Interesting, but given the continual indeterminacies in Creeley's
poetry (whether or not he was always conscious of them), surely one
reads both/and...? Which any Saroyan should know, too....
Doug
On 5-Mar-08, at 5:04 PM, Max Richards wrote:
> Letter to LRB, current number online:
>
> Drive, he sd
>
> From Aram Saroyan
>
> Stephen Burt’s account of Robert Creeley’s famous poem ‘I Know a Man’
> reminded me that once, at a time when Creeley and I both lived in
> Bolinas,
> Creeley in conversation bridled at the popular appropriation of his
> line
> ‘drive, he sd’ (LRB, 21 February). As quoted, it misconstrued the
> poem, he
> said, explaining that the word ‘drive’, which occurs at the
> beginning of the
> final stanza, was meant to finish the narrator’s musing at the end
> of the
> previous stanza: ‘buy a goddamn big car// drive’. So that what
> followed
> shouldn’t be read, ‘drive, he sd, for/christ’s sake, look/out where yr
> going,’ but rather: ‘he sd, for/christ’s sake, look/out where yr
> going.’ It
> still puzzles me how so practised a grammarian as Creeley expected
> any but
> the former reading, in the absence of a semi-colon, dash or ellipsis
> after
> ‘drive’.
>
> Aram Saroyan
> Los Angeles
>
Douglas Barbour
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