posts tagged "Robert Creeley"

mobiles:
          that the wind can catch at,
against itself,
                a leaf or a contrivance of wires,
in the stairwell,
to be looked at from below.

We have arranged the form of a formula here,
have taken the heart out
                               & the wind
is vague emotion.

To count on these aspirants
these contenders for the to-be-looked-at part
of these actions
                     these most hopeful movements
needs
a strong & constant wind.
                            That will not rise above the speed
which we have calculated,
                         that the leaf
remain
          that the wires
be not too much shaken.

-Robert Creeley, “Still Life Or”

“But my dilemma, so to speak, as a younger man, was that I always came on too strong with people I casually met. I remember one time, well, several times, I tended to go for broke with particular people. As soon as I found access to someone I really was attracted by—not only sexually, but in the way they were—I just wanted to, literally, to be utterly with them. I found myself absorbing their way of speaking. I just wanted to get in them. And some people, understandably, would feel this was pretty damned exhausting—to have someone hanging on, you know, like coming at you. I didn’t have any experience of how it was really affecting the other person. I mean, I think that a lot of my first wife’s understandable bitterness about our relationship was the intensity that she was having to deal with. I mean everything was so intense and involved always with tension. My way to experience emotion was to tighten it up as much as possible, and not even wittingly. Just “naturally.” Allen Ginsberg makes a remark that when I get to town nobody sleeps till I’m gone. I can’t let anybody sleep because I don’t want to miss anything. I want it all, and so I tend at times, understandably, to exhaust my friends—keep pushing, pushing, pushing. Not like social pushing to make a big noise, but you know, I don’t want to miss it. I love it. I so love the intensity of people that I can’t let anything stop until it’s literally exhaustion.”
-Robert Creeley, from The Art Of Poetry No.10

The Flower

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.

-Robert Creeley

Now I recognize
it was always me
like a camera
set to expose

itself to a picture
or a pipe
through which the water
might run

or a chicken
dead for dinner
or a plan
inside the head

of a dead man.
Nothing so wrong
when one considered
how it all began.

It was Zukofsky’s
“Born very young into a world
already very old…”
The century was well along

when I came in
and now that it’s ending,
I realize it won’t
be long.

But couldn’t it all have been
a little nicer,
as my mother’d say. Did it
have to kill everything in sight,

did right always have to be so wrong?
I know this body is impatient.
I know I constitute only a meager voice and mind.
Yet I loved, I love.

I want no sentimentality.
I want no more than home.

-Robert Creeley, “Goodbye”

"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.”
-Robert Creeley, from “The Rhyme"

I could look at
an empty hole for hours
thinking it will
get something in it,

will collect
things. There is
an infinite emptiness
placed there.

-Robert Creeley, “Joy”

"Oh when regrets stop
and the silence comes
back to be
a place still for us,

our bodies will tell
their own story, past
all error,
come back to us.”
-Robert Creeley, from “The Eye"

"I thought that if I were broken enough
I would see the light,
like at the end of a small tube, but approachable.”
-Robert Creeley, “The Revelation"

Robert Creeley, “The Language”

-Robert Creeley