The following was a dialogue Bill Dodd and I had just after Robert Creeley's death in 2005. I reprint it in homage to Dodd whose insights about Creeley were so strong and to hear Dodd again in the magazine he helped create. BP

he was a good poet and often a friend to many of us”…Bill Pearlman

a dialogue, in memoriam, for Robert Creeley, 1926-2005

Bill Pearlman: Bill Dodd and I are going to have a conversation about Robert Creeley, who was a great influence for both of us.  Can you go back, Bill, and recall your first encounters with Bob in New Mexico?

Bill Dodd: Pearl, before I talk about my first meeting with Bob, which was in Albuquerque, around l961—to which I was an émigré from the Texas Panhandle—I feel it’s necessary to preface such remarks with a note or two, for the sake of contrast,  on those plow-ruined grasslands, previously the domain of the Kiowas, Comanches, and Apaches.

Abruptly, out of that tabletop’s solitude, aptly named the Caprock, a huge wall of red cloud could rapidly engulf our ubiquitous frame house in Ropes, Texas—hometown, I’m told, also of Max Evans—which acted as a mere sieve through which the sand could emerge as a fine powdered dust to dim even further already dim light bulbs. This could go on for days. Dust pneumonia was not uncommon.  At last, dust covering everyone and everything, we undead would slowly emerge and things would begin to return to their existential normalcy.  It was cotton land from which a huge bonanza had been realized because of WWII. Now it is all subsidized, as it was then, in fact.  There were also cries in the wilderness from the numberless protestant churches to the hundreds of Jobs there to get right with God. Only some of the preachers and fewer still of their members showed much enthusiasm for the work. Many of the farmers were, naturally, quite rich…and some even allowed it to show. Most of the rest of us were relatively poor and wholly dependent on the up’s and down’s of seasonal agriculture.  In school we were thoroughly drilled in the rudiments, but that was the extent of it, pretty much. Left to our own devices, by 15 I could distinguish between good and bad whiskey, but certainly not between good and bad poetry…some Tennyson and Poe being the extent of my exposure.

...

At any rate, I left there for Albuquerque, l959, knowing nothing else, running purely on the energies of youth, and by the fall of l961, registered blind for a course in creative writing;  and entered to find a tall, thin man in a worn corduroy suit, handsome, fine featured, and sporting a van dyke—with a curiously missing eye. There were no formal introductions.  He just began talking about contemporary poetry—his poetry and that of his friends—as if we were all familiar with it.  Of course, none of us had the idiom; but I think almost everyone there thought, as well, we soon would. It was his enormous energy and presence that dominated—but not self-consciously.  We were perhaps naifs, at best, and Bob Creeley was already confortable in his own skin and apparently conversant with the universe; meanwhile, I was  a refugee from Badwater, clueless except I sensed he had some information I badly wanted.

There was also Bob’s unspoken conviction that not only we students but anyone of mental competence would be interested in the writing exploits of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, and also those of Jack Spicer and Joel Oppenheimer, to name a few. He noted that Olson was a master.  This was the first man I had ever met, or, at least, the first to whom I ever paid any attention who wasn’t possessed by either God or money. Or both. He was the man as artist.

Here, truly, was something other than the rather despicable life I’d accustomed myself to, surviving in West Texas.  Today, such events are called “viable alternatives.” Then, we had no such name for the phenomenon; I called it a godsend. Soon, for me, he connected as well with the “moderns.” And there were the facts surrounding his life to that point.

During WWII, he had driven an ambulance in Burma; there was his Harvard beginnings; the sojourns in Majorca and Central America. He brought his friends in to read and lecture…Robert Duncan, Alexander Calder…it was pretty heady stuff, for me.  He was definitely another kind of cat, and one I respected.

I’d like to ask you, Pearl, you come to this encounter with Bob from an altogether different environ: L.A.  What turned you on to what he was doing?  And what, to your mind, was he doing?

