Words by Robert Creeley

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Williams wrote “the only reality we can know is MEASURE” and declared that the reader “never dares to know what he is at the exact moment that he is.” In Words, Creeley takes these dictums very much to heart (or, rather, mind), announcing at its start: "So it is that what I feel in the world, is the one thing I know myself to be, for that instant."

In the poems that follow, he captures the mind’s movement as it, rather than fix on the things of thought, falls into a rhythm propelling everything in its time:

The rhythm which projects
from itself continuity
bending all to its force
from window to door,
from ceiling to floor,
light at the opening,
dark at the closing

(From the very first poem, which opens with the statement “It is all a rhythm…”)

Consistently, Creeley problematizes how measure is a name for the overdetermination of one’s perceptions by one’s perspective, while also underscoring that there’s really no way out of that condition:

Why not ride
with pleasure
and take oneself
as measure,

making the world
tacit description
of what’s taken
from it

for no good reason,
the fact only.

So far as we just are, as the measure, Creeley’s comment here about the poem’s making of a world “for no good reason” once again underscores that movement is more important than meaning, and that poetry can’t really move beyond the moment, “cannot / move backward / or forward” but is “caught // in the time / as measure.” At the same time, however, Creeley (who announces “I cannot see myself / but as what I see”) says the poet does *do* something to the world, in that the poet’s voice and head are also “[feet],” which “club / people in / [the] mind / push them this / way, that // way” and so on. The question is: is there a right way of being in the measure, that does not “club” things out of the rhythm they would/should otherwise take?

CC: Devotional Cinema by Nathaniel Dorsky: "but the more we are able to relax and accept the absolute presence of our situation and then begin to recognize its formal qualities, the greater the chance we have to transmute it."

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