Robert Creeley

I was pleasantly surprised to find out that Robert Creeley was giving a poetry reading in the East Village. Truth to tell, I hadn't been sure if this legendary Black Mountain poet was still alive. The question of mortality clearly must have been on his mind as well, since the latest collection of poems he read from is titled "Life & Death." Now in his 70s, Creeley is preoccupied by the short time he has on earth and his poems meditate on that question.

The Black Mountain College in North Carolina was an extremely important institution that served as a transmission belt for "alternative" values to people questioning American society in the 1950s and early 60s. Creeley, along with Charles Olson and Robert Duncan, taught at the college. They helped to define a style of poetry that along with the San Francisco Renaissance (Ferlinghetti, Rexroth) and the NY beats (Ginsberg, LeRoi Jones) influenced a younger generation of college students like myself.

I was fortunate to have Robert Kelly as a teacher at Bard College in 1961-65. He was a poet with ties to this new poetry movement. He brought both Robert Duncan and LeRoi Jones up to Bard College for readings in 1962. Duncan was heavily influenced by Ezra Pound, as all Black Mountain poets were, and by Walt Whitman. Much of his poetry was frank about his own gay identity, a distinctly rebellious stance to take in the 1950s. Jones read from a epic poem which cast his home town of Newark as a modern Dante's Inferno. His bitterness was channeled in an esthetic direction at this point, but only six years later he would resurface as Amiri Baraka, a black nationalist leader of the Newark rebellion.

The figure who towered above all the Black Mountain poets was Charles Olson, one of the most distinctly individual voices in 20th century culture. He began as a high-level administrator in FDR's New Deal but opted for a writing career. He was the first American poet to label himself "postmodern," but nobody could mistake him for the sort of sterile academic discourse that goes by that name nowadays. Olson was no bullshit artist.

Olson thought that Western thought had to be liberated from logic and classification, habits of thought that went back to Plato. On the level of technique, Olson was strongly influenced by Ezra Pound, the great modernist poet who was in a mental hospital for the criminally insane. He had made pro-Mussolini radio broadcasts during WWII. Olson acted as Pound's secretary in 1946-48, while the government was trying to decide whether to charge him with treason or not. Olson broke with Pound after the almost certifiably insane poet charged him with having mongrel racial roots.

One of Olson's most important works is the prose "Call Me Ishmael." A man of boundless curiosity, Olson wrote with passion about Melville marginalia, Mayan inscriptions, Shakespeare's tragedies and abstract expressionist art, according to a Boston Review article by John Palattella. The theme which unites much of his poetry and prose is the opposition between poles of thought or sensibility, including Melville against Poe, Pip against Ahab, etc. What interests me in particular is the reference in Palattella's article to Olson's notion that Mayan thought is in a duality with Western civilization. This is something I definitely have to follow up on.

Most people's perception of the Black Mountain College is that it was a haven for experimental poets, musicians and dancers. At one point or another, Merce Cunningham, John Cage, R. Buckminster Fuller, Robert Rauschenberg as well as the aforementioned poets were part of the faculty. What is much less well-known was the communal structure of the college. Students did not pay tuition. In exchange for their education, they served food, mowed lawns and even built new dormitories. The college also believed that professors were not authority figures, but simply partners in the quest for knowledge with the student body.

The school's original director was Josef Albers, who fled Nazism. He was a leader of the Bauhaus school in the Weimar Republic, a socialist institution that promoted highly functional architecture, household design, etc., for the working-class. Albers helped to shape the educational and political direction of the Black Mountain College, even though very few people at the time identified with socialism as a doctrine, particularly avant-garde artists like John Cage. Albers simply believed that Black Mountain should be a place to practice "dangerous" art. Anything much more than this would have gotten him in trouble with the new fascists in 1950s America.

So, in a very real sense, the cultural roots of the 1960s radicalization are in the German working-class movement of the 1920s.

Creeley was never associated with the more political aspects of the 1960s cultural revolt. He was no Allen Ginsberg and the subject-matter of his poems tended to be very private. However, this does not mean that what he writes is unimportant. After all, everybody--including Marxists--are confronted at one point or another with their own mortality. And we need people like Creeley to help us think and feel deeper about this subjects.

Lately these questions have been much more on my mind. I discovered that a dear old friend from Austin, a classmate at Bard, has discovered that she has Hepatitis C, a disease for which there is no cure and which can be fatal. A New Yorker article on the disease appeared about a month ago and it pointed out that there 4 times as many people infected with the disease than AIDS. Many of them, who are middle-class and white, will be more difficult to sweep under the rugs than the poor and gay people who are HIV-positive. The article pointed out that Hepatitis C can be contracted by sharing a straw to inhale cocaine. With a transmission route like this, the possibility of an catastrophic epidemic are quite real. In the face of a general decline in health-care, the social consequences could be explosive.

I was searching for the New Yorker article in the Columbia Library periodical room to send to my old friend when I ran into G., who received a doctorate recently in political science and was now teaching a class in African-American history. He was an ex-Trotskyist like myself. The last time I saw him, a month ago, we argued for about an hour on the question of Marxism and the American Indian. He was still wedded to the notion that capitalism means progress for indigenous societies. I was looking forward to continuing my discussion with him, but he was preoccupied with another matter. He had just learned that he has Multiple Sclerosis. So we didn't talk about Marxism, we talked about "Life & Death," the subject and title of Creeley's latest collection of poems, instead.

As I said, Creeley is not a social or political commentator, but one of his new poems addresses his own mortality and the old-age of our own troubled twentieth century in an interesting way. It is called:

GOODBYE

Now I recognize it was always me like a camera set to expose

itself to a picture or a pipe though which the water might run

or a chicken dead for dinner or a plan inside the head

of a dead man. Nothing so wrong when one considered how it all began.

It was Zukofsky's 'Born very young into a world already very old...' The century was well along

when I came in and now that it's ending, I realize it won't be long.

But couldn't it all have been a little nicer, as my mother'd say. Did it have to kill everything in sight,

did everything have to be so wrong? I know this body to be impatient. I know I constitute only a meager voice and mind. Yet I loved, I love.

I want no sentimentality. I want no more than home.