o_190rdoloef55ab3f4r60s1n5fa.pdf

Damn Fine Letters
The Selected Letters of Robert Creeley
edited by Rod Smith, Peter Baker
aker, , and Kaplan
Harris
(University of California Press)
Robert Creeley. Black Mountain, voluminous
pile of letters, lots published, between him and
mentor figure Charles Olson by John Martin’s Black
Sparrow Press, Creeley’s own publishing venture in
Mallorca, The Divers Press. Running off with Kenneth
Rexroth’s wife Marthe, correspondent of William
Carlos Williams, chicken farmer, sometimes wore a
patch over eye damaged as a very young boy,
connected with the Beats, Kerouac and Ginsberg and
the others in San Francisco in the mid 1950s, not
always a poet, as things like The Gold Diggers attest
to. We know this much maybe, the casual observers
amongst us, to varying degrees.
With The Selected Letters of Robert Creeley
edited by Rod Smith, Peter Baker, and Kaplan Harris
we learn so much more. Creeley was a literary
vagabond, moving around America and South
America, searching for peace of mind, an escape
from poverty as a struggling poet, his family in tow.
The chicken farmer part is true and not something
fanciful. He took it seriously. He also took his poetry
very seriously, one can’t stress how utterly serious he
was about it.
In early letters to people like Charles Olson
and William Carlos Williams and indeed, Ed Dorn,
there are pages of deep thought and critical analysis
of his work and the others. He is a committed
student of poetic theory, dissecting each line
meticulously, looking for weaknesses, seeking to
improve himself. He questions his motivation,
discards much writing which he later regrets. The
back and forth between him and elder poets like
Carlos Williams – a giant to Creeley – is invigorating.
It would be marvellous to see their letters, the triggers
to Creeley’s thought. These deep poetic discussions
can become a little heavy and early on exchanges
between Creeley and Olson evolve into something
akin to Post War jivetalk, a brand of hip speak,
codelike in character that the reader has to tread
carefully and slowly through to decipher. And Creeley
modifies his letter writing style to fit whoever he is
writing to. To Ezra Pound is more formal, stiff even,
recognisable as the kind of letter you or I might
write.
Creeley is a magazine publisher. He enjoys
the organisation, the gathering of material for issues,
the letter writing it entails asking for poems for the
next issue of whatever he is doing. He worked on
issues of Origin, whilst in Mallorca, for Cid Corman.
Of course he is central to the publication of The Black
Mountain Review, a short lived but so essential
publication that played home to him, Charles Olson,
Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac,
Robert Duncan and many many others whose names
you will know. For many the collection will take on a
new meaning with mid 1950s letters to Kerouac and
Ginsberg. Creeley seems totally excited and enervated
by meeting Kerouac, his letters are so open about
this, excited by his encounters with him personally in
San Francisco as the ‘poetry renaissance’ there gathers
pace, the landmark Six Gallery reading, Howl,
Kerouac’s explosion into the public sphere with On
the Road, Creeley seems to take to Kerouac personally
and artistically. He champions Kerouac at every turn,
much as Ginsberg did for all his friends. Creeley
wrote to Kerouac in late January, 1958, not for the
first time, “Dear Jack, I’ve got some start into the
Subterraneans, and yesterday On The Road came – so
that’s it. Your style is pretty incredible, old friend, i.e.,
how you hold a thing, in a haze, then sharpen, then
fade – I like it. To me – and it’s no simpleness – it means
more than the content – or is the content, a disposition
in itself. Or ‘all to be talked about’ a sharp, sliding web
of consideration. So that again is it. Beats is for supper,
otherwise – but you pick and I’ll read it, and feel very
honoured in sd process. You are very damn good. Again,
it’s what you can do, that makes me think about it
all…” (Letter to Jack Kerouac, January 31,1958).
In letters to William Carlos Williams, to
Olson, Creeley is banging the drum, not just for
Kerouac but William Burroughs and Naked Lunch.
I’m taken aback by his positive words on Burroughs
52