The American Century: Literature since 1945 603other kinds of horror. For him, in effect, the poem is not an act of communion but
an authentic cry of pain: or, as he put it in “A Poem for Painters” (1958), “a man’s /
struggle to stay with / what is his own, what / lives within him to do.”
Apart from Olson, however, the most important poets connected with the Black
Mountain group are Robert Creeley (1926–2005), Ed Dorn (1929–1999), and Robert
Duncan (1919–1988). In the case of Creeley (whose Collected Poems was published
in 2006), an interest in open forms and the belief that “words are things too”
combined with two quite disparate but in a way complementary influences. There
was, first, his involvement with the free-flowing experiments of Abstract
Expressionism and modern jazz. “To me,” Creeley said, “life is interesting insofar as
it lacks intentional ‘control’ ”; and it is clear that the example of painters like Jackson
Pollock and musicians like Charlie Parker and Miles Davis encouraged him to see
the artist as someone immersed in the work he created, experiencing its energy,
involved in its movement, and limited in terms of how he expresses himself only
“by the nature of the activity.” Along with this, there is what Creeley has termed his
“New England temper.” New England gave Creeley many things, including a
tendency to be “hung up,” to suffer from pain (“I can / feel my eye breaking”) and
tension (“I think I grow tensions / like flowers ...”). Above all, though, what it gave
him was two things, one to do with perception, the other with expression. “Locate I,”
declares Creeley in one of his poems; elsewhere, he insists, “position is where you /
put it, where it is.” He was fascinated, in effect, by the perceptual position of the
speaker, how the poem grows out of the active relationship between the perceiver
and perceived. The preoccupation with the limits of vision that earlier New
Englanders demonstrated is consequently translated into cool, modernist terms: the
aim being not an “ego-centered” verse but precisely its opposite, words that reveal
how our eyes and minds “are not separate ... from all other life-forms.” At the same
time, New England habits, Creeley said, gave him a “sense of speech as a laconic,
ironic, compressed way of saying something to someone,” the inclination “to say as
little as possible as often as possible.” So the forms of his saying became, as he
believed they should, an extension of content. His purpose was “a realization, a
reification of what is”: “a process of discovery” that turned out to be a matter of
vocabulary as well as vision. “What’s the point of doing what we already know?”
Creeley asked, and his writing continually illustrates this belief in experiment. His
poems evolve on both a sequential grammatical level and a cumulative linear level;
each line reaffirms or modifies the sense of the sentence and the total argument,
each word exists in contrapuntal tension with all the others. There is risk here, in
fact, a taste for the edgy and subversive, of a kind that would be equally familiar to
Thelonious Monk and Emily Dickinson.
Given the habit “I” or self-consciousness has of getting in the way of revelation,
Creeley tried to strip poetry of its more obtrusive, interfering devices: easy
generalizations, abstractions, and colorful comparisons are eschewed in favor of
patient attentiveness, a tendency to approach things and words as if they were small
bombs set to explode unless carefully handled. To capture the “intense instant” what
is needed is caution, perhaps (“The Innocence”), surprise (“Like They Say”),GGray_c05.indd 603ray_c 05 .indd 603 8 8/1/2011 7:31:34 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 34 PM