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Robert Creeley has published more than sixty books of poetry in the United States and abroad, including If I Were Writing This (New Directions, 2003), Just in Time: Poems 1984-1994 (2001), Life & Death (1998), Echoes (1994), Selected Poems 1945-1990 (1991), Memory Gardens (1986), Mirrors (1983), The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1945-1975 (1982), Later (1979), The Finger (1968), and For Love: Poems 1950-1960 (1962). He is also the author of a novel, The Island (1963), a collection of short stories, The Gold Diggers and Other Stories (1965), and more than a dozen books of prose, essays, and interviews. He has also edited such books as Charles Olson's Selected Poems (1993), The Essential Burns (1989), and Whitman: Selected Poems (1973). His honors include the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award, the Frost Medal, the Shelley Memorial Award, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Rockefeller Foundation grant, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation. He served as New York State Poet from 1989 to 1991 and was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 1999.
Interviewer: John Amen
JA: You've been writing and publishing for decades. Have there been particular poems or books (of your own) that, for you, have represented significant milestones? Do you have favorites among the poems or books you've written? And, why do these particular works stand out for you?
RC: I do, but they are apt to shift from day to day, both books and poems. The first substantial book I published, For Love, stays a favorite, and then Pieces. And so on-- it's like trying to choose among children!
JA: You've been involved in one way or another with Buddhism for many years (teaching at Naropa, etc.). How has that affected your writing? And, more importantly perhaps, what has it contributed to your life?
RC: Actually, although I've had some very dear friends who were Buddhist--Phil Whalen, Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg--I never was particularly engaged with it. I think the tacit rules involved put me off, having grown up in a Puritan habit, which had all too many "rules" as it was. I just didn't want more "things to do today" if I could help it.
JA: I was wondering if you could speak a little about the relative obscurity of poetry. I mean, throughout the ages various poets have made it a goal to connect more with the mainstream; all said and done, at least in modern times, this has not really happened. What is it about poetry that renders it, in terms of popularity, so obscure?
RC: I know it's been said a lot, but once more can't hurt; that is, there are many modes and manners of poetry, and the obscurity you speak of has to do with that most familiar to those using an academic frame or definition of what "poetry" is supposed to be. Think of obvious parallels with music, i.e., there are composers whose work frustrates the interest of the public and those who very much attract it. It's all "music," and it all has its particular uses and occasions. For example, I'd think of Bob Dylan as having written a substantial amount of poetry. Likewise there's dear Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who seems happily to be understood, and I see Garrison Keillor says "Thank you!" on the back cover of his book just now published. Poetry has not been obscure for all that long, really. In many cultures it's been both the record and the manifest of the culture's habits and history. When poetry got relegated to the classroom, sometime at the turn of the last century, as you note, then a lot of public interest dropped away. My grandmother, in contrast, could recite poems by the hour sans any instruction in their circumstance whatsoever.
JA: You've taught writing for many years. Is teaching an inspiring practice for you? Do you experience realizations and breakthroughs as a result of teaching; are there things that occur in the classroom that inspire your own writing?
RC: Again, I fear there's a misunderstanding in that I've very rarely taught writing in the sense implied; i.e., workshops, etc. In the thirty-seven years I taught at the University at Buffalo, my courses were almost without exception literature courses. Here at Brown, although I'm in the faculty of the Program in the Literary Arts, the seminars I've taught the past two semesters and will teach this fall are all centered on literature, with aspects of education and the visual arts contingent. Otherwise I love teaching-- here I am still doing it at seventy-eight! More importantly, I've taught every grade except the sixth all the way from first grade through graduate school. It's teaching itself which delights me, not the so-called "subject." Teaching is a very particular way of relating to another person or persons. "Oh fathers and teachers..." says Whitman.
JA: You contributed, I believe, to the Poets Against the War anthology. Could you speak a little about your motivations for doing so? And, do you think poets, or an anthology such as that, can make a difference in political matters?
RC: Here is the poem:
Ground Zero
What's after or before
seems a dull locus now
as if there ever could be more
or less of what there is,
a life lived just because
it is a life if nothing more.
The street goes by the door
just like it did before.
Years after I am dead,
there will be someone here instead
perhaps to open it,
look out to see what's there--
even if nothing is,
or ever was,
or somehow all got lost.
Persist, go on, believe.
Dreams may be all we have,
whatever one believe
of worlds wherever they are--
with people waiting there
will know us when we come
when all the strife is over,
all the sad battles lost or won,
all turned to dust.