Bill Pearlman: Well, my first contact with Creeley came when Peter Marin, who was introduced to me by Jack Hirschman, suggested I take a look at For Love, which Peter thought representative of the best poetry after WC Williams, and in WCW’s tradition. So I got a look at that book and liked it. So from the early 60s, there was Hirschman, Williams, Creeley as strong influences. And then when I moved to Placitas, NM in l967, Bob and Bobbie were there and we got acquainted some, and then I took two classes with Bob in 68-69 at Univ. New Mexico…Yes, Bob’s seriousness about poetry was real, and conversations with him and others from his generation (including Dorn and Ginsberg) opened up something powerful for me.  We read through Olson in the first class I took, and I remember doing a paper on Philip Whalen.  What Bob seemed to be up to as a poet was refining the short lyric, in a tradition that took in for me Emily Dickinson, Williams, Zukofsky. And Creeley was hip to boot, and liked his wine, and spoke in that sometimes amazing style all his own, with weird recurring phrases, ‘like they say,’ ‘not heavily,’ and exact and heartfelt, and though dominating conversation , he still listened to the other.  There was a different kind of intensity in Bob than I encountered in Hirschman, who was also a great force in those years. Jack had finished his Ph.D. at Indiana and was on a tenure track at UCLA before Vietnam overwhelmed his ability to hang in.  Bob was less credentialed than Jack, (M.A. from UNM which is what I in fact ended doing), but Bob got on a tenure track at SUNY Buffalo and later got a Chair in Poetry, and stayed the course. But Creeley manifested, as you Bill have pointed out, some kind of devoted sense that poetry mattered and was worth doing and hearing. And I think he brought home perhaps from Williams, the idea of improvisation on themes that appeared readily in his world.  I’d like us to look at particular poems as this dialogue advances….

Which poems, in that light, first struck you as breaking ground that you found valuable, Bill?  Because you encountered him about l960, when For Love I think first appeared; what did those curious love poems do for your own quest and sensibility?

Bill Dodd: Well, the most famous short poem of his, “I Know A Man,” comes immediately to mind…but I read that book, For Love, really as if it was one long poem.  The voice there is so harmonic and attuned, and it is seeking to accurately reflect the mind of the man writing…so even the irrational, or perhaps, the irrational particularly intervenes in the music, like, very modern music, and he was, you know, a friend of Cage, who was, I believe at Black Mountain when Creeley was there, so there is necessarily that stoney (Northeasterly, the Cape, the rock beaches), isolate sounds that occur and is arhythymical by nature—against the measured beat of poetry up until then that often practically drowns one in its ominiscient repetitions and beat.  Unfortunately, like much of the Rap and Hip-Hop of today, so governed, as it is, by the Beat, insistence cadences (meter), and hard end-rhyme stops.  I think Creeley really wanted to stay away from that beat. But wanted, also, something honest, as a guide to phrasing, or phrase, in its place. “Breath” was his answer.  As the best measure of a man might be his physiology, my words, so perhaps Bob, although I never heard him say this exactly, took the best measure for a line as a single breath. No one who every heard Creeley didn’t hear this. I’ve thought much about that, and I must say, it’s never found a very persuasive conclusion in my own mind because, of course, the breath of anyone is no metronome, although I’ve found my own line has grown, for the most part, much shorter over the years, and perhaps that can be attributed, in some fashion, to an unconscious/conscious grappling with the issue.  I don’t know.

Moving on…take his poem, “After Mallarme.” “Stone,/like stillness,/around you my/mind sits, it is//a proper form/for/it,like/stone, like//compression itself,/fixed fast,/grey,/without a sound,” and compare it to Wallace Stevens’ “Anecdote of the Jar.”  The biggest difference here, I would submit, highlights some of the central differences separating “moderns” from the contemporary.  Stevens, of course, argues for some cognitive organization around an external (framed, still-life) reality, whereas Creeley’s epistemological positivism is far more updated.  In fact, many of Bob’s poems “deconstruct” themselves, and a few may even be moderately scrambled without losing anything. Certainly many of his phrases/sentences can be transposed with no loss of “meaning.”

I believe this is important to an understanding of just how far his “oversight” into poetry went. Here one has someone working in full light of not only the history of prosody but the future of it as well.  And it is the mind: concrete (not to be confused with concretism). There are the same apparent “logical” or cognitive gaps in much of his poetry that inheres in the mind itself.

I remember in some of my early poetry—and I still do it—I would repeat, often more than twice, key words or the same word or phrase.  Creeley never failed to point this out to me, but he didn’t do it critically…merely to ascertain if I had bothered to think about what it might indicate.  He was meticulous.  Anyone who ever talked to him at length could see that clearly.  A lot of thought went into those little short poems, but, of course, by the same token, was never allowed to touch them. The quandary—although I’m fairly convinced he never lost sleep over the issue—was that “popular” poets, of his, or anyone’s day, always got a great deal of mileage out of those old poetic devices.  The public, as it were, loved it. Bob could never have brought himself to write a “poetic” line.  John Cage couldn’t compose a “Rhapsody In Blue,” for many of the same reasons. That was not what they heard.

