Good company

an interview by means of Roberta Obermayer

ROBERTA OBERMAYER: Can you talk about the of recent origin book, the long poem "L'Histoire de Florida" and in what way it was a departure for you?

ROBERT CREELEY: There were ten clan in a pleasant workshop at the Atlantic Center for the Arts and single of them was very moving to me The whole occasion was for a like reason important to her. I mean, not alone did she like it, on the other hand it was a turning point in her life. She came from a family that was real loathe to let their daughter be beyond the immediate family enclosing so for her to pass to Florida was a big deal. Particularly it was a big deal for her to be able to make progress to such a curious thing as a poesy workshop. She was fragile and this was a real new situation for her. Quite before long into it, she suggested in great excitement and advantageous faith that we might each of us, the company, write something specific. She insinuateed that we might intend to write something each day so we'd be able to propel off what we'd brought to the workshop. What we might write then and there would have a freshnes and also be an occasion for talking and thinking about it in ways that the rehearsed or written piece wouldn't subserve So, it made a great deal of faculty of perception to me and I thought-Gee I'd like to do that too. We started quite early in the morning with equal reason I'd usually write in the afternoons. It was charming but I had to be careful I didn't test to write all at one time because I didn't want to write the whole damn thing in single day or something. I wanted it to be . . not just a rush to completion which would be my impulse, on the other hand to let it gather. I had single or two false starts, then it just got rolling and I had the piece of poetry "L'Histoire de Florida." That's really it. There was a locating faculty of perception of things, by which I mean, now the day is becoming specific. I'm absolutely in what this metrical composition is saying-it's my life. It's a unique metrical composition for me. I don't think I've at any time written anything like that. It was eighteen pages which is not all that drawn out but for me it's a periodicity that's quite unusual. I also like that it draw nears back at the end, that it separates on a parallel with a piece of poetry by Wallace Stevens which was a crucial piece of poetry for me as a young man, "Anecdote of the Jar." "I placed a jar in Tennessee" etc And thus I put an inter-linear pattern with that and my jar is in Florida, that's all. on the other hand the whole imagination is Stevens's. In his piece of poetry the jar is almost terrifying. This determining percept thus placed begins to assert and formalize all that's around it; the inherent growing the pattern and presence of things, begins to be overthrowed by this jar, "Like nothing other in Tennessee," as he brings it and I began to make a curious parallel. Not with Florida, admitting that would certainly fit, on the other hand with a sense of oneself being an agent, which in Stevens's piece of poetry that's implicit. The coming to place is curiously dislocating. Florida is for a like reason subtly off balance to a of recent origin Englander. Existentially, the awkwardness of the human nearness there, you know?

OBERMAYER: above the years you've done several collaborative throws with different artists that brought together art and verse How did these collaborations approach about?

CREELEY: I've worked with Clemente Baselitz, move with a jerk and Diana, Jim Dine, Marisol Escobar, Susan Rothenburg from Buffalo and with a allotment of different people. I did it for merriment classic fun. It was always interesting to work with someone whose ways of the two responding and defining the world used a different mode-like hanging on the outside with a good farmer or something. Someone who simply does things in another way with a great deal of the same end in view and for a like reason artists were always fascinating to me Someone who could take a piece of paper and draw something that you could recognize, not solitary recognize, but could have an issue of power was very moving to me That you could think of things in relation to what he or she place there without using words-I was fascinated they could do that. An exhibition is to take place beginning at the Castilani Museum at Niagara University and it will then go on to the University of North Carolina, the University of Southern Florida, and Stanford University. Then it goe to a small interesting museum in Maine, the Farnsworth Museum in Rockland and it goe to the novel York Public Library.

OBER MAYER: strike was a great influence for you, wasn't he?

CREELEY: Ye his terrific influence on me was his classic advice as to in what way one might proceed as a writer. He took in the way that seriously both the possibility of being a writer, a author of poems and the necessary responsibility of it. He said, "Artists are the antennae of the race." in like manner whenever you felt sort of battered or down or disregarded you had Pound's glorious insistence. He gave practical advice, his works The ABC's of Reading and by what means to Read were extraordinarily useful upon how to learn to pay attention to what it is metrical composition is doing. Things like, "listen to the entire that it makes." Remarkably hardly any people would ever think of doing that, I don't know wherefore It isn't that poetry is necessarily defined through the sound that it makes on the contrary it's a very sturdy and continuing composing of what poetry would otherwise be today. in like manner for my poetry, it's a crucial simple body and I have probably learned to listen as abundant from reading Pound, both in his suggestions and his practice. I don't think I at any time sent him a poem in my life actually. I don't remember doing it. I sent Williams a certain number of but very shyly and modestly What if they didn't like it? They were my heroes. What if they said-Gee, you're awful! with equal reason I was very leery of exposing my delicate efforts to their eyes. I had to present to view Williams, in a funny way, because he was for a like reason much my advice as to in what way I was trying to set things together. But it was Pound's literary sensibility that I base absolutely useful, his so-called governments of thumb, for example. He also had a great way of leading me to other writers. It was he who set me in touch with Paul Blackburn. He had a great leaping way.