As Ron Silliman blogs at the beginning of the day (certainly, an early riser), I blog at its end (myself, a person for whom the night is the time of greatest productivity). So I end the day responding to or reverberating off the posting that Ron began the day with. The posting runs itself like a poem, moving from idea to idea, while revolving along the same idea, allowing accretions to the original thought until it ends with a little shudder of surprise.
He begins by noting that plenty of websites are now quoting snippets of Creeley poems, and we begin to wonder where this thought might take us. Apparently, the presentation of quotations from poems is a sentimental activity in this context, which well it might be, but it’s hard to imagine why this presentation of poems must be sentimental, or why it constitutes some kind of affront to the memory of Creeley. Let’s consider a few questions:
Why I wonder does this have to be the same as the concept of memorizing and reciting poetry? If it is, why is memorizing poetry a bad thing? Are we to believe that postmodern poets do not memorize poetry, lest they be thought sentimental? Does that jibe with Creeley’s frequent enough quoting of famous lines from poems? (He even found it necessary to quote François Villon’s famous line (sans “Mais”), “ou sont les neiges d’antan?” twice, in two separate poems, in his book Echoes.*) And why are we expected to believe that Creeley’s sentimental nature (or, more properly, that of his poems) was created out of whole cloth at the end of his career?
The sentimental (and a leaning towards sentimentality) was clearly in evidence even in Creeley’s early poems. Ron considers Creeley’s poem “The Warning” to his “own comment upon sentimentality,” noting also that this poem gives the volume it appears in (For Love) its title, but failing to consider that the poem “For Love,” which ends the same volume and which is essentially a love poem to his wife of the time. But is “The Warning” truly a poem that comments on sentimentality>
The Warning
For love – I would
split open your head and put
a candle in
behind the eyes.
Love is dead in us
if we forget
the virtues of an amulet
and quick surprise.
Interestingly, Creeley once gave a reading a little down the road from here in Herkimer County, and afterwards a woman said something about not enjoying his “violent” poem. Creeley noted his surprise at her reading of the opening of “The Warning.” He didn’t see it as a violent image at all, because (at least, it so seems) the image is not meant to be taken literally: not cracking open of heads is intended. It seems to me that the opening stanza is merely a joke, a shocking surprise, and a necessary element in retaining the love between two people. Without the shock of that image to wrestle interest out of the jaws of the quotidian, love would vanish, and that seems the warning of the poem to me.
Not that we can be sure. Creeley’s poems tend to be remarkably economical in their use of words and, therefore, a bit cryptic, and my reading of the poem—one that is definitely sentimental—might contradict many others. But given the frequent references to love in Creeley’s work, and to friends loved and sometimes lost, it seems impossible to call him a hard-edged post-modernist. His style of writing, particularly in
For Love and
Words, is quite dense and crabbed, with syntax spiraling into itself, but that technique of writing doesn’t negate or eradicate the intent of his poems. It seems to me that technique can be demanding on a reader even if a poem is sentimental.
More interesting to me than Ron’s take on Creeley and sentimentality. Is his about sentimentality and totalitarianism:
Whenever we see poetry being equated with sentiment and sentiment equated with responses to military intervention, as with the Richeys, it’s hard, frankly, not to remember that schmaltz was the aesthetic preference & sentimentality the preferred emotion of the Nazis. Sentimentality is the quintessential totalitarian emotion.
Sentimentality seems to me no more totalitarian than it is democratic. All political movements have as an option the appeals to the heart, which is usually easier than an appeal to reason. People are more pliant to the call of their hearts, and their heads are better convince via the heart itself. And I hardly see the quoting of poetry or presentation of it in popular forums (assuming NPR and the tiniest websites of cyberspace constitute part of popular culture) as “totalitarian framing.” One’s own grandmother might be a great sentimentalist, yet she is hardly likely to be a fascist because of it.
This type of argument is too simple, and it reminded me of a 1970s review in
Time by John Ashbery of the paintings of Grant Wood in which Ashbery suggested that Wood’s paintings were somehow of lesser quality than we might imagine since they were a favorite of the Nazis. (A bit of rhetorical legerdemain I’ve found difficult to forgive Ashbery for after more than three decades.) Life, the world, emotion, art, and even the great existential gut that guides each of us are not as simple as that. We cannot reduce things to absolutes that easily and still keep a grip on the shimmering surface of reality.
When I think about it, which I do quite frequently as I continue to read Creeley from beginning to end, I see Creeley as a brave poet, a man interested enough in saying something powerful to say it in his own and sometimes difficult style, to say it in few enough words to confound the reader, and to expose himself as a man of emotion and doubts. In some ways—I’ve said this before—Creeley was a confessional poet. His heart is on his sleeve; his sentiments are always in evidence. He was a man in love and full of doubt, happy and sad—just like all of us, just like each of us—but he was willing to risk embarrassment to be a poet of both word and emotion. He took poetry for all it was: intellect and heart. So that probably makes him a good candidate for quoting on blogs, because in the briefest space of words he tried to hit our minds and our hearts.
Ron ends his posting by quoting from Creeley’s famous (and fairly atypical) “I Know a Man,” which is the story of a conversation that ends with a call to “look/out where yr going.” The poem, which crowds more intertwining syntax and story onto a dozen short lines than we could likely imagine on our own, is a simple one, a recounting of a story, a bit of writing fully in the demotic. It entertains and instructs and scarcely little else, but it hits us with its way of telling and the telling that it is.
And it leaves Ron with his final and important point: “But no amount of poetry is going to solve the problems of Iraq.” Which is as it always is. Poetry is not about solutions. It’s about finding a way, exposing a thought, excavating the mind, the body, the heart. It is a fully intellectual exercise—and, often enough, a fully sentimental one—sentiment being just one version of our intellect.
_____
* Possibly so because Echo herself is mentioned in the Villon original.
ecr. l’inf.
