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Creeley — Poetry Lives

You've been billed as a 'Black Mountain Poet'. Can you explain what that is exactly?

For the background to the college, check out a book by Martin Dikeman, called Black Mountain An Experimental Community.... It closed in '56. In 54 I edited a magazine called the Black Mountain Review, that was sponsored by the college. And really most parts of it are quite separate from the college, in the sense that most of the writers coming together were not necessarily involved with the college.

So was it a school of poets?

It was poets that really followed Charles Olsen's directives, his conceptual interests and his sense of prosody. Also there were poets that were primarily coming from the so-called Williams/Pound tradition, and that probably brings them together more than Olsen. Oslen was the great thinker - an incredible person.

You have said that you were influenced by jazz singers such as Charlie Parker and Anita O'Dea. Could you outline in what ways?

It's the phrasing, the pacing. I was always fascinated by listening to the pacing. Particularly the use of solo instruments, like Charlie Parker's phrasing of a melodic pattern. I wanted something very simple, something I could actually hear. Charlie Parker's phrasing within that pattern would change entirely the experience of hearing that as a sequence of notes. The stress and beat of the words was being used as an element in the statement.

How do you do that in a poem?

You just write down the words and indicate the means: you give a typographical pattern which helps emphasize the pace you want; like you give spaces if you want people to go slow, or put impedence in the words, or bunch the words together if you want them to go fast.

What writers do you think have influenced your style?

The Bible - I like that kind of resonance of Old Testament language. I particularly like some of early Elizabethans, like Herrick and Campian and Wyatt (he's got beautiful rhythms) and Marlowe. I didn't like Jonson as much as I thought I would.

What about American poets?

Oh, Whitman, Ezra Pound. William Carlos Williams. Coleridge was terrific but he was not American. Blake I came to very late. I'll be at an age soon when Blake's ways of qualifying the situation will be very interesting.

What about New Zealand poets?

Alan Loney I found extraordinary. A very articulate poet and craftsman. Then a beautiful humanist like Barry Southam. Alan Loney's sense of measure and source in writing are in a sense mine. Alan I feel closest to as a poet. He was a drummer, dig it. When you start talking about the beat there's no confusion whatsoever. He knows there's an absolutely physical situation in time. So does Barry Southam. There are poets too I've read but not yet met, like Russell Haley.

Most of us are familiar with your poetry up until 1965. What sort of poetry are you writing now?

I've been writing poetry and prose, and it seems to be a graph of reality as it seems now to be, to keep sending, to check out kinds of emotional patterns, relationships, feelings of places and times. I do not have the pretention to tell you what I'm saying. I say these things and my presumption is that you as reader will take away what is significant. It's a very different sense of communicating. Communion's what matters. I love to commune with poems. Reading and writing are the experience of these cognitive possibilities, what they say matters surprisingly little.

Do you see poetry as a dead medium?

Oh no, poetry lives. I guess what one is always bucking is the particular definition of its existing at any point in social time, and how poetry thus is involved in a common social life. We've so abstracted ourselves from the experience of our own words that there's an incredible proliferation of modes of retrieval - and then there's the unknown man who actually made love to his xerox machine and duplicated that.

So the proliferation of language means that the ways we experience language are significantly altered. So you're not like an oral tradition where you're carrying the mores and social habits by virtue of the poetry, as with Homer's texts. But with a literary tradition, obviously poetry is going to have a laudified situation, it's not going to be a different act, just a different transmission. I don't feel that it's anachronistic, but the definitions of it have become very restricting. There'd be no real contest as to whether Bob Dylan is a poet. Well, any poet in the world can tell you he's a poet, whether you include him in a university course or not.

Literary criticism, you have said, is naive and inarticulate. At university we're conned into believing it has something to say.

Well, it does, I just wish it would get its act together a little more completely! The critical ways of measuring a piece of poetry or prose are really very inarticulate. They either repeat the story like you're back in fourth grade or something, - you tell the story and then you tell whether you liked it.

But critics don't do that, they just say 'It's awful', not that they thought it was awful. They're purveyors of a taste, you dig. Like you look in the magazines to see what the styles are this fall - they're doing the same trip. By and large they're hustlers, leaning on the poet, being dragged along like some national event. The readers are the great people, who really love reading. Obviously a writer lives for him Critics are impeding the situation, putting all these false dimensions on the situation. I dislike some of them in fact I hate some of them.

Some people might say - Why aren't you writing sonnets, why aren't you using Keatsian adjectives...

I didn't know any. Those modes of saying things I dearly love, but I felt they were physically and socially inappropriate - I couldn't use them with any grace. So I tried to discover what would feel good, comfortable - doing it the other way I always felt phoney, pretentious, inacurate to the feeling.

I don't particularly like the place you arrive in a sonnet, a conclusion so systematised in structure. The two great sonneters were E.E. Cummings and Ted Berrigan. The kinds of sonnets I do like are those which end but you're not sure if you're really there.

What's your image of yourself as a poet?

I like myself - it really helps. I think being a teacher gave me a kind of simple social confidence. When you're travelling primarily alone and you think you're full of shit, obviously it's not going to be of any use to you - 'Gee, they'll hate me tonight'.

Why do you think people read your poems?

Not because people have told them to, like teachers. There s one kind of emotional factual circumstance, especially in the earlier poems, which has to do with the particular situation in which one is human. A friend of mine found that 'For Love' became an absolute vocabulary for his own feelings, he found that this text became dear to him as an emotional register of his own person But you see, I don't write about things the way Lovell does.

When I read your poetry I can't articulate what I get from it but I find I'm sharing in an emotion.

You can say 'What's that tree doing there?' - 'Well, it's planted for shade'. That's a sufficient answer, but it's no way to do with what's happening.