[Wgcp-whc] WGCP--Creeley minutes, year wrap-up

[richard.deming at yale.edu]

4/25/05

Dear Group,

Last Friday, The Working Group in Contemporary Poetry and Poetics met
for its last session of the 2004-2005 academic year.  Although there
seems to be some interest in having the group meet periodically over the
summer (more on that at the end of the minutes), this seems like the
appropriate moment for the group to extend its thanks to its two primary
sponsors, the Whitney Humanities Center and the Beinecke Library.  Both
institutions have given financial, intellectual, and moral support and
we thank them and their staff and in particular Maria Menocal, Director
of the WHC and Frank Turner, Director of the Beinecke.

On April 22, the group met to discuss the work of Robert Creeley, who
died on March 20.  We began with a listening to an excerpt from his
reading at the Beinecke (which occurred in November of 2003) and then
briefly historicized his work. Creeley serves as bridge from the
Williams/Pound wing of high Modernism (he was a long distant mentee of
both) to the present moment of contemporary poetry.  He can be linked to
such seminal movements as Black Mountain School (with Charles Olson),
the New American Poetry (which acquires its name from Donald Allen’s
landmark anthology), the Beats, the New York School, and he even was an
advocate for the Language poets. Also, he attended Harvard at the same
time as John Ashbery, Robert Bly, Donald Hall, Kenneth Koch, and others.
Given Creeley’s insistence on community and what he referred to as “the
company” it is necessary to mention his relationships to other poets. 
For a good thumbnail section see the Guardian’s Obituary of Creeley 
http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,,1452159,00.html.

We also, then glanced, at the trajectory of his work—from the torturous,
complex self-consciousness of the dense early lyrics (best represented
in For Love, one of the most important collections of poetry in post-war
American poetry) to the more expansive meditations of the more recent
work (see the most recent collection, If I Were Writing This
from 2003).
 In these recent poems Creeley moved to a recurring use of rhyme, though
he still otherwise resisted the conventions of more traditional lyrics.

After listening to the excerpt and some contextualizing the work, we
began discussing Creeley’s dictum “Form is never more than an extension
of content” (cited in Olson’s essay “projective verse” and originally
occurring in letter Creeley wrote to Olson), which went on to serve
almost axiomatically.  We noted how on the one hand that this was itself
a revision of the Modernist credo “form is content.”  We noted the
possibility of an interesting irony of Creeley’s statement and the fact
that he rarely revised, dashing of some of his most famous poems (“I
Know a Man,”  “The Warning” and others) all at once.  The more we talked
about the claim, the more we felt it was indeed a complex idea.  There
is a sense in which content and form are tied but perhaps content has a
certain kind of primacy in this equation.  We left the discussion at the
possible reading that he meant form is not imposed content as in that
equation the form has a certain a priori authority (in other words, in
such a situation—arguably—the poet becomes a “content provider” for the
pre-existing forms).  This interested in this might consult Creeley’s
interview with Linda Wagner (found in Creeley’s Tales out of School:
Selected Interviews) I would now almost amend the statement to say,
"Form is what happens." It's the fact of things in the world, however
they are. So that form in that way is simply the presence of any thing. 
What I was trying then to make clear was that I felt that form—if
removed from that kind of intimacy—became something static and
assumptional. I felt that the way a thing was said
would intimately declare what was being said, and so there-fore form was
never more than an extension of what it was saying” (30).

We moved to a more specific discussion of Creeley’s poems “The Warning,”
 “A Form of Adaptation,” (both from For Love) “Numbers” (the sequence
written in collaboration with Robert Indiana- and found in the
collection Pieces) and “Clemente’s Images” (likewise a collaboration
with Francesco Clemente).  We noted that in his weaker poems (such as,
especially from the earlier work, the point of view could be
self-aggrandizing or egomaniacal, indulgent, and even misogynistic.  In
the stronger poems, however, that self-consciousness (and at times a
paradoxical lack of self-consciousness in the form of moral judgment)
attains an emotional complexity that acts in counter to the often
monumental authority of the High Moderns or poets such as Frost or even
Auden. In this sense, the speaker of Creeley’s poems becomes a profound
and comic (even absurd) figure. 

The aspect of lyric affect became on element of our discussing Creeley’s
work as the issue of whether or not this was poetry of ideas and
consciousness or a poetry of more or less direct emotional intimacy.
This becomes especially poignant in considering “Numbers” or “Clemente’s
Images,” the end being either a meditation on numbers themselves or an
invocation of the phenomenological content of numbers or an exercise in
discerning associative properties of numbers (Indiana’s pop art were
paintings of numbers 1-0 and can be seen by searching through
http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/indiana_robert.html).  For examples
of Clemente’s paintings (though not necessarily the ones Creeley is
responding to one can start looking at
http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/clemente_francesco.htmlTalking
about Creeley’s work with these two painters, we raised the additional
question of what constitutes collaboration as distinct from ekphrasis by
a poet and painter that don’t work together exactly but in conversation.
 Are the poems part of that process or are they ekphrastic?   We
concluded by listening to Creeley’s reading of “Clemente’s Images” where
the rhymes that he had turned to seemed more foregrounded and allowed
for a recurring structure reminiscent of the poems that one first learns
by heart (such as nursery rhymes) and which allow for surprising
associations and linguistic analogies that reveal “before unapprehended
relations.”  For instance, one poem ends with the rhyme of “worship” and
“warship.”   Rather than a return to such devices, this seemed like
another extension of Creeley’s exploration of form.  Moreover, there was
the sense that this was a “discovered” form rather than a formal
constraint that he necessarily placed on his work.  Creeley was often
known to cite Louis Zukofsky statement of poetics being “lower limit
speech, upper limit music” and that the rhyme still participated in that
principle of composition.  

This was one of our longest meetings and seemed like it was apt to just
continue. We did wrap up the discussion and there was a motion that we
meet a few times over the summer, perhaps once every three weeks, for
anyone interested.  There was a proposal that the first summer meeting
should occur June 1.  Specifics in terms of that meeting will be
forthcoming.

Some have inquired about the possibility of obtaining a full set of the
minutes.  If people e-mail me a request, I can send these as a word
document (and I can send last year’s as well).  I’ll also arrange to
have a few copies available at our usual pick up spot at the WHC.  In
any event, the minutes are all archived via listserv and are available
that way as well.

A thanks to all local and at large members (there are alomost 70 people
on our group listserv) for making this year’s installment of the Working
Group in Poetics such a success.  There are big plans afoot for next
year and when things are more in place and when the new academic year
starts out we’re apt to have some good events and discussions in place.
 Otherwise a good, productive, restorative summer to all!

“The Working Group in Contemporary Poetry and Poetics meets every other
Friday at 1:45 PM in room 116 at the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale
University to discuss problems and issues of contemporary poetry within
international alternative and /or avant-garde traditions of lyric
poetry. All are welcome to attend.”  

---R. Deming, group secretary


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