I think any gesture, any act, any attitude, any commitment, which can oppose in any manner whatsoever the brutal conduct of our present administration and the commitment to war as a solution more generally, needs to be taken and/or supported. I felt that way in the Vietnam War days-- I've felt it ever since I was an ambulance driver with the AFS in Burma in WWII. War is the most stupid and degrading of human resolutions. It just does not work, as I can testify from the seventy-eight years of life I've been given and would wish all others on earth might be equally permitted to have. People die-- killing them helps nothing.
JA: Could you speak a little about your involvement with the Black Mountain College? What did those days mean to you? What do you think the Black Mountain "movement" contributed to poetry?
RC: To begin, it's useful to realize how briefly I was there and at what time-- that is, from March into June 1954, and then for another three or so months beginning mid-summer 1955. I came very late and the college was already suffering badly from lack of funds and the general conservatism of the time.
But for me personally, as one says, it was an altogether transforming time, and the sense of myself I gained by being there, however drunk and despairing I often was, proved the turning point of my life. For a useful report of it all, I'd suggest Michael Rumaker's recently published Black Mountain days. He was a crucial student and is a continuing friend indeed.
As to the Black Mountain "movement" and poetry, if one values Denise Levertov (who was never there), Paul Blackburn (who was never there either), John Wieners, Robert Duncan, Charles Olson, Joel Oppenheimer, Ed Dorn and so on, then clearly it was useful. But remember such labels are only that-- like the "Imagists" or the "Lake Poets." They are best for indexing, not for discovering active connections.
JA: What is your take on the role of the internet in publishing? What are your feelings about online publishing? What do you think this "movement," if you will, is contributing to the world of literature?
RC: I very much enjoy and respect it, and have been participating in it for some years now. It seems to me an excellent means to the end of getting one's work where it can be got to simply. If you type my name into Google, you'll quickly see what I am talking about.
JA: What is something related to writing or the writing process with which you still struggle? I mean, after all these years of writing, what is something that still poses difficulty for you?
RC: I think with poetry one's always starting each time at the beginning, so to speak; there's no simple assurance that this time it will work. Because poetry is so addressed to what one's trying to find, trying to find as feeling, as fact of something, as a presence as yet inchoate and only sensed, there's no surety that "practice makes perfect" or much of anything at all, except for flexibility and alertness and a knowledge of general ways and means. In other words, in poetry, you don't "get better," you just, with luck, keep going. After all these years, as you say, I have no problem with that-- but it's always a demand, call it, I have to deal with. In fact, it's what makes clear I'm setting out into a territory I haven't reduced simply to habits.
JA: Could you comment a little, if you're comfortable doing so, on what seems to me to be a hyper-conservative movement in this country. I mean, there's talk about overturning Roe vs. Wade. There are "anti-terrorist" laws that potentially undermine general rights of privacy. And, the thing is, this doesn't seem to be just the current administration's stance; a majority of people, according to various poles, seems, basically, to be in agreement with moving in these directions. In your mind, what's going on here?
RC: I cannot fathom why it is people are so agreeable to being led in such a contemptuous manner, as though a woman had no rights as to her own body, as though an abstract rule had right to enter my life at any time of the day or night with no need for legitimacy, except that it claims for itself, no "rights of the accused," etc. It seems to me terrifying, that the public good has been so overwritten, that greed and apparent corruption so simply triumph, and that there is so little protest. The lies evident, literally, seem not to matter to the general public-- unless one is missing something entirely. I was heartened to see the mass of Israelis protesting the neo-conservatives there, as I was by the recent massing of women in Washington. More!
JA: In America we have deplorable voter turn-out; something like 30 per cent, I believe. Why do you think so many people are estranged from the American political process? Why, quite simply, do most people in this country not vote?
RC: Well, one obvious reason would be that such voting does not seem to be the authority proposed-- as in the instance of the last election, which all evidence (along with well-informed opinion and reporting, such as the BBC's) would make clear Gore won. In Buffalo, last election, the mayor ran unopposed by anyone; people just don't believe that voting serves more than a hoax, sadly. Elections are so much the result of media hype, money, you name it, that they've lost the authority they were once assumed to have.
JA: What kinds of projects are you currently working on? What are some themes you find yourself dealing with now that didn't concern you as much at earlier times in your life?
RC: None particularly, other than what comes to hand. Aging is certainly a "theme" I've come to, which even the poems of my thirties, with their now and then "When I have fears that I may cease to be" vibes, really didn't touch. Being old is very different than thinking about being old. It's a state like Maine or happiness. You'll know it when you get there but not before.
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