WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:00.960 align:middle line:90% Thank you, Gail. 00:00:00.960 --> 00:00:03.900 align:middle line:84% Thank you Tenney and others at POG, 00:00:03.900 --> 00:00:06.540 align:middle line:84% and all of you who have come here. 00:00:06.540 --> 00:00:09.570 align:middle line:84% From the 1950s to the present, Robert Creeley 00:00:09.570 --> 00:00:12.780 align:middle line:84% has been a mainstay in American poetry, 00:00:12.780 --> 00:00:16.740 align:middle line:84% as a poet, as a teacher at Black Mountain College in the 50s, 00:00:16.740 --> 00:00:20.160 align:middle line:84% for the last couple of decades at the State University of New 00:00:20.160 --> 00:00:22.470 align:middle line:84% York at Buffalo, where he has helped 00:00:22.470 --> 00:00:27.060 align:middle line:84% found an amazing and important poetics program. 00:00:27.060 --> 00:00:32.670 align:middle line:84% He, in conjunction with Charles Olson and others, 00:00:32.670 --> 00:00:35.520 align:middle line:84% articulated a poetics which is still 00:00:35.520 --> 00:00:38.550 align:middle line:90% a powerful force to many of us. 00:00:38.550 --> 00:00:41.490 align:middle line:84% In the poem, A Pattern, Robert Creeley writes-- 00:00:41.490 --> 00:00:49.020 align:middle line:84% I'm sorry, The Pattern, that, "As soon as I speak, I speaks." 00:00:49.020 --> 00:00:53.850 align:middle line:84% He thereby registers at once the act of being a self 00:00:53.850 --> 00:00:58.800 align:middle line:84% and of being outside oneself, or beside oneself. 00:00:58.800 --> 00:01:01.260 align:middle line:84% Particularly in speech, which I take here 00:01:01.260 --> 00:01:05.400 align:middle line:84% to be the performative act of language that includes poetry, 00:01:05.400 --> 00:01:10.200 align:middle line:84% one is speaking and one is spoken. 00:01:10.200 --> 00:01:13.260 align:middle line:84% The complications of being human are immense, 00:01:13.260 --> 00:01:17.250 align:middle line:84% and no one registers this fact more specifically 00:01:17.250 --> 00:01:20.235 align:middle line:84% or more emotionally than Robert Creeley. 00:01:20.235 --> 00:01:23.220 align:middle line:84% He embraces all of the theory and philosophy 00:01:23.220 --> 00:01:25.320 align:middle line:84% of the last century and continuing, 00:01:25.320 --> 00:01:28.800 align:middle line:84% that calls into question our individuality, who we are 00:01:28.800 --> 00:01:30.480 align:middle line:90% and what we are. 00:01:30.480 --> 00:01:33.360 align:middle line:84% And he does so not so much by thinking it-- 00:01:33.360 --> 00:01:35.550 align:middle line:90% though he can do this too-- 00:01:35.550 --> 00:01:37.440 align:middle line:90% as by feeling it. 00:01:37.440 --> 00:01:39.780 align:middle line:84% And feeling it in relation to others-- 00:01:39.780 --> 00:01:45.120 align:middle line:84% or to the other, as in, In London, where he writes, 00:01:45.120 --> 00:01:48.820 align:middle line:90% "You will never be here again. 00:01:48.820 --> 00:01:53.250 align:middle line:84% You will never see again what you now see. 00:01:53.250 --> 00:01:58.530 align:middle line:84% You, the euphemistic I speaks always, always 00:01:58.530 --> 00:02:03.180 align:middle line:90% wanting the you to be here." 00:02:03.180 --> 00:02:06.900 align:middle line:84% By registering this fact of human incompleteness, as well 00:02:06.900 --> 00:02:09.759 align:middle line:84% as overload, as an emotional fact, 00:02:09.759 --> 00:02:14.820 align:middle line:84% he takes a lead from Pound's dictum, "Only emotion endures." 