Creeley Quotes & Sayings

As I get older, I recognize that my thinking about poetry may or
may not have anything actively to do with my actual work as a
poet. This strikes me as no thing cynically awry but rather
seems again instance of that hapless or possibly happy fact,
we do not as humans seem necessarily aware of what we are
physically or psychically doing at all! — Robert Creeley

Hopefully, I write what I don't know. — Robert Creeley

My nature is a quagmire
of unresolved confessions. — Robert Creeley

Form is never more than an extension of content. — Robert Creeley

My wife and I lived all alone,
contention was our only bone.
I fought with her, she fought with me,
and things went on right merrily.
But now I live here by myself
with hardly a damn thing on the shelf,
and pass my days with little cheer
since I have parted from my dear. — Robert Creeley

Memories

Hello, duck,
in yellow

cloth stuffed from
inside out,

little
pillow. — Robert Creeley

It's the classic story form. All staying equal, or proving equal, or being equal, this will all continue, and the next time around, we'll move on to see what happened to Harry after he dove in the river, or who his friend John really was, and so on. — Robert Creeley

The most important American love poet in living memory, and certainly one of the most important American poets tout court, Robert Creeley was born in 1926 and raised in eastern Massachusetts. — Susan Stewart

I know this body is 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. — Robert Creeley

Communication is mutual feeling with someone, not a didactic process of information. — Robert Creeley

The Black Mountain poet I like most is the early Creeley. Those early poems seem very lyrical and very traditional, with a lot of voice and character. — Robert Morgan

That poetry survived in its formal agencies finally, and that prose survived to get something said. — Robert Creeley

Thought is a process of work,
joy is an issue of work — Robert Creeley

It is hard going to the door
cut so small in the wall where
the vision which echoes loneliness
brings a scent of wild flowers in the wood. — Robert Creeley

All of which was OK, as that proved then, I certainly wouldn't contradict it as a necessary sense of things. — Robert Creeley

Bless
something small
but infinite
and quiet. — Robert Creeley

Don't name it, as they say, because instantly you offer it to this peculiar authority. — Robert Creeley

Love, if you love me, lie next to me. Be for me, like rain, the getting out of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi- lust of intentional indifference. Be wet with a decent happiness. — Robert Creeley

For love - I would split open your head and put a candle in behind the eyes. — Robert Creeley

I'll win the way
I always do
by being gone
when they come.

When they look, they'll see
nothing of me
and where I am
they'll not know.

This, I thought, is my way
and right or wrong
it's me. Being dead, then,
I'll have won completely. — Robert Creeley

A Token"

My lady
fair with
soft
arms, what

can I say to
you - words, words
as if all
worlds were there. — Robert Creeley

What am I to myself
that must be remembered,
insisted upon
so often? Is it
that never the ease,
even the hardness,
of rain falling
will have for me
something other than this,
something not so insistent
am I to be locked in this
final uneasiness. — Robert Creeley

I don't think any man writing can worry about what the act of writing costs him, even though at times he is very aware of it. — Robert Creeley

When I speak, I speaks. — Robert Creeley

What a great thing! To be a writer! Words are something you can carry in your head. You can really 'travel light.' — Robert Creeley

The irony of our social group is that so often everyone feels this, but there's no company whatsoever in that feeling. Think of Pound's great emphasis, the way out is via the door. — Robert Creeley

Moon, moon,
when you leave me alone
all the darkness is
an utter blackness,
a pit of fear,
a stench,
hands unreasonable
never to touch.
But I love you.
Do you love me.
What to say
when you see me. — Robert Creeley

Oh well, I will say here,
knowing each man,
let you find a good wife too,
and love her as hard as you can. — Robert Creeley

God give you pardon from gratitude and other mild forms of servitude. — Robert Creeley

I did however used to think, you know, in the woods walking, and as a kid playing the the woods, that there was a kind of immanence there - that woods, a places of that order, had a sense, a kind of presence, that you could feel; that there was something peculiarly, physically present, a feeling of place almost conscious ... like God. It evoked that. — Robert Creeley

And what's fascinating in The Ten Thousand Things is that although there's time, an inexorable time of the three generations of lives, actively present, but place is the time, time doesn't really have to do with simply the human experience of it. — Robert Creeley

It's as though all the terms of a family were present at one time rather than his dad and his mum. Not just a present authority, but the resident memory of what qualifies what else is the case. — Robert Creeley

The tree cannot walk, all its going must be violence. They listen to the saw cut, the roots scream. And in eating even a stalk of celery there will be pathetic screaming. — Robert Creeley

Comes the time when it's later
and onto your table the headwaiter
puts the bill — Robert Creeley

There are a lot of editorials that have nothing to do with anything like that. But I was just thinking of that sense of prose as being very responsible and perceptive, thoughtful, intimate, and contriving a quote statement. — Robert Creeley

Again like Williams, with the emphasis now regrettable, when a man makes a poem, makes it mind you, he takes the words as he finds them lying interrelated about him. — Robert Creeley

What has happened makes the world. Live on the edge, looking. — Robert Creeley

My love's manners in bed
are not to be discussed by me — Robert Creeley

The pattern of the narrative never of necessity wants to end, it never has to. — Robert Creeley

First you wonder if they're separate stories, but no, they're not, they're contingent stories and they form a pattern. And you begin with some of the island as the place to which the heroine of the book returns. — Robert Creeley

Robert Creeley has forged a signature style in American poetry, an idiosyncratic, highly elliptical, syntactical compression by which the character of his mind's concentrated and stumbling proposals might be expressed ... Reading his poems, we experience the gnash of arriving through feeling at thought and word. — Forrest Gander

The awful thing, as a kid reading, was that you came to the end of the story, and that was it. I mean, it would be heartbreaking that there was no more of it. — Robert Creeley

Still, no one finally knows what a poet is supposed either to be or to do. Especially in this country, one takes on the job - because all that one does in America is considered a "job" - with no clear sense as to what is required or where one will ultimately be led. In that respect, it is as particular an instance of a "calling" as one might point to. For years I've kept in mind, "Many are called but few are chosen." Even so "called," there were no assurances that one would be answered. — Robert Creeley

I heard words
and words full
of holes
aching. — Robert Creeley

I will go to the garden.
I will be a romantic. I will sell
myself in hell,
in heaven also I will be. — Robert Creeley

Let's build a house of human pieces, arms and hair, not telling any one. — Robert Creeley

You were saying that once when visiting Yale, you were struck that unlike Pound, Williams's thinking was volatile, I mean, did not stay locked into a pattern of concepts that then defined his subsequent necessary behavior, whereas Pound did. — Robert Creeley

Suddenly the whole imagination of writing and editorial and newspaper and all these presumptions about who am I reading this, and who else other people may be, and all that, it's so grimly brutal! — Robert Creeley

He lives out in Orchard Park. I mean, to be able to sit on the bench so patiently, for whatever part, and to be able to get up and do something, with such heroic competencies would be great. — Robert Creeley

Locale is both a geographic term and the inner sense of being. — Robert Creeley

No matter how wild reality was obviously often being, it was an absolutely secure place, as a tone and intelligence, and a thing happening. — Robert Creeley

O love, where are you leading me now? — Robert Creeley

Writing is the same as music. It's in how you phrase it, how you hold back the note, bend it, shape it, then release it. And what you don't play is as important as what you do say. — Robert Creeley

The Lady has always moved to the next town
and you stumble on after Her. — Robert Creeley