Notes on Robert Creeley - so seemingly simple, so difficult

Like so many others, way back when I was in college and grad school Robert Creeley was my poet-hero - thousands (like me) wrote bad to at-best mediocre imitations of Creeley poems - I don't think mine ever approached his excellence. And of course he was there first, figuring out a unique use of verse and lyric in a vision and style that was his alone - to write a "fake" Creeley poem would be like an artist painting his or her own Pollock or Rothko - maybe possible, but essentially pointless and verging on infringement. Creeley's poems came as close as possible in English to being entirely about language - the are all short, apparently simple with very short lines and stanzas, with almost no metaphor or simile and with a focus only of feelings and incidents - never about ideas, and never lyrical in the traditional Romantic-lyric mannner. He was a descendant of Williams (and of his much-less-talented mentor, Charles Olson) but far more austere that either. It's important that his verse is only apparently simple - when you look more closely at his poems, the structure and syntax of the sentences is as more complex that any other writer's - save maybe Mallarme and perhaps some of the poet-philosophers, like Wittgenstein (whom I imagine was also an influence). Looking now at the title poem of his most famous collection, "For Love" - I had this almost memorized when younger, and now I'm not sure that I could even explain most of the passages or sentences - though the overall mood of the poem is very plain and obvious, simply a paen to love and how it overwhelms the poet and dominates all his emotions, despite its complexity and ineffable qualities, much like this poem itself. A typical passage (quoted without the line breaks): "Today, what is it that is finally so helpless, different, despairs of its own statement, wants to turn away, endlessly to turn away." Creeley asks a question that he will not or cannot answer, and therefore punctuates it as a declarative rather than as an interrogative (a typical Creeley device); also, Creeley known for odd use of adverbs as in "finally" above. Can we figure out each line? Perhaps: despairs of its own statement probably = in some way his despair as a poet unable to express the most allusive and overwhelming of feelings? One other striking quality of Creeley's style is the mixture of this very complex syntax with devices of simple, colloquial speech and direct address, as in: "If the moon did not, no if you did not I wouldn't either, but what would I not do, what prevention, what thing so quickly stopped." A very difficult passage - but the direct address, and the interruption of his own thinking process (No, if you did not) makes it seem simpler than it is. Final note: I crossed paths with Creeley several times later in life and was very impressed and moved by what a nice man he was, very thoughtful, great with students and with other writers - and he spoke very much the way he wrote, in a way that I've never heard anyone else speak, ever.