Small Spaces of Existence: Robert Creeley’s Poetry

Year 2008, Issue: 27, 59 - 70, 01.04.2008

Marie Weinel

Abstract

Robert Creeley’s poetry undertakes to examine the place occupied by an individual, both emotionally and physically, at a given instant. His work explores the notion that each person experiences the world around him or herself through distinctly personal sensations and perceptions and that, in this sense, we might all be considered to live within the confines of our unique “spaces” of consciousness and physical being. Creeley’s poems—crouched vulnerably within the smallest of literary spaces—are frequently as slight in poetic form as they are “slight” in their ostensible subject matter: the small world of the individual private life. Yet it is in this intimate arena, Creeley argues, that life is at its most personally significant. To make the dimensions of one life “actual” to others is, he enigmatically claims, “not an embarrassment, but love” A Quick Graph 34 . In his humane attentions to the small spaces of existence, Creeley magnifies his modest poetry into something of larger import; the domestic is challenged to be profound. Creeley’s poems thereby aspire to reach beyond the confines of their fragile forms and bring the small space of one man’s existence to the attention of others in the hope of achieving meaningful connection.

References

• Creeley, Robert. A Quick Graph. San Francisco: Four Seasons Foundation, 1970.
• ---. A Sense of Measure. London: Calder & Boyars, 1972.
• ---. The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley 1945-1975. Los Angeles: U of California P, 1982.
• ---. The Collected Essays of Robert Creeley. Berkeley: U of California P, 1989.
• Duncan, Robert. Selected Poems. Ed. Robert J. Bertholf. Manchester: Carcanet, 1993.
• Iser, Wolfgang, The Act of Reading. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978.
• Olson, Charles, Selected Writings. Ed. Robert Creeley. New York: New Directions, 1966.