robert creeley

"Creeley's first principle is that you find out what you have to say in the process of saying it: poetry becomes a way of making not representing."

"A poem is the fact of its own activity: it exists in itself and for itself so that we can relate to it not just as "expression" but as enactment. This is not so much an objectification of the poem as a placing of the poem in the world as a thing requiring not mute appreciation but active response."

Charles Bernstein, on Robert Creeley

after robert creeley:

he broke free from the

flailing arms, flailing legs, and flew

brown bird soaring

for the recognition and cheers, see

the clear path,

foot smacks court, foot smacks court,

foot

smacks

court

dribbling hope,

a prayer for the neon red

numbers to change

and he leaped

arms outstretched

where’s the crowd?

it roars, and holds its breath

but in slow

slow devastation

he falls

ball slips from his fingers and he crashes down

into oblivion and disgust and disappointment

the bitter taste of failure

again

and,

i. here, crowded room. noise and chaos,

windowless.

pixels blinking in constant change,

making the photo(graph)

telling his defeat, again

sadly immortalized.

i sigh and pry

the last remnants of color

from his yearning skin

color,

when i was(am) a child,

wander through tangled tall brush of green eating

a tomato, red orange juice and seeds bursting

dripping down my arms

in the mess that is childhood and tomatoes

the deceit. i thought it was an apple. and silly, how

things aren’t always how they appear, and how

the skin gave so easily to my infantile canines and how

it felt like a r.ip of flesh and not the crisp earth of apple