00:02:14.820 --> 00:02:18.480 align:middle line:84% Yet because the feeling is found in the tension of the line, 00:02:18.480 --> 00:02:21.270 align:middle line:84% in the breaks, and what clearly is called, 00:02:21.270 --> 00:02:24.510 align:middle line:84% "finding one's measure," in his ability 00:02:24.510 --> 00:02:28.830 align:middle line:84% to make every edge of the sound in words articulate, 00:02:28.830 --> 00:02:32.490 align:middle line:84% he discovers, for in his way, to write 00:02:32.490 --> 00:02:37.890 align:middle line:84% is to discover, that emotion in poetry, as his elder Louis 00:02:37.890 --> 00:02:41.340 align:middle line:84% Zukofsky said, is a matter of cadence, 00:02:41.340 --> 00:02:46.290 align:middle line:84% or of the total articulation of the sound of the poem. 00:02:46.290 --> 00:02:49.950 align:middle line:84% In recent poems, the concern that the person causes Creeley 00:02:49.950 --> 00:02:54.060 align:middle line:84% to look back at past years, past friends, past selves, 00:02:54.060 --> 00:02:58.440 align:middle line:84% and ask of face bent in mirror, why does it 00:02:58.440 --> 00:03:04.150 align:middle line:84% stay there, what's become of person who was here. 00:03:04.150 --> 00:03:06.270 align:middle line:84% In other words, he still shares with us 00:03:06.270 --> 00:03:10.890 align:middle line:84% a wonder at the moment, a wonder at the fact of being, 00:03:10.890 --> 00:03:13.950 align:middle line:90% at what happens. 00:03:13.950 --> 00:03:18.930 align:middle line:84% 24 years ago, as a part of my entry into a life in poetry 00:03:18.930 --> 00:03:20.910 align:middle line:84% and book making, I was privileged to spend 00:03:20.910 --> 00:03:24.630 align:middle line:84% a week at a poetry festival in honor of Charles Olson, 00:03:24.630 --> 00:03:28.230 align:middle line:84% in the company of Robert Creeley and others. 00:03:28.230 --> 00:03:30.910 align:middle line:84% If one's entry into poetry is even 00:03:30.910 --> 00:03:34.020 align:middle line:84% in part through Robert Creeley, then before one exits, 00:03:34.020 --> 00:03:37.090 align:middle line:84% there's likely to be substantial encounter with others, 00:03:37.090 --> 00:03:43.620 align:middle line:84% including Olson, Duncan, Dorn, Zukofsky, HD, Dickinson, Wyatt, 00:03:43.620 --> 00:03:46.380 align:middle line:84% philosophers such as Wittgenstein. 00:03:46.380 --> 00:03:50.040 align:middle line:84% Because this is a poetry that seeks meaning as relation, 00:03:50.040 --> 00:03:52.500 align:middle line:90% a speech that seeks company. 00:03:52.500 --> 00:03:56.250 align:middle line:84% And in taking us through poetry and more, 00:03:56.250 --> 00:03:59.790 align:middle line:84% Creeley brings a world and truly becomes 00:03:59.790 --> 00:04:03.900 align:middle line:84% what Olson called him, "a figure of output." 00:04:03.900 --> 00:04:06.480 align:middle line:84% And he also brings us back to ourselves 00:04:06.480 --> 00:04:10.170 align:middle line:84% as he writes at the end of this new book, Yesterdays. 00:04:10.170 --> 00:04:15.000 align:middle line:84% Because it's when all thoughts occur, to say again, 00:04:15.000 --> 00:04:18.029 align:middle line:90% were where we were. 00:04:18.029 --> 00:04:20.220 align:middle line:84% We're here in this place because of the University 00:04:20.220 --> 00:04:22.290 align:middle line:90% of Arizona's Poetry Center. 00:04:22.290 --> 00:04:23.970 align:middle line:84% And I know, that those great people 00:04:23.970 --> 00:04:25.800 align:middle line:84% who keep that center going and do it 00:04:25.800 --> 00:04:30.000 align:middle line:84% so well know fully that the real center and being of poetry 00:04:30.000 --> 00:04:32.430 align:middle line:90% is the act of the poet. 00:04:32.430 --> 00:04:34.890 align:middle line:84% Absolutely no one I know accomplishes 00:04:34.890 --> 00:04:38.610 align:middle line:84% that act with more intensity and more generosity 00:04:38.610 --> 00:04:40.620 align:middle line:90% than Robert Creeley. 00:04:40.620 --> 00:04:44.700 align:middle line:84% He once wrote in introducing Ed Dorn's marvelous poems 00:04:44.700 --> 00:04:48.480 align:middle line:84% a preface for Ed Dorn's poems, "not even a sunrise could quite 00:04:48.480 --> 00:04:49.880 align:middle line:90% manage that." 00:04:49.880 --> 00:04:53.010 align:middle line:84% It is something of what I feel tonight, 00:04:53.010 --> 00:04:56.780 align:middle line:84% as I ask you to please help me welcome Robert Creeley. 00:04:56.780 --> 00:05:01.000 align:middle line:90%