Mirror

by Robert Creeley, Martha Visser't Hooft

Poems explore the experiences of the author and examine the themes of love, birth, death, and time

Genres: Poetry, American

24 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1983

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 · Rating 3 out of 5]

He tried the sweet,
the gentle, the "oh,
let's hold hands together "
and it was awful,
dull, brutally inconsequential.

Terse flickers, fading images grasped momentarily on a crazy warm Sunday morning. I was looking for a torque but found instead a respectable patience. Very William Carlos Williams.

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

As always, I appreciate Creeley's stark style, his spare style, his precise style. The effect is something like the Zen Koan, a seemingly crystallized source of wit or wisdom. Indeed, Creeley is economical with his words. In fact, his shortest poems are between five and six lines in length...

Thanks for
what will be
the memory
if it is.
- Retrospect


Once started nothing stops
but for moment
breath's caught time
stays patient.
- Death


If it isn't fun, don't do it.
You'll have to do enought that isn't.

Such is life, like they say,
no one gets away without paying

and since you don't get to keep it
anyhow, who needs it.
- Sad Advice


So careful
of anything

thought of,
so slow

to move
without it.
- Worry

I was pleasantly surprised to read a poem that made specific reference to one of my favourite filmmakers, Robert Bresson...

A movie of Robert
Bresson’s showed a yacht,
at evening on the Seine,
all its lights on, watched

by two young, seemingly
poor people, on a bridge adjacent,
the classic boy and girl
of the story, any one

one cares to tell. So
years pass, of course, but
I identified with the young,
embittered Frenchman,

knew his almost complacent
anguish and the distance
he felt from his girl.
Yet another film

of Bresson’s has the
aging Lancelot with his
awkward armor standing
in a woods, of small trees,

dazed, bleeding, both he
and his horse are,
trying to get back to
the castle, itself of

no great size. It
moved me, that
life was after all
like that. You are

in love. You stand
in the woods, with
a horse, bleeding.
The story is true.
- Bresson's Movies

Likewise, I was pleased (but not altogether surprised) to read a poem that made specific reference to a poem by one of my favourite poets, Allen Ginsberg's Kaddish . I say "not altogether surprised" because Creeley and Ginsberg were friends, and references to Ginsberg abound in Creeley's work...

"All girls grown old..."
broken, worn out

men, dead
houses gone, boats sunk

jobs lost, retired
to old-folks' home.

Eat, drink,
be merry, you fink.
- On Phrase from Ginsberg's Kaddish

The coda marks the end of the collection, but it also marks the end of a friendship. The piece "Oh Max" is dedicated to Creeley's friend, the poet Max Finstein, who died in 1982 (Mirrors was published in 1983)...

1
Dumbass clunk plane "American
Airlines" (well­-named) waits at gate

for hours while friend in Nevada's
burned to ash. The rabbi

won't be back till Sunday.
Business lumbers on

in cheapshit world of
fake commerce, buy and sell,

what today, what
tomorrow. Friend's dead -­

out of it, won't be back
to pay phoney dues. The best

conman in country's
gone and you're left in

plane's metal tube squeezed out
of people's pockets, pennies

it's made of, big bucks,
nickels, dimes all the same.

You won't understand it's forever -­
one time, just one time

you get to play,
go for broke, forever, like

old-­time musicians,
Thelonious, Bud Powell, Bird's

horn with the chewed­-through reed,
Jamaica Plain in the '40s

- Izzy Ort's, The Savoy. Hi Hat's
now gas station. It goes fast.

Scramble it, make an omelet
out of it, for the hell of it. Eat

these sad pieces. Say it's
paper you wrote the world on

and guy's got gun to your head -
go on, he says, eat it...

You can't take it back.
It's gone. Max's dead.


2
What's memory's
agency - why so much
matter. Better remember

all one can forever­ -
never, never forget.
We met in Boston,

1947, he was out of jail
and just married, lived
in a sort of hotel-­like

room off Washington Street,
all the lights on,
a lot of them. I never

got to know her well,
Ina, but his daughter
Rachel I can think of

now, when she was 8,
stayed with us, Placitas, wanted bicycle,
big open-­faced kid, loved

Max, her father, who,
in his own fragile way,
was good to her.

