PeopleHerd

I’ve been listening to the PennSound Archive and analyzing poets’ reading styles.  Here’s a response to Creeley reading his poems “The Whip” & “For Love” in 1963 at the University of Arizona Poetry Center.

Robert Creeley famously equivocates.  In “The Whip,” he vacillates between a woman in his bed and a woman on the roof, a current lover and a potential or former. Creeley injects his printed poems with vacillation through heavy enjambment: “addressed myself to in / a fit she / returned.  That / encompasses it.  But now I was / lonely.”  He indicates the moment he requires to contemplate his word choice with the line break.  Read aloud, these momentary deliberations fragment a straightforward narrative, as if Creeley is a close friend stammering through a confession of his predicament for the first time.  His reading of “For Love,” conveys the same feeling, as he tries to dictate a love poem on the spot, but constantly scratches his head and eyes the floor and never knows what to say.  “If the moon did not… / no, if you did not / I wouldn’t either, but / what would I not / do.”  Creeley speaks candidly, sometimes his voice appears close to tears when he cannot decide, as if he didn’t have a finished poem on a podium to read.