“all happening visually as well as intellectually”: Robert Creeley and the Act of Writing

Year 2008, Issue: 27, 123 - 139, 01.04.2008

Özge Özbek Akıman

Abstract

The quotation in my title is from Robert Creeley’s essay, “Contexts of Poetry,” which was originally delivered as a lecture in the 1963 Vancouver Poetry Conference, with Allen Ginsberg, published by Audit in 1968 and was later collected with nine other interviews on a range of different subjects in the edition entitled Contexts of Poetry: Interviews 1961-1971. The issues Creeley discusses in the lecture illustrate the problems he faced in relation to his writing life at that point. The lecture testifies to a turning point in Creeley’s writing as he conveys in his interview by Robert Sheppard. Creeley pleasantly remembers trying to explain his dissatisfaction with his writing habits, that they were “exhausted,” upon Olson’s teasing questions like, “What’s this I hear about you guys saying that you’re bankrupt as poets, that you’ve come to some weird dead-end?” or “What is this weird self-commiseration that you’re engaged with?” Sheppard 43 .

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