creeley again

poetry workshop

Actually, here's a Creeley poem, posted by someone on an email list I'm on:


AS IF

As if a feeling, come from nought,
Suspended time in fascinated concentration,
So that all the world therein became
Of that necessity its own reward-

I lifted to mind a piece
Of bright blue air and then another.
Then clouds in fluffy substance floated by.
Below I felt a lake of azure waited.

I cried, Here, here I am -- the only place I'll ever be...
Whether it made a common sense or found a world,
Years flood their gate, the company dispersed.
This person still is me.



Creeley was at Buffalo when I spent a couple of months there on my first sabbatical. He had been a legendary bad boy of poetry--at least as regards women and drugs--in his youth, but in his old age, he was an oddly mixed character. He was capable of meanness, yes, but also of great humanity. His readings were remarkable for the way in which he honored enjambments by pausing as he arrived at them, so that the effect was staccato, like the jazz music he loved.
He lived in an old renovated firehouse in Buffalo, with a beautiful garden.
His 75th birthday celebration occured while I was there, though not anywhere near his birthday. He seemed sad and angry to be old, but the occasion was (mostly) a joyous one. Amiri Baraka, an old friend, arrived a day late to sing (literally) some of his poems, and John Ashbery also read (about dwarves on a dashboard, as I recall).

Anyway, an important passing.

aloha, Susan