Creeley’s poems relentless, human Reflection, brevity mark newest book

IF I WERE WRITING THIS, by Robert Creeley, New Directions Books, 2003, 104 pages, hardcover, $21.95.

For five decades, Robert Creeley has sounded a poetic voice of as much intelligence and common sense as any American poet. His intensely honest revelations about the qualities of emotional experience, and how they are bonded to language, have gained him an international reputation as one of our best-loved and most reliably human poets. His most recent collection of poems, “If I Were Writing This,” verifies his standing.

Creeley once said in conversation that, although he grew up in Massachusetts, he felt great kinship with Maine people, who prefer to “say as little as possible as often as possible.” To this purpose he has over the years spent a great deal of time here, as a visiting faculty member at the University of Maine and in a house on the midcoast, cultivating with endless fascinating talk the idea that the less said, the better. A result of this approach is his unrelenting effort to find the simplest way to express bewilderingly complex experiences, and a hallmark of his poetry is brevity – short lines, short stanzas.

In “If I Were Writing This,” Creeley at 76 brings brevity to bear again on his experiences of age, surroundings, the fast-approaching end of life, and the peculiar qualities personal memories take on. He bids farewell, as we say, with characteristic fondness to close personal friends who were some of our most influential poets, including Allen Ginsberg. “For Gregory Corso” opens simply:

I’ll miss you,

who did better than I did

at keeping the faith of poets,

staying true.

An unusual number of poems in this book are dedicated to individuals, and many directly address family members and friends. “Yesterdays” explicitly recounts events long past but vivid in mind. “Emptiness” crystallizes the welter of feelings associated with the end of a sister’s life, occurring in much-loved Maine. Throughout the book, Creeley’s highly concentrated language discloses the intensity with which he felt the Beat ’50s, the tumultuous ’60s, and the unsettling settling of ’80s and ’90s middle America.

From the 1940s on, Creeley’s poems have never been what you’d call light reading, and it’s still true of “If I Were Writing This.” But this collection has the advantage of an expansive backdrop – most of Creeley’s life – and there’s a sense he feels a sort of freedom, now, to approach not only complexity with simplicity, but also simplicity with simplicity. And so in this book densities of feeling and language are powerfully interwoven with homespun, perfectly real sentiments, and even with what used to be called “wisdom” (which the poet reveals he has by denying, altogether believably, that he has it).

“If I Were Writing This” is no doubt a kind of general farewell, and while I imagine there’s more yet to come, Creeley in this book gives us a moving view from the edge. As always.

Dana Wilde is a Bangor Daily News copy desk editor and English instructor at the University of Maine. He can be reached at dana.wilde@umit.maine.edu.