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Poetic Profile
Robert Creeley
1) Where did you grow up? Was poetry and writing part of that mix?
I grew up in the then farm town, West Acton, Mass -- some twenty to thirty miles north of Boston, and about eight miles north of Concord. Writing certainly wasn't a family habit -- my father (who died when I was four) was a doctor and my mother a nurse (she eventually became Acton's town nurse) -- but poetry in the old sense was. My grandmother knew reams of it by heart -- and two others of the family wrote, my older sister (and only sibling) Helen, one of whose poems as a teenager had been anthologized by Robert Tristam Coffin, and my mother's sister, Aunt Bernice, who published her poems, often witty parodies, in various local newspapers. It was Helen particularly who directed my early reading, like they say.
2) Who are your poetic influences, favorite poets, writers, artwork, other things that inform your work?
It's an insistent meld finally. When I was young, prose writers were probably more an influence than any others -- Lawrence, Stendhal, Dostoyevsky, Cervantes -- and then on to Cocteau, Gide, Defoe, James, Celine et al. First poets really to get to me were Williams, Pound, and Hart Crane. Jazz was a terrific company all through college -- college friends then were more often musicians than not. So one needs include Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, etc. Then, in the Black Mountain days, visual artists became locating friends -- Kline, Guston, deKooning and contemporaries as John Chamberlain.
3) When did you 'become' a poet when did poet become part of your everyday life?
I was always leery of claiming to be a "poet" -- who could tell? First off, I thought to write prose primarily, so it's not till I'm in my late twenties that it seems I'm to be primarily a poet. Consequently and like it or not, most of my life seems defined by fact of being a poet one way or another. Whatever the circumstances otherwise, it's what I did and do.
4) Where were you educated? Was this important?
The last years of my secondary education are very important, just that they locate a whole world for me emotionally and intellectually. In my sophomore year I got a scholarship to what was then a small Episcopalian boy's school in New Hampshire, Holderness School -- seventy-five boys altogether with excellent teachers. That's where I first read Tolstoy and Joyce, which last we 'translated' parts of into Basic English. It's where I first recognized language as an agency, not just what one spoke. Harvard was sadly the total opposite -- with some great exceptions as F.O. Mathiessen. Harry Levin, Kenneth Murdock, Fred McCreary, and otherwise my peers there. Ellie Dorfman the photographer has this note in her Housebook: "Gordon Cairnie, proprietor of the Grolier Book Shop -- [was] one of only two people at Harvard who made Bob Creeley feel he might amount to something (the other, Fred McCreary)..." Anyhow it was such a bleak change from the nurturing support and intellectual curiosity of Holderness, and the Second World War was also an awful time to come of age period.
5) You have been friends with and learned from many poets including Olson, Pound and Williams is their a poet who has influenced you that may surprise your readers?
When I looked in an old anthology I had had back in the forties -- Conrad Aiken's (Modern Library) something or other -- I was surprised to find the one poet I had really chosen to single out was E.A. Robinson, particularly "The Man against the Sky." (Marsden Hartley gets marked in the same collection.) You can find Robinson’s poem online at this link, the very last one of the poems there, and it still seems all too humanly familiar:
http://www.hn.psu.edu/faculty/jmanis/earobin/earobin1.pdf I also read Conrad Aiken, be it said -- Brownstone Eclogues, etc. I recall as well being much attracted to Tristan Corbière, thanks to Pound, despite I could barely read him. Then there are particular modes of various poets, Norman Macleod's cadence and form in A Man In Midpassage, for example, Richard Eberhart’s use of couplets with a curious backbeat.
6) What is your favorite food?
Paella, I guess, from Mallorca days. Or Huevos Rancheros from New Mexico breakfasts.
7) Sports Team?
Red Sox and/or the Buffalo Bills.
8) Vacation Spot?
I don't know that one's ever "on vacation" in the formal sense. Summers I work on my own commitments in Waldoboro, Maine -- where my sister first lived and we then followed some twenty or more now years ago. All my mother's family came from Maine, so it wasn't a great change. Now it's the one place we own, so to speak, and I have other family there as well.
9) Curse Word?
It depends on the occasion.
10) It has been said that what happened at Black Mountain College in the 1950's defined poetry and visual art for the next 50 years who were in your opinion the most important figures of your time at Black Mountain?
For me it was Charles Olson, just that he is the one responsible for getting me there to teach and also arranged for me to edit the Black Mountain Review, which starts in 1954 and stops in 1957, a year after the college closes. But remember that I was only in and out of Black Mountain, first from March into June of 1954, then from June ’55 into the winter of that year. The college by that time was all but in shambles. Ed Dorn was there, as were also John Chamberlain, Jorge Fick, Cynthia Homire, Dan Rice, Michael Rumaker – friends who stayed friends all my life. Then there was terrific Stefan Wolpe, the composer, and his wife, the poet Hilda Morley. I also first met John Wieners there, although he was just visiting. The Black Mountain connection, so to speak, led to Joel Oppenheimer, Fielding Dawson, the great “Abstract Expressionists” Franz Kline, Phillip Guston, Bill deKooning. Etc. It changed my literal life.
11) In a recent interview on this site Regis Bonvicino said that you were the American most worthy of winning the Nobel Prize for literature. If you did win what would you want the world to know about the poetic community in the USA? What would you want to tell the world about our culture at this time?
I have no appetite for such "what ifs" -- and no expectations whatsoever.
Craft Questions
1) How do you form a poem?
I don't really "form" it, I do what it makes possible, so to speak. Obviously my head for years now has been stuffed full of possibilities got from reading, endless variables of "form" and the like. Best sense I've come upon is Robert Duncan's in "The Truth and Life of Myth" -- and the poem on which that essay centers, "A Poem Beginning with a Line from Pindar." From The Opening of the Field.
2) Do you use collage, found language?
I do when it fits, i.e., you'll find a lot of 'quoting' much like jazz's use of such in what I've written -- tags, echoes, allusions. One poem I think of quickly as a good example -- "In London" from Pieces.
3) Is poetry an organic or synthetic process for you?
For me it happens, and over the years I really haven't revised as a practice. That is, I'm stuck or blessed with what I write -- and if it doesn't work, then that's that. I do something else, albeit what's been the prompting can come again in different manner.
4) Where do you write? Is Ambiance important? Do you have rituals or habits when you write?
Most usually I write (and have written) in a place particular, i.e., a workroom of whatever kind -- with books, typewriter, or now computer, at hand. I like music as a "place" to get started in. I don't like to be too separated from family or whatever's going on. Most usually when I am working, all else fades away in any case. I also write on the road -- I did a lot of traveling until recently, now slowed down a bit. Then I use whatever's to hand -- and it's primarily poems that come.
5) In the balance between found language and created language where does your work fall? Do you use many sources?
I really don't know. As to sources, I have all that otherwise my life would be said to have, viz body on out.
6) Your work is very controlled how do you continue to control the evident energy in your work?
I'm not religious, so I can't say “God” does it -- but I really don't "control" in any intent to. As Williams best puts it, I write what's "there to be written." I am not its primary determinant in that sense. Lawrence says, "Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me!" That's what one is
paying attention to -- something's happening, coming to be.