A Note on Robert Creeley, New England, and “This”

Authors : Edward FOSTER

Pages : 51-53

View : 12 | Download : 10

Publication Date : 2008-04-01

Article Type : Research Paper

Abstract :The novelist Mark Jacobs tells us that one evening as he and Robert Creeley were leaving a restaurant in İzmir, they passed “the statue of Atatürk. [Creeley] raised his finger in a sign of approbation that was almost a blessing and told me, ‘This.’ One of my graven memories is the look on his face when he said it, a mix of complicity and delight” Jacobs 5 . That moment and gesture in Izmir seem to me pure New England, a recognition of present fact which is at the center of what it means to be a “Yankee” as well as the generative core of Creeley’s work— i.e., a capacity to live in the here and now with all its multiple complexities that in turn can make a New England sensibility, wherever transported, delight in, and be complicit with, what it encounters.
Keywords : Robert, Creeley, New England