In and out
of time, first Boston,
New York later­ - then

he showed up in N.M.,
as I was leaving, 1956,
had the rent still paid

for three weeks on
"The Rose­ Covered Cottage" in Ranchos
(where sheep ambled o'er bridge)

so we stayed,
worked the street, like they say,
lived on nothing.

Fast flashes -­ the women
who love him, Rena, Joyce,
Max, the mensch, makes

poverty almost fun,
hangs on edge, keeps traveling.
Israel -­ they catch him,

he told me, lifting
a bottle of scotch at the airport,
tch, tch, let him stay

(I now think) 'cause
he wants to.
Lives on kibbutz.

So back to New Mexico,
goyims' Israel sans the plan
save Max's ("Kansas City," "Terre Haute")

New Buffalo (friend told me
he yesterday saw that on bus placard
and though, that's it! Max's place).

People and people and people.
Buddy, Wuzza, Si
Perkoff, and Sascha,

Big John C., and Elaine,
the kids. Joel and Gil,
LeRoi, Cubby, back and back

to the curious end
where it bends away into
nowhere or Christmas he's

in the army, has come home,
and father, in old South Station,
turns him in as deserter, ashamed,

ashamed of his son. Or the man
Max then kid with his papers
met nightly at Summer Street

subway entrances on Xmas
he give him a dime for a tip...
No, old man, your son

was not wrong. "America"
just a vagueness, another place,
works for nothing, gets along.


3
In air
there's nowhere
enough not
here, nothing

left to speak
to but you'll
know as plane
begins its

descent, like
they say, it
was the place
where you were,

Santa Fe
(holy fire) with
mountains
of blood.


4
Can't leave, never could,
without more, just
one more

for the road.
Time to go makes
me stay ­-

Max, be happy,
be good, broken
brother, my man, useless

words
now
forever.

- for Max Finstein died circa 11:00 a.m. driving truck (Harvey Mudd's) to California - near Las Vegas - 3/17/82

[e · Rating 4 out of 5]

Creeley’s “third period” (starting with Later and ending with Echoes), as Benjamin Friedlander calls it, has quietly emerged as my favorite. For Love is easy to love with its bold lines and turns of phrase, but that turning feels more daring because it’s almost done in secret in this third period, a quite literal re-turn to the place of first permission. Friedlander characterizes the third period (1979-94) as “fifteen years of determined composition, of re-asserting, &, in some cases, of rethinking what came before.” Heidegger says something in Mindfulness (I think, but don’t quote me on this) about the philosopher’s need to rethink another philosopher’s work from the ground up in order to not just understand it but refute it—this is why truly great works of philosophy are “irrefutable.” And in this way, Creeley does the same with his own work, here, thinking back into being what led him to the fact of where he is in the moment of composition. These are poems not of winsome strangeness and tender, sometimes raging romance as in the first period—I noticed I had this at a 2* rating a decade ago, & surely this came from a sense of disappointment that they read as re-hashes with diminished returns. But I think once you’ve had to experience genuine return in your life, dwelled in its inevitability and thought it not a disappointment but an opportunity for bringing past & present together in a puzzling cohesion, these poems will sing to you, truly:

SOME ECHO

The ground seems almost stolid
alongside the restless water,
surface now rippled by wind
echoed by the myriad tree branches—

and thought is a patient security then,
a thing in mind at best or else
some echo of physical world
it is but can know nothing of.

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

I hate the star-ranking system for rating books. Mirrors by Robert Creeley is one exquisite example of this system completely failing to completely grasp on how I feel about this book. The style sometimes feels overdone to me; but overall, I felt that the themes that were expressed on family, friendship, death, and relations-to-place are covered thoroughly and beautifully. Before this, I've only read a few singular poems by Creeley, and they make more sense as a whole.

What strikes me most about this book is just how sure Creeley is about form and the form in which his poems take. It's something I hope to strive for in my own work.

I grabbed this at the library on a whim. I hope to buy a copy of this book for my permanent collection.