Robert Creeley, Pieces, 1969
Pieces reflects in its fragmented structure, and in the frayed-edge sensibility given off by its structuring, the imminence of travel – that undeniability of the onward drag. Unlike Words before it and In London after, Pieces refuses to make discrete its components, or to commit its islands of text to categories of either “poem” or “note.” The consequence is a run-on quality, where bodies are separated only by line breaks or dots, carrying in this crowdedness a sense of itinerance, perpetual preoccupation. Such rapidity is unusual for Creeley, whose work conveys above much else a suspension from the rush – juxtaposed with Charles Olson, with Jack Spicer, with, even, Larry Eigner, its dynamism is the quietest.
Yet, even in this rapidity of rushing from place to place, Creeley is able to disassemble the inevitability of the poem’s temporality with rigorousness. Admittedly, though, it’s a rigorousness matched by knowledge of its own futility. “A Step” echoes TS Eliot’s Prufrock for an instant (“Things / come and go”), carrying in that echo the great weight of Eliot’s page-eating poem, but only does so to drop the anticipation with a mix of resignation and acceptance (“Then / let them.”) As in the earlier “I Know a Man,” where Creeley pokes fun at his own vocation by reference to “always talking,” our awareness of Creeley as poet acquires an unweary knowledge of its ultimate impotence in the face of those “things” that must be “let.”
Although it can’t be called resignation, the metaphysical attitude conveyed in Creeley’s Pieces is a kind if acceptance not entirely too far from it. Here banality – or, should we say, the prosaic – stretches from line to line, unhurried: “Sit. Eat / a doughnut.” The drama of the world is placed elsewhere, not in the seeing-knowing action of observation and charting that so consumes, for instance, Olson’s Maximus Poems, but in the exacting dissection of the simplest words. Drama is conjured up by predisposing, by attuning the reader to the operations of language. On 388, the crescendo of a love (or sex) poem is held, slowed, and transformed into a question of language’s ability to mark the moment and transmit its urgency: “Here here / here. Here.” The hot, breathy, if elegant lust on page 387 becomes transposed onto Creeley’s examinations of language: “Here I / am. There / you are. / The head / of a / pin on . . .” Machinations and maneuvers that are set up as literally romantic are revealed or transformed into operations of language, both more and less concrete than before, for while they now address abstract concepts like the ability of a word to conjure or point, they do so by literally pointing at the shape and substance of ink on the page – the phrase “pin on,” for instance, seems present only to point at the emphatic, and evidently present, full stops that follow it.
Pieces reflects in its fragmented structure, and in the frayed-edge sensibility given off by its structuring, the imminence of travel – that undeniability of the onward drag. Unlike Words before it and In London after, Pieces refuses to make discrete its components, or to commit its islands of text to categories of either “poem” or “note.” The consequence is a run-on quality, where bodies are separated only by line breaks or dots, carrying in this crowdedness a sense of itinerance, perpetual preoccupation. Such rapidity is unusual for Creeley, whose work conveys above much else a suspension from the rush – juxtaposed with Charles Olson, with Jack Spicer, with, even, Larry Eigner, its dynamism is the quietest.
Yet, even in this rapidity of rushing from place to place, Creeley is able to disassemble the inevitability of the poem’s temporality with rigorousness. Admittedly, though, it’s a rigorousness matched by knowledge of its own futility. “A Step” echoes TS Eliot’s Prufrock for an instant (“Things / come and go”), carrying in that echo the great weight of Eliot’s page-eating poem, but only does so to drop the anticipation with a mix of resignation and acceptance (“Then / let them.”) As in the earlier “I Know a Man,” where Creeley pokes fun at his own vocation by reference to “always talking,” our awareness of Creeley as poet acquires an unweary knowledge of its ultimate impotence in the face of those “things” that must be “let.”
Although it can’t be called resignation, the metaphysical attitude conveyed in Creeley’s Pieces is a kind if acceptance not entirely too far from it. Here banality – or, should we say, the prosaic – stretches from line to line, unhurried: “Sit. Eat / a doughnut.” The drama of the world is placed elsewhere, not in the seeing-knowing action of observation and charting that so consumes, for instance, Olson’s Maximus Poems, but in the exacting dissection of the simplest words. Drama is conjured up by predisposing, by attuning the reader to the operations of language. On 388, the crescendo of a love (or sex) poem is held, slowed, and transformed into a question of language’s ability to mark the moment and transmit its urgency: “Here here / here. Here.” The hot, breathy, if elegant lust on page 387 becomes transposed onto Creeley’s examinations of language: “Here I / am. There / you are. / The head / of a / pin on . . .” Machinations and maneuvers that are set up as literally romantic are revealed or transformed into operations of language, both more and less concrete than before, for while they now address abstract concepts like the ability of a word to conjure or point, they do so by literally pointing at the shape and substance of ink on the page – the phrase “pin on,” for instance, seems present only to point at the emphatic, and evidently present, full stops that follow it.