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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 April 2011
Multiple uses of the spatial deictic “here” are a notable feature of Robert Creeley's poetry. For example, the Collected Poems 1945–1975 contains five poems called “Here” and two called “Here Again,” and after only a hundred pages one has encountered at least eight uses of “here.” Similarly, Charles Altieri has noted a movement in Creeley's poetry from saying “there” to being able to say “here” as a statement of “an ideal of pure presence, of a relationship between subject and world where each is transparent to and completely adequate for the other.” In this essay, I will examine examples of Creeley's “heres” in the early poetry, up to and including Words (1967) and Pieces (1969). I will argue that while some of Creeley's uses of “here” do involve problems of location and ideal presence, other uses speak to problems of agency, form and the body. I will go on to argue that, ultimately, Creeley's “heres” map a search for location that discovers each new articulation is a disorientating reorientation. This reading of Creeley's use of “here” will be informed by a number of other sources including Jonathan Culler's pioneering work on deixis in Structuralist Poetics; J. P. Denny's comparative work on spatial adverbs in English, Eskimo and Kikuyu; Heidegger's discussion of “here” and “yonder”; and the paintings of Barnett Newman which are notable for their deictic titles. Reading these with and back into Creeley's poetry enables a greater understanding of how spatial deixis works in lyric poetry and how it relates to Creeley's reflexive lyric.
1 In David Anfam, Abstract Expressionism (London: Thames and Hudson, 1990), 145.
2 Ibid., 146.
3 Yve-Alain Boise, “Here to There and Back – Barnett Newman Retrospective,” Artforum, March 2002, 100–8, 100–1.
4 Jeff Nuttall, Bomb Culture (London: Paladin, 1970), 100.
5 Nuttall, 221.
6 Robert Creeley, Collected Poems 1945–1975 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 508, 413, 161 and 503 respectively. Other references are given parenthetically in the text.
7 Altieri, Charles, “The Unsure Egoist: Robert Creeley and the Theme of Nothingness,” Contemporary Literature, 13, 2 (Spring 1972), 162–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 170.
8 Weinel, Marie, “Small Spaces of Existence: Robert Creeley's Poetry,” Journal of American Studies of Turkey, 27 (Spring 2008), 59–70Google Scholar, 62.
9 In Robert Creeley, Contexts of Poetry: Interviews 1961–1971 (San Francisco: Four Seasons Foundation, 1973), 203.
10 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980), 319, 320, original emphasis.
11 Charles Bernstein, “Hero of the Local: Robert Creeley and the Persistence of American Poetry,” Golden Handcuffs Review, 1, 5 (Summer/Fall 2005), www.goldenhandcuffsreview.com, accessed 6 Aug. 2010.
12 Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics (London and Henley: RKP, 1975), 166, 167.
13 Ibid., 168.
14 In Frank O'Hara, Selected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet Press 1991), xiii–xiv, xiv.
15 Culler, 170.
16 I am grateful to the work of Jill D. Hopkins for drawing my attention to Denny. See Hopkins, Jill D., “Spatial Deixis in Chiwere,” Kansas Working Papers in Linguistics, 15, 2 (1990), 60–72Google Scholar.
17 J. P. Denny, “Locating the Universals in Lexical Systems for Spatial Deixis,” Papers from the Parasession on the Lexicon (Chicago: CLS, 1978), 71–84, 74.
18 Ibid., 72–3.
19 Ian Hunt, “Being Here,” in Simon Perril, ed., Tending the Vortex: The Works of Brian Catling (Cambridge: CCCP Books, 2001), 102–6, 103–4 and 105.
20 See Culler, 168.
21 Altieri, “The Unsure Egoist,” 178.
22 Hallberg, Robert von, “Robert Creeley and the Pleasures of the System,” boundary 2, 6, 3 (Spring–Autumn 1978), 365–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 372.
23 Robert Creeley, Hello: A Journal (London: Marion Boyars, 1978), 29.
24 Heidegger, Being and Time, p.142.
25 All in ibid., p.142.
26 Middleton, Peter, “Robert Creeley's Reflexive Poems,” The Gig, 18 (May 2005), 43–59Google Scholar, 58.
27 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981).
28 Ibid., 26–7, original emphasis.
29 Ibid., 96.
30 Robert Creeley, “Some Sense of the Commonplace,” in Tom Clark, ed., Robert Creeley and the Genius of the American Common Place (New York: New Directions, 1993), 83–116, 87. I am indebted to Peter Middleton's article for bringing this passage to my attention.
31 Altieri, “The Unsure Egoist,” 177–8.
32 Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans Alan Sheridan with an introduction by David Macey (London: Penguin, 1994), 103.
33 Altieri, “The Unsure Egoist,” 177.
34 Ibid. 178.
35 In Middleton, “Robert Creeley's Reflexive Poems,” 57.
36 Robert Creeley, A Quick Graph: Collected Notes and Essays, ed. Donald Hall (San Francisco: Four Seasons Foundation, 1970), 25, original emphases.
37 Bunn, James, “Circle and Sequence in the Conjectural Lyric,” New Literary History, 3, 3 (Spring 1972), 511–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 524–5.
38 “Poets Q&A's: Robert Creeley,” Smartish Pace (a Poetry Review), no date, available at www.smartishpace.com/pqa/robert_creeley, accessed 6 Aug. 2010.
39 Bertholf, Robert J., “And then He Bought Some Lettuce: Living into Robert Creeley's Poetics,” Journal of American Studies of Turkey, 27 (Spring 2008), 9–49Google Scholar, 37.
40 Ibid., 45, original emphasis.
41 Wendy Steiner, The Colors of Rhetoric: Problems in the Relation between Modern Literature and Panting (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 41.
