A Note on Robert Creeley, New England, and “This”
Abstract
The novelist Mark Jacobs tells us that one evening as he and Robert Creeley were leaving a restaurant in İzmir, they passed “the statue of Atatürk. [Creeley] raised his finger in a sign of approbation that was almost a blessing and told me, ‘This.’ One of my graven memories is the look on his face when he said it, a mix of complicity and delight” Jacobs 5 . That moment and gesture in Izmir seem to me pure New England, a recognition of present fact which is at the center of what it means to be a “Yankee” as well as the generative core of Creeley’s work— i.e., a capacity to live in the here and now with all its multiple complexities that in turn can make a New England sensibility, wherever transported, delight in, and be complicit with, what it encounters.
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References
- Clark, Tom. Robert Creeley and the Genius of the American Common Place Together with the Poet’s Own “Autobiography”. New York: New Directions, 1993.
- Creeley, Robert. “The Pool,” The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley: 1945-1975. Berkeley: U of California P, 1982.
- Holley, Joe. “Robert Creeley, 78; Postmodern Poet, Professor.” Washington Post. Friday, April 1, 2005. P. B06. 16 July 2009 . Jacobs, Mark. “What Creeley Knew.” Talisman: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics. 36/37 (Summer/Fall 2008): 5-8.
- Lowell, James Russell. My Study Windows. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1871. Thoreau, David Henry. Walden: A Fully Annotated Edition. Ed. Jeffrey S. Cramer. New Haven: Yale UP, 2004.