A collection of quotes and thoughts by Robert Creeley on time, river, friends, imagination, thoughtful, thinking, reading, poetry, narrative and experience.
41 Top Robert Creeley Quotes That Will Positively Influence Your Line Of Thought
Robert Creeley is considered as one of the most influential American poets of the 20th century. He was well-recognized for his association with the Black Mountain group of poets. During the year 1946, Creeley published his first poem \'Wake’ in the ‘Harvard Magazine’ while he was a student there. Later in the year 1954, Creeley was asked to join the members of faculty at the, ‘Black Mountain College’ and edit the ‘Black Mountain Review’. Creeley has been credited for publishing more than 60 books of poetry in America and other countries. ‘Life and Death’, ‘Later’, ‘Mirror’, ‘Memory Gardens’ and ‘The Finger’ are few of his poems. Other writers and poet described his style of writing as very distinctive and elliptical. Apart from poetry, Creeley authored more than a dozen books and essays. This American poet earned many honors including, ‘Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award’ and was also elected as the ‘Chancellor of Academy of American Poets’ in 1999. Robert’s sayings on life, writing and reading are very deep and will leave you thinking. Below, we have collected few of Robert Creeley’s quotes and sayings that will change your interpretation of things in life.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I know this body is impatient.
I know I constitute only a meager voice and mind.
Yet I loved, I love.
I want no sentimentality.
I want no more than home.
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.
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.
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.
Robert Creeley
What has happened makes the world. Live on the edge, looking.
Robert Creeley
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 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.
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.
Locale is both a geographic term and the inner sense of being.
Robert Creeley
Thought is a process of work,
joy is an issue of work
Robert Creeley
Writing is the same as music. It’s in how you phrase it, how you hold back the note, bend it, shape it, then release it. And what you don’t play is as important as what you do say.
As I get older, I recognize that my thinking about poetry may or
may not have anything actively to do with my actual work as a
poet. This strikes me as no thing cynically awry but rather
seems again instance of that hapless or possibly happy fact,
we do not as humans seem necessarily aware of what we are
physically or psychically doing at all!
My wife and I lived all alone,
contention was our only bone.
I fought with her, she fought with me,
and things went on right merrily.
But now I live here by myself
with hardly a damn thing on the shelf,
and pass my days with little cheer
since I have parted from my dear.
I did however used to think, you know, in the woods walking, and as a kid playing the the woods, that there was a kind of immanence there - that woods, a places of that order, had a sense, a kind of presence, that you could feel; that there was something peculiarly, physically present, a feeling of place almost conscious ... like God. It evoked that.
