Vox Populi
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Robert Creeley: The Rain
All night the sound had
come back again,
and again falls
this quiet, persistent rain.
What am I to myself
that must be remembered,
insisted upon
so often? Is it
that never the ease,
even the hardness,
of rain falling
will have for me
something other than this,
something not so insistent—
am I to be locked in this
final uneasiness.
Love, if you love me,
lie next to me.
Be for me, like rain,
the getting out
of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi-
lust of intentional indifference.
Be wet
with a decent happiness.
~~~~
Robert Creeley (1926 – 2005) was an American poet and author of more than sixty books. He is usually associated with the Black Mountain poets. He was close with Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, John Wieners and Ed Dorn. Among his many honors and achievements, Creeley was a recipient of the Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award.
Copyright 1960 Robert Creeley
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I’ve loved that notion of “a decent happiness” forever ❤️
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Creeley was a master of original phrasing, wasn’t he?
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Amen, friend!
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The only poem of his I remember is I Know a Man, a favorite of 20th century anthologies. It’s worth a read. And powerful phrases of his venture forth from other poems, like “I heard words/ and words full/ of holes/aching. Speech/ is a mouth. from The Language.
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Just discovered him. Yes, that last stanza!
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Ah, a little gem of a love poem… such melancholy.
And that last sentence!
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I love this poem as well. Creeley was considered a major poet for a couple of generations of Americans, but doesn’t seem to be part of the canon now. Pity. His experiments with the simplicity of language open doors into rooms of consciousness we barely know exist.
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You’re right, Michael — so, so many poets that were considered “great” or “important” are now never mentioned, and rarely present in anthologies. What a lesson in humility, modesty & literary history, right? So thank you for publishing their work…
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When I was a young man, I was skimming the poetry shelf at the Dormont City Library in Western PA and I came across an old tattered volume called something like “New American Poetry”. The copyright was 1910. As I skimmed the TOC, I realized that the only name I recognized was Walt Whitman’s. In the intro, the editor explained to the reader that Whitman’s verse, although uncouth and unrhymed, really was poetry. Dickinson wasn’t represented, nor were any of the modern poets, such as Frost and Stevens. All the other poets in the anthology have been forgotten, I suppose. We are dust and shadow, as Horace says. Dust and shadow.
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