Robert Creeley Quotes

"Again like Williams, with the emphasis now regrettable, when a man makes a poem, makes it mind you, he takes the words as he finds them lying interrelated about him."

"All of which was OK, as that proved then, I certainly wouldn't contradict it as a necessary sense of things."

"And what's fascinating in The Ten Thousand Things is that although there's time, an inexorable time of the three generations of lives, actively present, but place is the time, time doesn't really have to do with simply the human experience of it."

"At least I felt a responsibility for everything that was started. It must have been that New England sense that you've got to finish what you start."

"Don't name it, as they say, because instantly you offer it to this peculiar authority."

"Everything is so contiguous and contingent that reality doesn't inhere in one focus."

"First you wonder if they're separate stories, but no, they're not, they're contingent stories and they form a pattern. And you begin with some of the island as the place to which the heroine of the book returns."

"He had, almost, tactics. He was somewhere; he had to figure his next move, always."

"He lives out in Orchard Park. I mean, to be able to sit on the bench so patiently, for whatever part, and to be able to get up and do something, with such heroic competencies would be great."

"He means the door I presume, the door you open and close as you choose or can. But again, what's so moving in Dermout's writing is the complex, echoing, confident, permeating, social experience, far more than her premises."

"He's dead, yeah. I was thinking of Jim Kelly now, the great Buffalo Bills quarterback, with his, not displacement, but his having been happily, successfully replaced by Frank Lloyd Reich."

"I don't know, I love the goofs in prose, I think they're beautiful. It's a newer form than poetry, it's much more opaque."

"I remember once being told by an outstanding landscape architect, Dan Kiley, how he'd met his wife. He'd found himself at the edge of Lake Champlain, in the middle of the winter-very cold and desolate place-he just was absolutely captivated by this lake."

"I thought when younger that the burden of the song or the poem was the emotional condition that it made articulate or the feelings it thus gave voice to, or the this or that, whatever is-and I think all of that is part of its real fact, but paradoxically, I don't think that's what defines it."

"I've been reading a terrific writer, just not read enough, a poet, David Rattray. He's got a terrific collection of essays, classic essays of preoccupations and musing and information and experience, called How I Became One of the Invisible."

"It's as though all the terms of a family were present at one time rather than his dad and his mum. Not just a present authority, but the resident memory of what qualifies what else is the case."

"It's the classic story form. All staying equal, or proving equal, or being equal, this will all continue, and the next time around, we'll move on to see what happened to Harry after he dove in the river, or who his friend John really was, and so on."

"No matter how wild reality was obviously often being, it was an absolutely secure place, as a tone and intelligence, and a thing happening."

"Suddenly the whole imagination of writing and editorial and newspaper and all these presumptions about who am I reading this, and who else other people may be, and all that, it's so grimly brutal!"

"That poetry survived in its formal agencies finally, and that prose survived to get something said."

"The awful thing, as a kid reading, was that you came to the end of the story, and that was it. I mean, it would be heartbreaking that there was no more of it."

"The irony of our social group is that so often everyone feels this, but there's no company whatsoever in that feeling. Think of Pound's great emphasis, the way out is via the door."

"The pattern of the narrative never of necessity wants to end, it never has to."

"The prosaic matter, to communicate in that particular sense something in mind, something of value, or something recognizable."

"There are a lot of editorials that have nothing to do with anything like that. But I was just thinking of that sense of prose as being very responsible and perceptive, thoughtful, intimate, and contriving a quote statement."

"There was a great moment a couple of years ago when Jim Kelly had hurt his elbow and Frank Reich came in and won the game against Miami the next week. He was asked afterwards immediately by the press, what'd you do?"

"There's a wild billboard down the street, I'd almost be grateful if you'd get a picture of it, it says, "If God wrote an editorial in the newspaper, wouldn't you read it?""

"This novel is not that way; this narrative is of a culture which is endlessly permeated, not permissive, but endlessly permeated by its own physical reality. And it has no time that's ambitious."

"What's curious, you get the tone that makes you recognize that Michael Ondaatje is part of a culture, not simply a singular writer; he's part of a whole way of seeing reality."

"When he's bored and he has simply an idea to carry it's awful, it's mawkish and sluggish-he's drunk, you know, you can tell."

"Where the habit of something-what Granddad's favorite chair is-is the chair it literally is, but it's endlessly permeated, vibrating in that other, so that a place has all the echoes of what its use has been."

"You set up a time track, but you can equally leave it. In fact, it is left endlessly when a book has become, like The Wizard of Oz for example, the exfoliating conditions and adventures."

"You were saying that once when visiting Yale, you were struck that unlike Pound, Williams's thinking was volatile, I mean, did not stay locked into a pattern of concepts that then defined his subsequent necessary behavior, whereas Pound did."