I went, at some point, away from Bob Creeley.  And am now, probably, even moreso.  Mine is a social concern. Maybe like one physicist concentrating on quarks and other subatomical particles and one concerned with the biomechanics of global warming, I don’t know. I doubt one could get much leaner than what is in much of Creeley’s work (though some have tried.)

Bill Pearlman: You know Bob wrote a blurb for my last book, so we had a communication over some years, and he thought I was concerned with “possiblities,” as least as far as that was his reading of what I do.  I like what you say about breath, and the meticulous element…. Sending you last note from Creeley.  Thought also I’d take a poem and see what it says at this removed….

THE RAIN

All night the sound had
come back again,
and again falls
this quiet, persistent rain.

What am I to myself
that must be remembered,
insisted upon
so often?  Is it

that never the ease,
even the hardness,
of rain falling
will have for me

something other than this,
something not so insistent—
am I to be locked in this
final uneasiness.

Love, if you love me,
lie next to me.

Be for me, like rain,
the getting out

of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi-
lust of intentional indifference.
Be wet
with a decent happiness.

Something strange but true in it.  Something his own, his own associations, his own trip, as we used to say…Surprising too, his mind at work, on the rain, the poem, the love...uneasiness he's’locked in, the self-consciousness explored; and then the release, the statement, directly to her (Bobbie?), as source of release from those elementals so vague in some ways—semi-lust of intentional indifference?  As if chastizing himself for a depersonalized realm, that is such a part of fucking? But there, somehow, lying next to him, and wet /with a decent happiness. So weirdly New England, somehow, but hip as well, placed in time, good timing, perhaps of use to them as a couple? One hopes that the case, otherwise an exercise in very intense self scrutinty, but it’s that as well. An improvisation on a natural event paralleling another course of nature, that redeeming wetness of the lover…It somehow talks to me in a strong way, and I have pieces similar, I think….

(Letter from Robert Creeley to Bill Pearlman, March, 2005)

Dear Bill,

Reading your generous note, for a moment seeing “Semana Santa,” I thought is it Xmas already?  Ah, well….  Years ago in Barcelona, we thought the Familia Sagrada was some local folks named Sagrada, and likewise getting a tape of Pablo Casals playing at the “Casa Blanca,” we thought that was the same place as the Bogart movie, etc etc.  Anyhow where there’s la vida, there’s la esperanza—and so far, so good.  With luck we are now in Marfa till May 1st, then back to Providence—if health gets worse, we’ll go back early but fingers are crossed. That space and that bowl of mountains is terrific.  Onward!

Best as ever,

Bob
Marfa, Texas

Bill Dodd: We poets who shared Bob Creeley’s generosity of spirit and artistic intensities were universally committed to free verse, which I interpret as an inside-out, empirical view of the craft: descriptive, in other words, of how it functions—though that is too cold and analytical for something that begins and ends in emotion.  Poetry, as I think Bob might agree, is first—and last—the arena of the felt and sensed…and only afterwards, anything else.  Of course, much of that cannot help but infuse someone’s verse.  He took Ralph Waldo Emerson’s observation that “form is the extension of content,” and made it his koan. And OPEN composition, or “composition by field,” was a familiar refrain from Bob. This went directly back to Pound’s CANTOS, and, more indirectly, to Walt Whitman.  These, together with the breath measure, were the theoretical pillars of Robert Creeley’s poetry.  And though his sensibilities may well have been as  “neurasthenically” frayed by this century of war as any English poet dying in a WWI trench, he managed, one way and another, to put together a body of lean and wry work with more than its share of memorable moments and more than its share of permanent markings.  His presence, for many of us, in the SW was a testament to the well-springs of  democracy.  He was a friend, mentor, teacher, and poet of repute; a singular man…and a very, very rare one.

Bill Pearlman

Let’s let Bob have the last word.

GOODBYE
Robert Creeley

Now I recognize
it was always me
like a camera
set to expose

itself to a picture
or a pipe
through which the water
might run

or a chicken
dead for dinner
or a plan
inside the head

of a dead man.
Nothing so wrong
when one considered
how it all began.

It was Zukofsky’s
“Born very young into a world
already very old…”
The century was well along

when I came in
and now that it’s ending,
I realize it won’t
be long.

But couldn’t it all have been
a little nicer,
as my mother’d say.  Did it
have to kill everything in sight,

did right always have to be so wrong?
I know this body is impatient.
I know I constitute only a meager voice and mind.
Yet I loved, I love.

I want no sentimentality.
I want no more than home.