, one of his most remarkable poems.
November 30, 2007
It's a Black Sparrow Press edition. As such, it's got that lovely embossed blue texture cover. There are illustrations by Bobbie Creeley as well. 500 of the 'cloth' cover I have were released, 200 additional featuring a special color illustration. It's wonderful of course. Came out in 1976. Was only $20 at Magers & Quinn here in MPLS (and only paying twenty felt like robbing them).
August 12, 2013
"If I wanted
to know myself,
I'd look at you.
When I loved
what I was,
it was that reflection.
.
Color so changing here,
sky lightens, water
greens, blues.
Never far from you,
no true elsewhere.
My hands stay with me."
to know myself,
I'd look at you.
When I loved
what I was,
it was that reflection.
.
Color so changing here,
sky lightens, water
greens, blues.
Never far from you,
no true elsewhere.
My hands stay with me."
October 18, 2013
I read this in one sitting today.
It took me awhile to get into it. The first few poems didn’t do much for me, but by the second half Creeley had hit his stride, and some of the later poems (“Circle,” “For Walter Chappell,” “Sitting Here,” and “Up in the Air”) almost had me in tears.
It took me awhile to get into it. The first few poems didn’t do much for me, but by the second half Creeley had hit his stride, and some of the later poems (“Circle,” “For Walter Chappell,” “Sitting Here,” and “Up in the Air”) almost had me in tears.
Read
January 14, 2013811.54 C913a 1976
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews