Michael March:  What cards were dealt to you in your life?

Robert Creeley:  That´s a curious and useful question. There were certainly bleak cards dealt: the death of my father when I was so young, the loss of my eye almost simultaneously. But the good cards were the support and emotional integrity of my family, my mother´s family, my grandparents. And the extraordinary acumen and intelligence of my older sister, who really is the person who actually got me into boarding school and therefore connected me with the kind of teaching that was crucial, although it was not particularly privileged in the social sense. But it was immensely useful practical and intellectual training for me. I´d come from the classic farm town which was benign but had no resources or habits that could give me an active education such as I frankly ended up needing as a writer. At the time I didn´t think I would become a writer. I didn´t even know what a writer was. And then, even the loss of my exe converted to insurance which put me through college – an eye for a private education. I don´t really recommend it, but so it was.

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MM: What constitutes being a writer?

RC:  I suppose someone who´s both attracted and committed to do what words can say. I guess it´s the sense of “bearing witness” or “telling”. Being the youngest in my family, the story was extraordinarily important to me as a kid – what happened, what they did, what they were like. I was living in a social place – a farm town – which in some curious way wasn´t really where I was. I mean my family had come from an urban environment. So there were stories that preceded my life very significantly and, in a curious way, continued it. So I must have intuited, if not understood, that knowing how to say things was absolutely crucial.

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MM: Was the Depression an important experience for you as a poet?

RC: The Depression was the enforcement of an extraordinary commonplace, even though some people might have been removed from it through various securities or privileges, it was impossible not to be there in one way or another. When you walked out into any public situation, you were constantly confronted. It permeated the entire nation. I´m presuming this because I was very young. In our situation, it meant that instances of despair and poverty were curiously close to us because my mother was the town nurse and the needs for support or help or response were obviously and insistently directed toward her. Our own sense of person and what we did was measured in relation to the despair and pain which was the rest of the world.

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MM: At that time there was a great social sense which coincided with the rise of very significant American poets, such as Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen, Carl Rakosi, Charles Reznikoff.

RC: Two things about them seem to be decisive. On is that they are in some sense the first poets, particularly in America. who write from the urban tradition. It isn´t that other writers don´t “deal wit it” or “use it”, so to speak, but none write of it as a daily condition in the same way. They´re not descriptive, particularly. They don´t tell you what the masses are doing today in some generalizing or even particularizing sense. But they are writers who ate coming from that situation. They are not talking about “the people” as some generalizing fact. They are trying to find a particularizing way of articulating that given world in themselves and in others. Also to the point is that they are a classic minority, as they say in America. On the one hand, they are part of an extraordinary tradition. Zukofsky, for example, could recite all of Hiawatha in Yiddish. So many of the immigrants were the classic intelligentsia of middle Europe, the Jews. The point is that Jews were particularly awkward for the status quo. They couldn´t be helped in the same way. You could hardly be patronizing to a sophisticated middle European. It would be absurd – they had their culture. So this group is both resisted and finally, remarkably, almost expunged. I see this situation in the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry. Zukofsky appears in one edition and he vanishes in the next.

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MM: What about your group, the Black Mountain school?

RC: We do really well. We´re all white. Almost all of us dropped out of university. I don´t think any of us has the degree we were originally after. But we ho to good schools. Most of all, we´re white and we´re male. We May be aberrations but we´re recognizable aberrations. So we don´t contest or qualify. I was thinking of Charles Olson in particular. He´s within a curious tradition of that circumstance. He´s not nearly as confusing as Zukofsky.

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MM: What about your own poetry?

RC: So far it has been a lovely, companionable indulgence of what´s been an ability do to something. String words in patterns that both said things and sounded things that I selfishly enjoyed hearing and getting said. The ways in which one both keeps company with oneself but also presumably, or hopefully, with the world.

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MM: For love – for the love of human beings, the love of this earth, the love of continuing life. These are your perpetual themes.

RC: Love is abiding affection. It´s more than sexual love. In fact, I was thinking of Octavio Paz´s recent death. He had written about the imagination of love as a commodity or simply a sexual exchange. He was therefore saying that in our time there has been an absolute degradation of love as binding affections or a shared recognition, care, response, or friendship with another person or persons. It is when one loses the particular preoccupation with oneself and yields it readily to the imagination of another person, to lose oneself in the eyes or in the reality of someone else. To live with someone, to share a world with them, to live together, as they say. That character of love, I think, is extraordinary. I don´t want to think of love simply as a consumer art, you know, like “I love nice things”, or “I love Picasso”, or “I love good movies”. That´s not contemptible, it´s very familiar as a statement. But it would certainly not be the love I´m hoping to honor or experience. “What thou lovest well will not be rent from thee. What thou lovest well is thy true heritage.” That second play really makes the point, “What thou lovest well is thy true heritage” – not “you get what you want”, but “what you want or commit yourselves to is your inheritance.”

