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On Creeley's Ear Mind
Allen Ginsberg
boundary 2, Vol. 6, No. 3, Robert Creeley: A Gathering. (Spring
- Autumn, 1978), pp. 443-446.
Stable
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On Creeley's Ear Mind
Alien Ginsberg
Creeley reading at Naropa Institute late summer 1976 at "Jack
Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics" I was the host doubly
nervous my own sneaky Karma and Creeley's present drunkenness - He
sat onstage at table, boom armed microphone across from his face
above notebooks newly carried back from Japan & Korea. Creeley
read new work for connoisseurs of ear - short lines spotted down
the small notebook pages, separated by a line or a star between
different entries. His mustache & blind eye too far from the
microphone, I couldn't hear him altogether, I kept hearing syllable
by syllable his mouth, his words, but not the continuity,
despairing shakes of the head to indicate what he read was
incomprehensible i f it wasn't immediately totally comprehensible,
it was so simple . . . his voice fading as he looked around to find
my face or another's friendly understanding or a t least hearing or
trying to hear, in the wings or audience. Occasionally he grabbed
the microphone & squeezed i t cruelly, making a rutting
electric sound, disgusted with its intervention on the actual
breath, the local word. I went up onstage & held microphone
closer to his mouth, looking over his mss., leaning in close to
him, so I could follow the text as he spoke.
I was astonished at the closeness of his speech with its
hesitancies word by word to the forms of his writing. I t seemed
that, in his specialized
-
- i.e. personal, unique, home-made, close to the nose, close to
the grain, actual - world of writing and speech, the forms he wrote
were precise notations of the way his mind thoughts occurred to
him, as he noticed them, and the way they'd be uttered out loud. Of
course Creeley's famous for his precise exactitude of form - the
personal - and I'd written or spoken about i t before - but I'd
never realized i t so clearly. The main principle seemed to be that
his mind moved syllable by syllable - as if his basic unit of
thought was the syllable - as if thought-forms could be broken down
further than picture image, further than thought-breath or
thought-phrase or idea-phrase or speech phrase or breath-clause or
what- ever larger unit Kerouac or Olson or Duncan or Williams or
others have used, could be broken down below words themselves even,
to syllables, one by one moving forward in time, one by one a t a
time left on the page to tell what change mind went thru in the
head at the desk or with pen in hand on the lap on a ship or a
plane or in bed, slow as a live clock, monosyllable by
monosyllable. Remember this was a Buddhist institute specialized in
observation of phenomena of thought-forms & here Creeley was
exh ib i t ing his own personal objective Yoga as it were of
speech-mindfulness, a completely unique universe uncovered by his
awareness of the syllable as basic atom or brick of poetic mind.
What was rare to experience was how much the entire set of mind,
the set up, represented in the beginning of the poem, was modified
by each new single-breath'd syllable. So each one word syllable
modified by hindsight all the previous words. Of course that's
universal in speech, but to hear speech so bare that the
modifications of mind syllable by syllable were apparent, were the
theme & play of the poem, was like raw mind discovery to me
anew, like rediscovering CCzanne's method of creating space, of
Poussin's arrangement of Planes or Pound's quantity of vowels. And
I knew this theme before but had never experienced i t so directly
as this reading in 1976. 1 was overjoyed a t the clarity of the
demonstration of the power of syllables as a measure of the poetic
line, and wondered how many of the audience, puzzled by Creeley's
quirkiness of manner a t microphone or distracted by my own or his
histrionics, heard what he was laying down.
February 22, 1977
