Body, Breath, World: Robert Creeley’s Phenomenological Poetics

Year 2008, Issue: 27, 83 - 95, 01.04.2008

Gabrielle T. Raymond

Abstract

In “Massachusetts” Robert Creeley writes, “You place yourself in / such relation, you hear / everything that’s said” Selected Poems l 4-6 . To discuss Robert Creeley’s poetics, consider the poet and poem in relationship, each an object in an object-filled world. Now add the reader. Since the poem is experienced through our bodies and because our bodies are never in stasis, the poem is also never in stasis. The creative act is not a singular act but an interrelated acting, thus the poem becomes an experiencing. Creeley takes into account the movement of a corporeal, temporal artist through a corporeal, temporal world, a world wherein the artist is an object acting in relation to other objects. As writes Charles Olson in Human Universe and Other Essays 1967 , “It is a matter, finally, of OBJECTS, what they are, what they are inside a poem, how they got there, and, once there, how they are to be used” 20 . It is the relationships between the world, poet, poem, reader, and the words themselves, that charge Creeley’s work. Speaking phenomenologically, it is therefore through these relationships that Creeley has access to the order of the world.

Keywords

Body, Breath, Robert Creeley