While I have enjoyed Robert Creeley’s poetry for many years, what strikes me now after a more in depth reading into the entire span of his writing life is how deft Creeley was at combining the subjectively personal with innovative forms. Too often a poet falls more towards one or the other and leaves the other side undeveloped. How Creeley achieves his pitch perfect balance probably is a result of his working under the premise of ‘form being an extension of content’, meaning that when determining how to approach his subject matter, it was the way in which the subject should be expressed in the poem that was probably dwelled or focused upon more after the initial inspiration than the 'what' of his subject that he wanted to relay through the poem.

If you are not familiar with Creeley’s work, what is most attributed to his poetry is the development of projective verse, which, loosely put, utilizes short one-breath lines and with each line extending what had been placed into the poem through the preceding line, done with the intent of creating immediacy within the poetry for the purpose of compounding new thoughts and possibilities within the reader as the poem progresses down the page (reference bookcover above). In its most experimental mode, as found in Creeley’s earlier poems, the percussive breakdown of syntax and play with enjambment was relied upon as much as the poetic images or ideas, resulting in a fragmented speech-- often strained and emotive-- that simultaneously conjured new relationships at the intellectual level.

In this mode of writing, the poems can result in surprising lyrical sensations with each with its own unique music, express the dramatic breakdown of the communicability of emotions and thoughts- as can be found however a ‘crisis’ may manifest itself, push the ways in which we understand our experiences into philosophical inquiries, such as the examination of memory, or, when Creeley is at his best, densely incorporate all of these aspects and dramatically doing so within a minimal number of lines and words. The poem 'The Window' being an excellent example and one of his most famous, and a personal favorite of my own (as it probably is for a lot of Creeley readers).

Towards the end of Creeley’s life though his writing also began to incorporate prose oriented language styles, such as through the use of long lines and full sentences, as well as forms that have a resemblance to more traditional verse poetry. It was this period of Creeley’s writing that I had not been familiar with and specifically wanted to learn about when picking up his Selected Poems, 1945-2005. Not surprisingly, the subject matter is more often than not what a man thinks about when entering his elder years– death of himself, death of loved ones, the semi-permanence of memories in an impermanent reality, etc.

While the reasons behind Creeley’s change in poetic forms at this point in his life is open for anyone to speculate on, I propose he choose clearer forms as a means to finalize certain understandings– a need he must have felt to come to terms with his life as well as the simple fact that endings place closure upon what used to be, to us, open possibilities, whether it be the final melding of the interior with the exterior or a belief in the interior, of all that remains of one’s experience with life and made manifest through poetry. As with his earliest poems, form again used to express content.