Minimalism Part II - Creeley's THIRTY THINGS [1974]

Robert Creeley presents an interesting instance of a post-Modernist writer whose career was to a considerable extent the "story" of the development of Miminalism in America--its possibilities and limitations--as the direction his work took through the 1960's and 1970's provides a kind of cautionary narrative of the vicissitudes of a commitment to a reductio. 

Creeley's work had always tended towards the narrow, the abbreviated. Poems collected in For Love 1950-1960 [Scribner's, 1962]--the book which established his reputation as a major post-War American writer, and even today is regarded by many as his best work--was filled with short, narrow, vivid, rhetorically succinct examples of a style that he'd derived from William Carlos Williams, Wyatt, Campion and others. It was "courtly" in a mocking, hip way. His following collection, Words [Scribner's, 1965-67] was somewhat looser in its first two-thirds, then, in its last 20 or so pages, reflected a new, more reductive tendency than before. His next book, Pieces [Scribner's, 1969], seemed at the time a culmination of the work of 20 years of thought and experiment, a distillation and limning of meaning and means into the fewest words possible for any given impulse. Some asked, at the time, whither might Creeley go, having written himself into a corner, so to speak? 

The answer, of course, was that he could go anywhere, do anything, use any form that suited his intentions. Having taken Minimalism about as far as one could, he was free to abandon it, exploit it further, or go silent. For the last almost 40 years of his life, that's exactly what he did do, writing almost every kind of poem you could imagine, in addition to abstract prose tracts, journals, autobiography, classical poems in quatrains, etc. And he continued, frequently, to keep his hand in with Minimal poems. 

One of the great books of the post-Modern, post-War period is his book Thirty Things [Los Angeles, Black Sparrow Press, 1974]. Published five years after Pieces [1969], it's like a continuation of the earlier collection, but with a slightly altered spirit. It's not just a collection of "things" however, but a clearly defined bracket of work, conceived as a unit, and deliberately executed as a book whose size, feel and qualities perfectly embody its content. The work is a collaboration between Creeley and his wife at the time, Bobbie, who contributes a series of black and white monoprints (collage-like found images distorted by moving them during exposure in a copy machine); the impression is of dream-blurred memories. 

The poems record a period during which Creeley lived in Bolinas, a small California coastal community perched on the southern edge of the Point Reyes National Seashore, a big triangle of land along the western margin of Marin County. Five poems scattered among the thirty, describe the windy edge of the mesa where the town sits, and are among the most accurate, and moving purely descriptive landscape (or pastoral) poems I know.  

The Temper

The temper is fragile

as apparently it wants to be,

wind on the ocean, trees

moving in wind and rain.

.

As You Come

As you come down

the road, it swings

slowly left and the sea

opens below you,

west.  It sounds out.

.

As We Sit

There is a long

stretch of sky

before us.  The road

goes out to the channel

of the water.  Birds

fly in the faintly

white sky.  A sound

shuffles over

and over, shifting

sand and

water.  A wind

blows steadily

as we sit.

.

Place

Faded mind,

fading colors,

old, dear clothes.

Hear

the ocean under

the road's edge,

down the side

of the hill.

.

Up on the top the

space goes further than

the eye can see.  We're

up here, calling

over the hill.

Bolinas isn't a vacationland destination. In fact, the residents of the town have historically resisted the incursion of outsiders, notoriously (and repeatedly) removing the road sign announcing the turn-off along Hiway 1, so drivers wouldn't know it was there. As if to say "we're happy in our isolation, go away, build your condos and shopping centers and motels elsewhere, we're keeping this place just the way it is." In the 1960's it became a hide-out or "artist colony" for refugees from the urban centers--poets and artists from San Francisco, New York, and elsewhere set up shop to brave the rustic rigors of primitive plumbing, septic systems, and the volunteer fire brigade. It was close enough to the Bay Area to touch base with civilization whenever one wanted, but secluded enough to pass for genuine outback. 

This sequence of poems captures the vacant, methodical character of the Pacific aspect, its continual breeze and hollow roar of endless surf, lulling, hypnotic, its grey-blue monotony flattening out daily care and nodes of vivid color and anxiety. The human temper is fragile, sensitive to the unrelenting assault of the elements, which become equivalents for its own sturm und drang. The simplest description of a thing may be its ultimate formula. Only someone with a mind like Samuel Beckett, would be likely to construct a narrative out of such meager materials. But Creeley's style seems ultimately suited to it.  

The Pacific has come to symbolize the "end" of the Westward movement, the point beyond which we cannot go. A sort of ultimate land's end of psychological regard. In a sense, these poems acknowledge that emptiness, the edge of our longing for further reaches of possibility and adventure, of "territory beyond" the settled. 

During the 1960's, Creeley had moved closer and closer to "the edge" in himself, as to the edge of the continent. "The edge of that edge." With Pieces, he may have approached a limit in his own life, beyond which he could not go. It may be, that in Thirty Things, he'd finally come to sit on the bench at land's end and found the "nothingness" of which the Existentialists speak. It seems to have had a calming influence on his nature. Much has been made of Creeley's "thaw" just as Lowell's relaxation of tensions had been remarked during the 1950's with his Life Studies [1959]. Did Creeley retreat, in early middle age, from the extremity of his own artistic enterprise? Or was the last half of his life a fulfillment of the potentials of his acute earlier vision?