Art & Creativity Quote by Robert Creeley

Creeley makes narrative feel less like a straight road than a set of pressure points. The sentence begins in a readerly shrug - "First you wonder" - staging confusion as part of the design, not a failure to follow along. Then he snaps the logic shut: "but no". That small refusal carries the authority of a poet who distrusts neat plots yet insists on structure. The key word is "contingent": not merely connected, but dependent, like events whose meaning only appears when you stop treating them as standalone anecdotes and start reading for consequence.

The subtext is a manifesto against the comforting illusion of separateness. Creeley is talking about stories, but he's also talking about how we live: we pretend experiences are isolated until pattern forces itself into view. "They form a pattern" reads almost like an accusation - a reminder that coherence isn't always chosen; it's discovered after the fact, sometimes reluctantly.

Then the island arrives, and with it a classic mythic device: return. Islands are perfect Creeley terrain - bounded, intimate, a place where the outside world gets edited down to essentials. The "heroine" signals that this isn't neutral geography; it's psychic geography. You "begin" with part of the island, as if wholeness is impossible at first, and the book's method is incremental recognition. In a postwar American poetry context wary of grand systems, Creeley offers a quieter system: relational, conditional, assembled from fragments that only turn into fate when placed side by side.