Stephen Burt on Robert Creeley: “Few poets have had their reception more affected by the wind of the times, which at one point seemed to blow right in Creeley’s direction. Yet we read not a zeitgeist but a book of poems, and behind the poems a man: shy at the core, aggressive in the beginning, melancholy at the end. Few writers have done more with fewer words.” (London Review of Books)
Start with the well-known Creeley poem, ‘I Know a Man’:
As I sd to my
friend, because I am
always talking, – John, Isd, which was not his
name, the darkness sur-
rounds us, whatcan we do against
it, or else, shall we &
why not, buy a goddamn big car,drive, he sd, for
christ’s sake, look
out where yr going.
