[Creeley was one of the originators of the "Black Mountain" school of poetry, along with Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, and Denise Levertov. These poets developed the theory of "projective verse "—a poetry designed to transmit the poet's emotional and intellectual energy directly and spontaneously, relying on natural speech rhythms. In the following essay, Creeley claims Zukofsky's poetry bears a true correspondence to human experience.]

I want to speak quickly, and openly, because I cannot now make an essay or that sense of a formal situation clarify my own concerns with Louis Zukofsky. For example, I have never understood why the following statement, among so many akin to it in his work, has not called for immediate use on the part of those who read it:

He who knows nothing
Loves nothing
Who does nothing
Understands nothing.
Who understands
Loves and sees,
Believes what he knows,
The horse has large eyes
Man's virtue his feeling,
His heart treasures his tongue, certain
That a yes means no no,
What else is happiness …
(A 12)

At times I do feel a deeply nervous confusion in myself, that men will not recognize the context which their own constructions of order—in speech, in the world—have effected. It is in the recognition of that possibility that Zukofsky is most clear:

… The poet, no less than the scientist, works on the assumption that inert and live things and relations hold enough interest to keep him alive as part of nature. The fact that he persists with them confirms him … (Kulchur 8, "Poetry")

His distinctions have been of great use to me, in that my own situation has often made me want to isolate myself as an effect—which in turn would create me singular. He corrects that longing very simply:

… With respect to such action ["The action that precedes and moves toward utterance moves toward poetry"] the specialized concern of the poet will be, first, its proper conduct—a concern to avoid clutter no matter how many details outside and in the head are ordered. This does not presume that the style will be the man, but rather that the order of his syllables will define his awareness of order. For his second and major aim is not to show himself but that order that of itself can speak to all men … (Kulchur 8, "Poetry")

One time in conversation, Edward Dorn said—how graceful the way he can hear that sound, ten lines later, and place against it the other, which recalls it, across that length of interval. It is no specious metaphor to say a man's measure of his life comes to depend on how finely he can place such equivalents, across the pattern of a daily insistence. Zukofsky hears as he lives, the accumulation or rather all that his world has opened to him, as—

Why should I dread
What outlasts
Snarled hope,
Is more than
Where no one is,
There where anyone is …
(A 12)

My own center in his long work A—because it came first to me, as a deepness in sound and what it said—is the eleventh movement. He knows how I love it, and how it has held me as surely as any man's hand. If one might understand, then, what world is here, as spoken:

… raise the great hem of the extended
World that nothing can leave; having had breath go …
(A 11)

Or what a relief of feeling can say, "Freed by their praises who make honor dearer / Whose losses show them rich and you no poorer / Take care, song, that what stars' imprint you mirror / Grazes their tears … (A 11)

This is virtue
The more so
All have it …
(A 12)

I want to make an insistence, of my respect, but passing that form of it, make such evidence as must be clear to all. If you value what sounds share with sense, or that rhythm which coheres them, so that the world of such sound, having sense, is a thing in the world, and as surely of it as any one thing can be—you will hear. What we speak, or, as poets, find possible as speech in the measure of our feeling moving in the world (take a big bite, says Olson)—you will hear.