"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"
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Creeley is policing a romantic fantasy: that poets invent language the way gods invent worlds. His insistence - "makes it mind you" - is less pep talk than corrective, the tone of someone tired of hearing poems treated as mere inspiration-transcripts. A poem is made. That verb yanks poetry out of the clouds and drops it into the workshop, where craft is not a dirty word but the only word that matters.
The sly pivot is "again like Williams", a nod to William Carlos Williams and the modernist, American argument for the local and the plain. Creeley’s "emphasis now regrettable" reads like a self-aware wince: he knows this line of thinking can harden into doctrine, the kind of programmatic minimalism that becomes its own cliché. He’s not retreating from the idea, he’s admitting the risk of sounding like a manifesto.
The phrase "takes the words as he finds them" carries the deeper ethic. Language isn’t private property; it’s communal debris and inheritance, already "lying interrelated" in the world - in speech habits, social pressures, inherited metaphors, the grain of a given moment. The poet’s job is not to purify that mess but to recognize the relations already there and re-compose them into a new, charged arrangement.
Contextually, this fits Creeley’s Black Mountain-era suspicion of grand rhetoric: meaning is not delivered by oratory but generated by attention, by the exacting selection of words that already carry history and collision inside them. The subtext is almost political: you don’t escape culture by writing; you show your hand in how you handle its materials.
The sly pivot is "again like Williams", a nod to William Carlos Williams and the modernist, American argument for the local and the plain. Creeley’s "emphasis now regrettable" reads like a self-aware wince: he knows this line of thinking can harden into doctrine, the kind of programmatic minimalism that becomes its own cliché. He’s not retreating from the idea, he’s admitting the risk of sounding like a manifesto.
The phrase "takes the words as he finds them" carries the deeper ethic. Language isn’t private property; it’s communal debris and inheritance, already "lying interrelated" in the world - in speech habits, social pressures, inherited metaphors, the grain of a given moment. The poet’s job is not to purify that mess but to recognize the relations already there and re-compose them into a new, charged arrangement.
Contextually, this fits Creeley’s Black Mountain-era suspicion of grand rhetoric: meaning is not delivered by oratory but generated by attention, by the exacting selection of words that already carry history and collision inside them. The subtext is almost political: you don’t escape culture by writing; you show your hand in how you handle its materials.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
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