A Lesson in Breathing We Loved , We Still Love

Robert Creeley
The above image shows two books by Robert Creeley, the one pictured is Elsa’s Housebook which I bought on my first trip to Boston. Read and see two terrific photos from Elsa Dorfman.

Found this poem “Creeley Led” by Crag Hill, here.

(Bresson’s Movies is a poem many love and are now going around the blogosphere. Bresson sounds like a lesson in Breathing, who is Bresson? )

Bresson’s Movies

A movie of Robert
Bresson’s showed a yacht,
at evening on the Seine,
all its lights on, watched

by two young, seemingly
poor people, on a bridge adjacent,
the classic boy and girl
of the story, any one

one cares to tell. So
years pass, of course, but
I identified with the young,
embittered Frenchman,

knew his almost complacent
anguish and the distance
he felt from his girl.
Yet another film

of Bresson’s has the
aging Lancelot with his
awkward armor standing
in a woods, of small trees,

dazed, bleeding, both he
and his horse are,
trying to get back to
the castle, itself of

no great size. It
moved me, that
life was after all
like that. You are

in love. You stand
in the woods, with
a horse, bleeding.
The story is true.

“To Bresson, add Creeley (a Robert to a Robert, as shown by the witty enjambment of lines one and two). The poem puts the poet in the picture, and a binary lyric system prepares to close. But not yet, not quite.” (read from here)

“We see, for instance, that collaboration has not been a sideline for the poet, but rather, that Creeley has consistently built many of his strongest poems out of relationships with visual artists.” (Read more here.)

Collage
Still Life with Donald Saltan
Collaborating with Gary Indiana and with Francesco Clemente , more here.

“For any young readers out there start with his early book FOR LOVE and keep going. The work expands over a rich & full life.” (from Patti Smith site, a tribute by Ann Waldman).

From Alan Sondheim, “He taught the value of the word and the spaces that fell through so that the poem disappeared.” (read more here. )

Darren Hughes just posted on his blog the release of Bresson’s
donkey film au hazard Balthazar from the Criterion Dvd Collection.