Try reading the later books as sequences of poems.
There are good recordings of Creeley reading. Probably some of thesde have
made it onto CD. It's helpful to hear his careful sorting of sounds and
silences, his weighing of every phoneme.
Both Wiliams and Olson, and also O'Hara, are every bit as good as Yeats, I
think, though they plough very different fields. Throw in Oppen and
Niedecker, tho their compasses are much narrower. And of Blackburn
certainly the Journals. It's a pretty full list--enough for now.
Mark
At 05:14 PM 5/11/2005, you wrote:
>Hooray, the _Collected Poems_ I ordered a while back has arrived and
>is good to come home to.
>
>"That one sounds like Stevie Smith," Sarah says of a poem titled "Oh
>No" that I have just read aloud in an English accent. "Is it about
>death?"
>
>Douglas C. was lamenting the other day the dearth of contemporary
>poets to rival Yeats. There are of course other contests in which one
>might prefer to participate. But what I've read of Creeley so far - a
>handful of poems, out of a thick volume - makes a good showing on
>Yeats' home territory: love, death, women, men, age, yearning, that
>sort of thing. Not just thematically: I mean the rhythm is there, the
>infusing of intelligence into the verse.
>
>I am more at home with the earlier poems than the later ones (the
>collection runs up to 1975), having not yet made the journey through
>the book that I think would bring the later ones into the right focus.
>There a Poundian flashes in the early poems that assist in
>orientation. I don't yet know what to make of the very sparse later
>poems, how to make them happen for me - assuming that's what they're
>there for. (If that's a wrong assumption, I need a replacement. I
>don't do unassuming.)
>
>I know shockingly little about American verse, including about how it
>sounds, so am not confident of my ability to hear Creeley aright. Also
>the whole context - Williams, Zukofsky, Olson and so on - is not there
>for me. They don't have anything by Zukofsky in Northampton Central
>Library. I am going to have to buy some more books. The Berryman I
>ordered at the same time has still not arrived. God, what if all the
>best stuff is out of print?
>
>Dominic
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