Honest, circa 1972, Robert Creeley read at noon in a big, filled auditorium
on the San Francisco State campus. Interestingly - myself included - all of
the serious young and medium aged poets in the local community sat on in the
seats facing the blind eye over which Creeley then wore the black patch.
What were we hiding from? What did we not want him to see? I though it
pretty odd and telling of something at the time. Though I still cannot say
what it was.
We're such a trustworthy lot, poets!
Curiously - for me anyway - I suspect what carries a Creeley reading is the
sense of an integrity within each word as if - like a New England shaker
craftsperson - he has tested each syllable of each word for its weight,
translucence, etc. Each element of which is measured against an emerging
structure. Then he makes it (the form) appear so natural, as if a given of
the world. Only in comparison to the work of others do I realize how unique
the gift, the charm.
I can go for years without reading a Creeley poem or book - while, at the
same time, the work I have read over the years remains so memorably close in
my consciousness.
Now a medium aged poet!
Stephen V
Blog: http://stephenvincent.durationpress.com
> on 7/3/05 12:52 AM, Richard Jeffrey Newman at [log in to unmask]
> wrote:
>
>> like stand-up
>> comedy--and tired, shallow 1950s, Jewish, psychoanalytically influenced,
>> stand-up shtick at that--than poetry, and yet he reads well in that vein and
>> people really like his work.
>
> No doubt several on this list know immediately who this poet is, and it is
> tantalising for me not to know. I suppose I'm so ill-read or so forgetful I
> don't deserve to know.
>
> Max Richards
>
> I've been enjoying all the messages on this subject.
> Coincidentally, my son is briefly here from Byron Bay NSW, bringing a
> compilation CD he made for my Christmas present but never got round to
> delivering. On it (from a 3CD album called I think The Beat Generation)
> I am now listening to bits of Kerouac, Burroughs (heroin relaxes the vocal
> chords, says my son), Ginsberg, none of them great to listen to but great
> historical curiosities now. And 27 seconds of Carl Sandburg 'On Beatniks',
> saying he was one round 1910...
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