If I were writing this</a> <link rel='stylesheet' href='http://thomasdevaney.net/style.css' type='text/css' /> </head> <body> <table width="600" align="center" border="3" cellspacing="6" cellpadding="6"> <tr><td> <p><img src="http://thomasdevaney.net/imgs/sm_logo_inquirer.jpg" /> <h3><i>If I were writing this</i></h3> <p align="left"><i>Robert Creeley <br />New Directions <br />$21.95 (112 Pages) <br />Reviewed by Thomas Devaney <br />from </i>The Philadelphia Inquirer </p> <p> <p>"I am ahead. I am not dead./Shovel it in," writes Robert Creeley with verve and a dark bravado in the last stanza of his "Supper." The poem might be called "The Last Supper," but is not, as the poet continues to "Shovel it in." <p>Creeley's starkly robust new collection, <i>If I were writing this</i>, from his publisher of forty years New Directions, is a moving engagement and lively reckoning of friends, family (the people he has loved — dead and alive), and literature itself as it lives on through more literature. The mode and mood of the collection is elegiac, as Creeley corresponds with his contemporaries again both living and dead: Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Keith and Rosmaire Waldrop, Kenneth Koch, and his beloved sister Helen to name some. <p>Creeley won Yale University's Bolligen Prize in 1999 (previously awarded to such major 20th century American poets as Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens and John Ashbery). He also received a Before Columbus Lifetime Achievement Award in 2000, and a Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award in 2001 following his acclaimed collection, Life & Death (1998). The new poems in <i>If I were writing this</i> are a majestic and down-to-earth amplification of Creeley's well-known expressive minimalist aesthetic. At their most engaging the poems offer alchemy of innocence and experience, which recall William Blake at his most stirring. Again, in the poem "Supper" Creeley writes: <blockquote> <p>Days on the way, <br />lawn's like a shorn head <br />and all the chairs are put away <br />again. Shovel it in. <br /> <br />Eat for strength, for health. <br />Eat for the hell of it, for <br />yourself, for country and your mother. <br />Eat what your little brother didn't. <br /> <br />Be content with your lot <br />and all you got. <br />Be whatever they want. <br />Shovel it in. <br /> </blockquote> <p>The poems to poet friends who have recently died are a gloss both on their work and Creeley's own. In one of the two poems for Allen Ginsberg, "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer..." Creeley writes: <blockquote><p>Hurry on, friend. <br /><i>There is no end <br />to desire,</i> <br />to Blake's fire, <br />to Beckett's mire, <br />to any such whatever. <br /> </blockquote> <p>In the poem entitled "For Gregory Corso," he writes: <blockquote><p>Ruthless, friends felt, <br />you might take everything. <br />Nothing was safe from you. <br />You did what you wanted. <br /> </blockquote> <p>The poem ends: <blockquote><p>all made a common sense <br />of the archaic wonders. <br />You pulled from nowhere <br />the kingly chair. <br />You sat alone there. <br /> </blockquote> <p>In the poem "For Kenneth" of Kenneth Koch, he writes: <blockquote><p>But your classic humor <br />of the edge, of being about to— <br />and hanging on even for one last look— <br />that was truly heroic. <br /> <br />I thought "Sleeping with Women" <br />sounded like birds settling <br />in some idyllic edge of meadow <br />just at night fall. <br /> </blockquote> <p>The poem "Possibilities," shows Creeley's ability to flawlessly fuse the optimistic (innocence) and shockingly stark (experience) mind-set when he mentions his dying mother, which also echoes Objectivist poet Charles Reznikoff. He writes: <blockquote><p>My mother dying sat up, ecstatic, <br />coming out of the anesthetic, said, <br />"It's all free! You don't have to pay <br />for any of it…" It's there <br />if you can still get to it? <br /> </blockquote> <p>These late Creeley poems are emotionally charge and as engaging as Creeley has ever been. In "Conversion to Her" he writes: <blockquote><p>Covered with skin <br />one lives within. <br /> <br />Women are told <br />to let world unfold. <br /> <br />Men, to take it, <br />make or break it. <br /> </blockquote> <p>In his introduction to the <i>Selected Writings</i> of Charles Olson, Creeley writes: "We are not here involved with existentialism, Camus may speak of a world without appeal, but the system of discourse he makes use of is still demonstrably a closed one." To say little of the metaphysical, for Creeley physical experience offers its own guide of the perplexed. He ends "Conversion to Her": <blockquote><p>One cannot say, <i>Be as women, <br />be peaceful, then.</i> The hole from which we came <br /> <br />isn't metaphysical. <br />The one to which we go is real. <br /> </blockquote> </table> </body>