Vitro Nasu

Robert Creeley (Photo by Jonathan Williams)

I know a man

by Robert Creeley

As I sd to my
friend, because I am
always talking,—John, I

sd, which was not his
name, the darkness sur-
rounds us, what

can we do against
it, or else, shall we &
why not, buy a goddamn big car,

drive, he sd, for
christ’s sake, look
out where yr going.

Poem via

Ginsberg, Anne Wildman and Robert Creeley.

Anne Wildman she has multiplied – number song.

America
by Robert Creeley

America, you ode for reality!
Give back the people you took.

Let the sun shine again
on the four corners of the world

you thought of first but do not
own, or keep like a convenience.

People are your own word, you
invented that locus and term.

Here, you said and say, is
where we are. Give back

what we are, these people you made,
us, and nowhere but you to be.

“America” Creeley’s poem serves to highlight the inconsistent attitude of America. Too often the nation is caught up in world affairs rather than addressing the issues at home.” via

First winter rain by Matsuo Basho

First winter rain–
even the monkey
seems to want a raincoat.

Rain Rain Rain
Three Monoprints by Fung Lin Hall

The Rain by Robert Creeley

All night the sound had
come back again,
and again falls
this quite, 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.

Marjorie Perloff on Robert Creeley’s Radical Poetics.

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.)

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.

(This sad news came from Ron Silliman’s blog. More here, and here.)

Black Mountain poet fired by an elemental energy (from the Guardian)

Goodbye by Robert Creeley

Now I recognize
it was always me
like a camera
set to expose

itself to a picture
or a pipe
through which the water

might run

or a chicken
dead for dinner
or a plan
inside the head

of a dead man.
Nothing so wrong
when one considered
how it all began.

It was Zukofsky’s
“Born very young into a world
already very old…”
The century was well along

when I came in
and now that it’s ending,
I realize it won’t
be long.

But couldn’t it all have been
a little nicer,
as my mother’d say. Did it
have to kill everything in sight,

did right always have to be so wrong?
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.
(Poem is from here).

Vincent van Gogh was born in Groot Zundert, The Netherlands on 30 March 1853, (from here.)
Read his Letters on his birthday.

Read this article today. Olivier Assayas said, “Maggie is a mystery,” he says, finally. “I don’t know if I ever fully understood her. I thought I did, but she’s even more of a mystery to herself.”
A parting gift for Maggie (from here.)

Another (the) Long Goobye took place in Arizona.
Funny Long Face says goodbye to Nina this morning.