WEBVTT

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Thank you, Gail.

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Thank you Tenney
and others at POG,

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and all of you who
have come here.

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From the 1950s to the
present, Robert Creeley

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has been a mainstay
in American poetry,

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as a poet, as a teacher at Black
Mountain College in the 50s,

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for the last couple of decades
at the State University of New

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York at Buffalo,
where he has helped

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found an amazing and
important poetics program.

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He, in conjunction with
Charles Olson and others,

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articulated a poetics
which is still

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a powerful force to many of us.

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In the poem, A Pattern,
Robert Creeley writes--

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I'm sorry, The Pattern, that,
"As soon as I speak, I speaks."

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He thereby registers at
once the act of being a self

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and of being outside
oneself, or beside oneself.

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Particularly in speech,
which I take here

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to be the performative act of
language that includes poetry,

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one is speaking
and one is spoken.

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The complications of
being human are immense,

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and no one registers this
fact more specifically

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or more emotionally
than Robert Creeley.

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He embraces all of the
theory and philosophy

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of the last century
and continuing,

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that calls into question our
individuality, who we are

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and what we are.

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And he does so not so
much by thinking it--

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though he can do this too--

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as by feeling it.

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And feeling it in
relation to others--

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or to the other, as in, In
London, where he writes,

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"You will never be here again.

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You will never see
again what you now see.

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You, the euphemistic I
speaks always, always

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wanting the you to be here."

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By registering this fact of
human incompleteness, as well

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as overload, as
an emotional fact,

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he takes a lead from Pound's
dictum, "Only emotion endures."

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Yet because the feeling is found
in the tension of the line,

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in the breaks, and
what clearly is called,

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"finding one's
measure," in his ability

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to make every edge of the
sound in words articulate,

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he discovers, for
in his way, to write

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is to discover, that emotion
in poetry, as his elder Louis

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Zukofsky said, is a
matter of cadence,

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or of the total articulation
of the sound of the poem.

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In recent poems, the concern
that the person causes Creeley

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to look back at past years,
past friends, past selves,

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and ask of face bent
in mirror, why does it

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stay there, what's become
of person who was here.

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In other words, he
still shares with us

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a wonder at the moment, a
wonder at the fact of being,

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at what happens.

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24 years ago, as a part of my
entry into a life in poetry

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and book making, I was
privileged to spend

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a week at a poetry festival
in honor of Charles Olson,

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in the company of Robert
Creeley and others.

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If one's entry
into poetry is even

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in part through Robert
Creeley, then before one exits,

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there's likely to be substantial
encounter with others,

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including Olson, Duncan, Dorn,
Zukofsky, HD, Dickinson, Wyatt,

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philosophers such
as Wittgenstein.

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Because this is a poetry that
seeks meaning as relation,

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a speech that seeks company.

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And in taking us
through poetry and more,

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Creeley brings a world
and truly becomes

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what Olson called him,
"a figure of output."

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And he also brings
us back to ourselves

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as he writes at the end of
this new book, Yesterdays.

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Because it's when all
thoughts occur, to say again,

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were where we were.

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We're here in this place
because of the University

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of Arizona's Poetry Center.

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And I know, that
those great people

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who keep that center
going and do it

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so well know fully that the
real center and being of poetry

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is the act of the poet.

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Absolutely no one
I know accomplishes

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that act with more intensity
and more generosity

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than Robert Creeley.

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He once wrote in introducing
Ed Dorn's marvelous poems

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a preface for Ed Dorn's poems,
"not even a sunrise could quite

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manage that."

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It is something of
what I feel tonight,

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as I ask you to please help
me welcome Robert Creeley.

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