Thank you, Gail.
Thank you Tenney and others at POG,
and all of you who have come here.
From the 1950s to the present, Robert Creeley
has been a mainstay in American poetry,
as a poet, as a teacher at Black Mountain College in the 50s,
for the last couple of decades at the State University of New
York at Buffalo, where he has helped
found an amazing and important poetics program.
He, in conjunction with Charles Olson and others,
articulated a poetics which is still
a powerful force to many of us.
In the poem, A Pattern, Robert Creeley writes--
I'm sorry, The Pattern, that, "As soon as I speak, I speaks."
He thereby registers at once the act of being a self
and of being outside oneself, or beside oneself.
Particularly in speech, which I take here
to be the performative act of language that includes poetry,
one is speaking and one is spoken.
The complications of being human are immense,
and no one registers this fact more specifically
or more emotionally than Robert Creeley.
He embraces all of the theory and philosophy
of the last century and continuing,
that calls into question our individuality, who we are
and what we are.
And he does so not so much by thinking it--
though he can do this too--
as by feeling it.
And feeling it in relation to others--
or to the other, as in, In London, where he writes,
"You will never be here again.
You will never see again what you now see.
You, the euphemistic I speaks always, always
wanting the you to be here."
By registering this fact of human incompleteness, as well
as overload, as an emotional fact,
he takes a lead from Pound's dictum, "Only emotion endures."
Yet because the feeling is found in the tension of the line,
in the breaks, and what clearly is called,
"finding one's measure," in his ability
to make every edge of the sound in words articulate,
he discovers, for in his way, to write
is to discover, that emotion in poetry, as his elder Louis
Zukofsky said, is a matter of cadence,
or of the total articulation of the sound of the poem.
In recent poems, the concern that the person causes Creeley
to look back at past years, past friends, past selves,
and ask of face bent in mirror, why does it
stay there, what's become of person who was here.
In other words, he still shares with us
a wonder at the moment, a wonder at the fact of being,
at what happens.
24 years ago, as a part of my entry into a life in poetry
and book making, I was privileged to spend
a week at a poetry festival in honor of Charles Olson,
in the company of Robert Creeley and others.
If one's entry into poetry is even
in part through Robert Creeley, then before one exits,
there's likely to be substantial encounter with others,
including Olson, Duncan, Dorn, Zukofsky, HD, Dickinson, Wyatt,
philosophers such as Wittgenstein.
Because this is a poetry that seeks meaning as relation,
a speech that seeks company.
And in taking us through poetry and more,
Creeley brings a world and truly becomes
what Olson called him, "a figure of output."
And he also brings us back to ourselves
as he writes at the end of this new book, Yesterdays.
Because it's when all thoughts occur, to say again,
were where we were.
We're here in this place because of the University
of Arizona's Poetry Center.
And I know, that those great people
who keep that center going and do it
so well know fully that the real center and being of poetry
is the act of the poet.
Absolutely no one I know accomplishes
that act with more intensity and more generosity
than Robert Creeley.
He once wrote in introducing Ed Dorn's marvelous poems
a preface for Ed Dorn's poems, "not even a sunrise could quite
manage that."
It is something of what I feel tonight,
as I ask you to please help me welcome Robert Creeley.