Hank Lazer Writes About His Friend, Robert Creeley

Robert Creeley (1926-2005)

Absolutely exemplary. Certainly these last ten years or so, a quality of sweetness, pleasure, and generosity. A life lived in and of words with absolute integrity. For me, personally, no more important poet, no one better able to show ways in words to make manifest the grace, pleasure, complexity, cadences, and play of mind at work.

I met Bob in the late 1970s, at a Black Mountain College celebration at Warren Wilson College. We spent a couple of days in conversation; I interviewed Bob; I listened to him read. Much of our time together I asked him for information on the three-line stanzas that he developed, and what relationship his writing had to similar modes in Williams. Great fun witnessing a packed auditorium at his reading, only to have Bob tell stories and follow out a range of thoughts for forty-five minutes to an hour before he read the first poem. Many left before he read. They missed a superb reading, one that was absolutely continuous with the talking that preceded it.

Yes, quite simply one of the greatest conversationalists of all time …

At the time of that Black Mountain event, I knew only parts of what Creeley had written – mainly Words and For Love. From then until now, I have grown more and more familiar with the range of his writing – the poetry, yes, but also the essays. In fact, when I got news of Bob’s declining health, I was reading a new essay of his on Whitman’s poetry of old age (in a special issue of Virginia Quarterly Review celebrating the 150th anniversary of the publication of the first Leaves of Grass).
In the mid-1990s, I gave a reading at Buffalo. Bob attended, and I had the pleasure of reading new poems (which became the book Days) which were very much based in what I had learned from his work. We spent the next morning, over pastry and coffee, sitting and talking, along with my good friend Yunte Huang. Bob’s generosity to Yunte is another story, but typical of Bob’s kindness to so many younger writers…

Here, at Alabama, I had the pleasure of hosting Bob for a reading a couple of years ago. Again, a packed house. A superb reading, though Bob had to sit for most of the reading, as he did for the conversation/discussion the following day. That particular visit enhanced by the presence of Donald Revell (in residence for the semester), another poet deeply steeped in Bob’s life and writing. And again, Bob made time for a morning of coffee, pastry, and conversation.

Last saw Bob at the Louis Zukofsky Centennial at Columbia this past fall. Some familiar anecdotes, and some unfamiliar.

I’ve been quite moved by the increasingly emotionally open work of Bob’s last couple of books – Life & Death and If I were writing this. He seemed able to circle back, to realize the importance and vitality of late 19th century verse – a family tradition of popular poetry – in his own practice. Or, to make of Keats’ work such a central thing.

We corresponded sporadically via e-mail. I would often send Bob a few poems, and his remarks were always appreciative. He blurbed a book of mine – an extended chapbook called As It Is (published by Mark Scroggins) – and was always supportive of my writing.

What Bob showed was the pleasure and work of making one’s way in a writing life. It is rather amazing to think of how many of us have learned from his example.

Yesterday, the day of Bob’s death, at the end of the day, I went with my son, Alan (16 years old), to Beulah Baptist Church – a black church on a hillside on the way home, a place that I’d often admired but where I’d never stopped. A modest graveyard with a cement angel of Memory leading the way up the dry, red clay hill. At the top of the hill, we walked around for a bit, sun streaming through the clouds. The wisteria now in bloom, we looked at the tombstones, stood beside one for “Pa Pa” Jones, and I read aloud several of Bob’s poems from Life & Death.

Earlier in the day I’d been in touch with several others to whom Bob had been so important – Charles Bernstein, Yunte Huang, Joel Kuszai, Don Revell, Claudia Keelan, Norman Fischer, Tyrone Williams. Even at the time of Bob’s death, it’s hard not to bear in mind his favorite closing in correspondence: “Onward.” Without Bob here to be the figure of Onward, we must take what we have learned from him and be, in our writing and friendship and conversation and correspondence, that no longer singular figure of Onward.

Hank Lazer
March 31, 2005

*

Here’s the e-mail I sent to Bob on Monday, March 28, 2005:

Dear Bob,A gray cold day of spring break, giving way to sunny windy afternoon. I spoke with Joel Kuszai mid-day, and learned some of your health difficulties. And then heard from Charles Bernstein, a more optimistic version. I'm simply writing to let you know I'm thinking of you. And thinking with you. Got in today's mail the latest issue of Virginia Quarterly Review -- on Whitman, and your superb piece on Whitman's poetry of old age. When I read at the Walt Whitman Center in Camden (several years ago, back when Alicia Askenase was in charge of the reading series), I visited Walt Whitman's house, and recognize it in the last photos. For me, the determining feature of my early years of writing poetry was to have an especially close relationship with my four grandparents -- all Russian Jews, all living close to us. In the way that drugs & zen of the 1960s allowed it, I spent time with them, in their decay mental & physical, with a mixture of love, curiosity, and observation (rather than the disabling frustrations that I saw in my parents' relationship to their aging parents). My poems began with telling their stories, my grandparents, and with learning (or trying to learn) something of the phenomenology of aging. And thus, yes, a reading of Williams' later work and others, including, eventually Oppen.A rambling way, Bob, to say that you are on my mind these days, as your poetry and your essays and correspondence will always be.With much love,Hank
*

And a poem, from several years ago, very much with Creeley in mind, from an ongoing work, Portions.


YOU


so the old
cabin leans “sit
up” i said

as if to
someone i said
it to you

i always do
if there were
no one else

if there were
only you i
would say “sit

up” & think
someone heard such
is my sense

the old cabin
leans what is
never passes away


- Hank Lazer