Diligent, strong and good are surely the epithets which attach to Robert Creeley's aspiring character …, for this poet shows, in his poetry at least, none of the distractions pressed upon him by the tendentious praise of both Leslie Fiedler and Hugh Kenner …, by the imprimatur of William Carlos Williams and the impertinence of John Simon …, and most distracting of all, by the clamorous mimicry of his juniors…. (pp. 143-44)

[Immensely out in the open now] Creeley yet continues to explore his own function—or his failure to function—as a poet with a splendid unconcern for external relations, preferring to harbor his most freakish and obvious faults quite as if they were his most original and valuable impulses (and perhaps they are—in any case they are indistinguishable from his virtues in the ultimate effect of his work …). So consistent, indeed, with themselves, so characteristic and even queer are Creeley's poems,… that they loom, or unravel, as much more like themselves than they are like any other poems, even poems by William Carlos Williams and Charles Olson…. Creeley has chosen to remain alive in the world, which means there are occasions when he has recognized the necessity of relating or concluding or repeating an experience—"it is necessary," he says, "to suppose a continuity, though none comes readily to hand." Indeed, if there is in any conventional sense—remembering that a convention makes easy what would otherwise remain difficult—a development in the art of Robert Creeley, it is a development toward not away from extremity, toward the limit of experience which makes it possible to know what the experience is by learning what it is not, and away from the center where things are neighbored, accommodated, solaced by propinquity. What we get in Creeley, what he wants to get, or is compelled by his nature to give, is a "hammering at the final edge of contact."… He is what Melville calls an isolato, not acknowledging the common continent of men, but rather the island of ego, the atoll of solipsism which life itself … forces us to leave…. But in a novel, surely, the supposed continuity is more necessary than in poems—that is why Creeley writes poems, not because of some ulterior inclination of literary temperament: poems are the one chance he has of focussing upon experience without a shift of view or voice …, without, in every sense of the word, relating. No connection and above all, no return. This notion of return (of recurrence and therefore of recollection …) is crucial to any art of verse, as the word verse itself indicates—Creeley writes not anti-poems, as has been said, but anti-verses…. A poetry without recurrence … is a poetry without verse; a poetry without return or ending … is a poetry without rhyme or reason (ratio); for rhyme and reason do go together, since the aim of both is to bring things to an end; a poetry … of precision but no rhythms—there is not a single sentence anybody will ever murmur to himself. And that is just what Creeley is after, or rather, he is not after something but seeking to be present with it: a poetry that cannot be murmured, remembered, but rather encountered, confronted…. Experience, then, is for him a matter of separation, the substitution of incoherence for subject matter (hence the titles of Creeley's two books, which are concerned with precisely the subjects most often thought to involve connection, love and language, and which for Creeley affords a kind of ecstasy of isolation, each instance of the use of his body and of the use of words as discreet, singular, insistently unique:

                      now screaming
                      it cannot be
                      the same)

—and the poem a strategy to avoid pattern …, to dissolve continuity and what used to be called the keeping of imagery; what is sought is the losing, an imagery out-of-keeping, an imagery kept out…. This question of the broken form, of something made to be—or to appear—fragmentary, partial, incomplete is of great importance to Creeley's work…. It is as though the contours of regular form must blur, dim and deceive us until we lose contact. Only the broken surface reveals the truth…. It is the first time in the history of poetry that a man has written a poetry of forgetting …—a poetry without any of the axiological signs and spells which serve to hold it in the mind; without images or rather with an imagery pulverized beyond the recognition of shared contours, an imagery hugged to the self, "played" close to the chest…. Creeley's method [is] a treatment rather than a technique of destroying expectation, of forgetting in order to avoid ending, which would mean having to re-open the healed, scabbed-over trauma—instead, everything is kept raw and ruined here, giving or enforcing the impression both of debris … and of contusion, the incurable wound…. Yet though there can be no doubt about the dismemberment (as opposed to remembering), it is precisely the ritual that is in question, for Creeley's poetry is in opposition to all ceremony, all politeness, which is inevitably a long poem since it is full of recurrences…. Creeley wants no poem remembered, wants each poem to enrich himself and us by what it reveals of his poverty, for in the entrancement of isolated experience the first obstacle to action is the absence of obstacles, of a resisting norm from which to vary…. (pp. 145-49)

The masters of linguistics tell us that there is no reason for the sentence, in its unconditioned state, to end—ever. There is every reason to suppose that we all, unwittingly, spend our lives within one and the same sentence, a single locution which is coterminous with our own bodies. This is what Robert Creeley means when he says that "words are common, and language knows more than one man can speak of;" it is his power (and, as well, his pathos) to have added his voice—sour, stumbling, secretive—to that enormous and obsessive murmur which sometimes rises from literature and which is perhaps its justification, the utterance of our becoming. "There is no more to live," Creeley says darkly in his preface to For Love, "than what there is, to live. I want the poem as close to this fact as I can bring it." He has brought his poems so close to that "no more" of his, to that irreducible absorption in what is there, that he speaks, or we hear him speak, out of an absolute solitude—honorable certainly and enriching to us…. (p. 150)