Many thanks, Mark.
Never met the man, but get some of the feel, voicing and movement and pattern,
from this.
Even here, to be missed at a distance.
Feeling for those of you who did know him.
Best,
Jill
> I find myself needing to say something about Bob Creeley, and poetryetc, my
> real home on the web, is a good place to do it. He was to my mind the best,
> truest voice in the US version of our language, totally dedicated to his
> art and the craft that carried it, and a model of integrity as an artist.
> His readings, even in the early days when he was often incoherent from the
> various substances he'd consumed, were as wonderful as his poems--he'd talk
> about whatever was on his mind, developing complex thought from simple
> premises in his inimitable supple and surprising sentences, and he'd read
> maybe one, maybe two new poems, and maybe a poem by someone else. It was
> like being in his living room or across a dining table--that intimate, and
> so much the same person on all occasions.
>
> Bob and I weren't intimate, but we knew each other, and there was a bond of
> affection--the same could be said by hundreds of other poets. He was great
> friends with Paul Blackburn, my Carlos' biological father, who was one year
> his senior. They corresponded voluminously in the late 50s and early
> sixties--an amazing correspondence of young poets finding their mastery
> that hopefully will surface into print some day. They had a violent
> falling-out sometime in the 60s, apparently occasioned by a fight between
> their then wives, and it was some years before there was even a partial
> reconciliation. Something like 15 years ago Creeley contacted Carlos, out
> of the blue. He wanted to meet him. Carlos was, you can imagine, shy about
> it, but I pushed him, and they formed a strong bond--a bond of equals, or
> something like it, because Bob was incapable of putting on airs. Bob was
> completing a circle, and for Carlos it was both an affirmation as a young
> poet and a gift of continuity with a father he barely remembered.
>
> What a lovely, generous man he was, and how well he aged. I miss knowing
> that he's there.
>
> There aren't many mediocre poems in his oeuvre. If I had my books I suppose
> I'd read The Finger, from Pieces, tonight, or some of the late, short
> books--intricately connected sequences of poems about aging and the
> approach of death and the web of affections.
>
> My window faces west, towards high cirro-cumulus clouds lit right now by
> the sun already sunk below the horizon, and now those clouds have become a
> web of violet, a soft pink bank of stratocumulus darkening beneath them.
> And now for a moment the sky behind the church across the street is purple.
> What else is there but to catch at the moment?
>
> Mark
>
|