Robert Creeley Dies/ Goodbye
Poet, Robert Creeley has died at age 78. I was introduced to the work of Robert Creeley through Robert Kelly, who instructed me in poetry during my freshman year at Bard College. Every few months I will pick up a book of his verse and escape this hobbled world.
Some traditionalists hate modern poetry. but I quite like it and make liberal use of its techniques in my own experiments, as did consummate Traditionalist T.S. Elliot.
Here is Robert Creeley’s poem “Goodbye”
Goodbye
Now I recognize
it was always me
like a camera
set to expose
itself to a picture
or a pipe
through which the water
might runor 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 right always have to be so wrong?
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.
Michael Brendan Dougherty
in Culture
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