THE ROBERT CREELEY READING AT LAWRENCE UNIVERSITY 1-27-05

Mary and I went to Appleton

last night and had supper at Taste of Thai on College Avenue with our friends Mike and Susan. Mike was my first room-mate in college many long years ago; we still try to get together a couple times a year. Mike and Susan live only a few blocks from the Lawrence University campus and had alerted us that Robert Creeley would be reading there.

The small auditorium was packed, all 200 seats filled, people standing along the wall at the back.

Already when Creeley walked out on stage, I knew this: when your heroes are 78 years old, you are probably 57 already.

The reading was more sober and somber than I had expected. Of course, going in I was pretty sure that not even Creeley could do full justice to his poems reading them aloud: they dance on the page; it is more difficult to get them to dance in the air. In addition, while the effort was marked by Creeley's extreme personal humility in manner, there was also a certain sadness in his demeanor.

And how could you tell he had stopped telling a story and started to read the poem? His voice didn't quaver reading the poem; it took on clarity and strength. The poems were more muscular than the talking, they came from a more visceral place. When he was talking, the words tumbled down before him. With the poems, his words rose; they ascended.

Some of what Creeley said; some of it prose, some poetry:

"Coming from New England, where everyone is wary of pleasure," Creeley said, "it takes some time to realize that happiness is its own reward."

"You make what you can of life," he said. "I'm 78 years old. As my mother would say, 'This is it. This is what you're going to get.'"

"Words carry all this freight, this tone," he said. "One thinks he is saying something."

"I hope it hasn't been a lifetime of solipsistic introspection," he said of his life. "What does it mean to be this thing in this place? I've spent a lifetime trying to understand."

"If we examine its Latin roots," he said, "a world is the experience of a human life."

"In your 20s and 30s," Creeley said, "the body you put to bed is pretty much the body you wake up with in the morning. In your 50s, that starts to change - the eyes, your hearing. As Robert Duncan says, in old age your body again becomes 'phenomenal,' just as it was in your adolescence. No one seems to talk about that much. I don't know why. It's as interesting as adolescence."

In the poem "Age" he noted: "The world is a round but diminishing ball."

Speaking of old age, he once asked some students in Poland, "What do you think is going to happen to you?" The students were sure they wouldn't be hard of hearing, wouldn't smell of stale urine. But they will. That's how we all end up. "I'm not simply trying to depress you tonight," Creeley said, "but with luck I will."

Obsessing about death? "You'll die anyway," he said, "you don't need to push."

Creeley spoke of Mrs. Peary of Massachussets "who never felt poor until she was given charity by the women of the Women's Club as the recipient of their annual good deed."

He remembered an Allen Ginsberg poem, in which someone asks God "How could you let the world get to be such a mess?" God responds: "I did the best I could."

"I cannot believe age is easy for anyone," he said.

What makes art real, he mused. "Is that a real poem?" he wondered. I always remember that it was Creeley who was asked by a student: "Is that a real poem, or did you just make it up?"

"In writing," he said, "what I thought to say gets overwritten by what I say."

Creeley spoke of his friend, John Wieners: "When you are a poet as he was, you have no confusion." I think he was talking about the man's passion.

This was in a poem: "There is music in pain."

"I'm going to end with one final one," Creeley said, "and then I can sit down. I was going to put the poem in my last book, but forgot about it. It had been in a magazine and I lost it. The poem had two endings. This one isn't the ending I want. Let me find the other one. Oh, I seem to have given it away. Here, this is the draft that was rejected." And that's what he read.

"My life, I wonder what it has meant.... Each physical moment, passing, passing.... I think I no longer know or care."

"Okey doke," he said, and walked off the stage.

The applause was rousing and sustained. I hope when I am 78 years old, I am as humble and holy as Creeley.

Comments

[beth]

Wish I'd been there. I don't know Creeley but sounds like I'd like his work and like him. Especially resonant were ""Coming from New England, where everyone is wary of pleasure..." (uh-huh) and the bit about the body in adolescence and the body as it ages - and how the latter is just as interesting. I think this is a helpful idea that will stick; I'm grateful to him and to you for it.

[Tom Montag]

Yeah, and it's not just the New Englanders who are wary of pleasure; there's some of that out here in the middlewest, too.

The notion about the connection between the old man's body and the adolescent's actually comes from Robert Duncan, whom Creeley credited in his talk. Yeah, it's not far off for me, when waking up each day will be its own adventure.

[Richard Robohm]

I learned this first day of National Poetry Month that Robert Creeley died on Wednesday. Looking for a favorite poem "I Know a Man," I stumbled over your page and a description of Creeley's January reading at Lawrence U. It was a comfort and pleasure to read your notes on his presentation.

[Tom Montag]

Richard--My wife and I were a little stunned to hear the news of Creeley's death. He looked vigorous enough when we saw him. We took some solace in the fact that - after many years of admiring him at a distance - we got to see him up close. We will be a little poorer for his loss. Thanks for stopping.