Hold Still, Lion

In post—World War II America there were several loosely affiliated, overlapping

strands of poets who began publishing—poets rejecting the epistemological and

anglophile models of W.H. Auden and T.S. Eliot. They were known variously as

the New York School, the San Francisco Renaissance, the Beats, and the Black

Mountain poets. They came up on the heels of Ezra Pound and William Carlos

Williams, and along the spur of the Objectivists, aka Zukofsky, Reznikoff,

Niedecker, et al. Robert Creeley was the bridge. He distributed the differences

and sounded parallel concerns. He began corresponding with Pound and Williams

in 1949. He and John Ashbery were seated two desks apart at Harvard. In

Majorca, his Divers Press published Robert Duncan and Paul Blackburn. He

typed Allen Ginsberg's Howl, which was then mimeographed in an edition of

twenty-five. At the now legendary and gone Black Mountain College, he studied

with Charles Olson and "earned" his successorship. At Black Mountain Creeley

edited the Black Mountain Review (initially from Majorca) and picked up the

degree he had managed not to complete at Harvard. Over the years he would edit

works of Charles Olson and George Oppen (and Robert Burns and Walt

Whitman), as well as anthologies of new American writing. His correspondence

was carried on at a rate and level not to be believed. The Olson/Creeley letters

alone consume ten volumes (if e-mail had been available to those two the number

of volumes might have been squared). He wrote tense stories and a superb short

novel along with scores of word-perfect essays. Overall he published in the

vicinity of seventy books. Checking a familiar book site, 227 titles are instantly

identified with his name. His collaborations with artists including Francesco

Clemente, Elsa Dorfman, Sol LeWitt, R.B. Kitaj, and Susan Rothenberg were the

occasion of fine-edition books and traveling exhibitions. His collaborations with

musicians such as Steve Lacy and Steve Swallow were performed for packed, hip

audiences and are featured on numerous recordings. He could and did fill Albert

Hall, but he had no qualms about reading to a crowd of four. No qualms, either,

about talking extemporaneously in lieu of giving the promoted reading. He was

not there to accommodate anyone's prepackaged expectations—he was there to

discover the direction of his own thinking. And in that lies, as he often quoted

William Carlos Williams, the profundity.

Copyright Credit: C. D. Wright, "Hold Still, Lion" from The Poet, the Lion, Talking Pictures, El Farolito, a Wedding in St. Roch, the Big Box Store, the Warp in the Mirror, Spring, Midnights, Fire & All. Copyright © 2016 by C. D. Wright. Reprinted by permission of Copper Canyon Press, www.coppercanyonpress.org.

Source: The Poet, the Lion, Talking Pictures, El Farolito, a Wedding in St. Roch, the Big Box Store, the Warp in the Mirror, Spring, Midnights, Fire & All (Copper Canyon Press, 2016)