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MM: Will we expel our own heritage?

RC: I was thinking about Paul Kennedy, the historian, and his imagination of the economic, political, and social possibilities of the next 30 years. He was quietly pointing out that capitalism was essentially serving a religious purpose. Capitalism now has this sacral place that religions had in the Middle Ages or in the Renaissance. Where people used to say, “In God we trust”, now we would say – not cynically, but practically – in money we trust.

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MM: These problems were addressed in 1968. They were either abandoned or, shall we say, put aside.

RC: These problems paradoxically no longer have to do simply with minorities. These problems have to do with work structure, with return on the character of employment, with the shift to the service industries as a base for cheap labour. Again, with respect to capitalism, the decisive terms are, necessarily, “how much can I get our of this”, not “how much can I produce and share with others”.

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MM: What is the position of the poet in all of this?

RC: A poet, in some ways, is inevitably the voice of the collective. I don´t think a poet invents a “thing to say” or “a way to say it” that is unique. I think that Federico Garcia Lorca is a classic instance. He certainly didn´t want to be a revolutionary. He was middle class, settled, white, affluent and unwittingly he becomes the extraordinary political and emotional voice of his generation´s afflicted world. Poets are almost like canaries in mine shafts – they sing because they have to and they sing of that particular fact of things that they intuit, rather than what they intellectually determine. They have the capability to make that information known. Just as Allen Ginsberg wrote Howl. I don´t think he set out simply to say ´I will correct the illness of my time´, but he sure struck a chord. It´s not that poets have the intellectual command or even understanding of what they are saying, but rather the curious sensitivity or power to say it. 

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MM: Attention is the prayer of the soul – a mutual recognition.

RC: It´s the old fashioned dilemma: Did God know what he was doing? Or, did this say intend to be? I have no idea. I don´t think poets know what the effects will finally be, even though they try to. I love Shakespeare for that reason. He sort of comes on the scene, does the trick, and then is absolutely gone. And no one can even remember who that masked man was. But he was the greatest genius in English. I love that – that no one could ever quite remember who he was. You know, “I think he married a woman named -, yeah, they used to live over there, here´s the records, but I don´t know what happened to him. He must have left the town.”

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MM: Could you say what happened to yourself?

RC: No, I´m the last person. I love Wittgenstein´s alleged last words, which were: “Tell them it´s been wonderful.” I really think it´s been wonderful. In a peculiar way, that includes everything. You can´t say, “Well what about the Second World War?” It was absolutely awful, certainly. But it was paradoxically wonderful insofar as it made explicit all the range of determinants that life might have to deal with.

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MM: If we can go back to the cards dealt, do we have pre-determined fates?

RC: I think our need to believe is absolute and after that I don´t think it really matters. I mean it matters if we believe in Hitler or if we believe in white supremacy – that´s obviously not happy. I think that´s curiously the problem – the need to believe, lacking a communal possibility in the benign sense, chooses anger. It´s just wanting to belong to something or to someone.

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MM: This is rather religious in the sense of human laws. Human laws versus divine laws – Hollywood and Divine.

RC: I don´t know that there´s a “versus”. I think that the only divine laws we´ll ever know will be humanly understood. There´ll be no divine laws that we´ll ever recognize or apprehend that we won´t have managed to “create” by our own understanding. They say in the United States that Americans always take weather personally, that the weather somehow has to have some meaning. You know, “Oh it had to go ahead and rain”, or “I was supposed to get married today and it´s snowing.”

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MM: What about divine law – the power of nature itself?

RC: I was thinking of the flooding, the tornadoes, and the awful disasters of the spring in the States. Certainly the power of nature is absolute. I can´t imagine what other power there could finally be. And I would include humans as part of the “equation”. The only faith I have is committed to humans. Not that humans will necessarily find the right answer or do the right thing but what seems evident is human. It isn´t that I eschew or dismiss the possibility of divine law or order, I simply have no faith in it.

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MM: Faced with ourselves, what is there to say?

RC: Hello.

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April 1998

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