"It's the classic story form. All staying equal, or proving equal, or being equal, this will all continue, and the next time around, we'll move on to see what happened to Harry after he dove in the river, or who his friend John really was, and so on"
About this Quote
Creeley is talking about narrative like it is a perpetual-motion machine: the "classic story form" isn’t a sacred template, it’s a device that keeps resetting the board so the reader will agree to keep going. The oddly bureaucratic phrase "All staying equal, or proving equal, or being equal" sounds like someone trying to file experience into categories that never quite fit. That stutter-step of near-synonyms is the point. It mimics the way stories promise stability (things stay equal), then manufacture validation (prove equal), then pretend the whole question was ontological from the start (being equal). Plot becomes a kind of moral accounting.
The names "Harry" and "John" are aggressively generic, almost placeholder humans, and Creeley leans into that banality to expose what narrative habit does: it makes strangers feel inevitable. The river-dive is pure cliffhanger bait, the oldest trick in serial storytelling, and Creeley treats it as both earnest and suspect. You can feel the hand of the storyteller nudging the camera: next episode we’ll check the splash, then the backstory, "and so on". That last phrase is a shrug that cuts. It admits the engine is recursion, not revelation.
Context matters: as a Black Mountain-associated poet, Creeley was famously suspicious of grand, prepackaged forms and more interested in the mind’s real-time pivots. Here, he’s not rejecting story; he’s showing its seams. The subtext is less "stories continue" than "continuation is the seduction". The form survives by promising answers while quietly feeding on deferral.
The names "Harry" and "John" are aggressively generic, almost placeholder humans, and Creeley leans into that banality to expose what narrative habit does: it makes strangers feel inevitable. The river-dive is pure cliffhanger bait, the oldest trick in serial storytelling, and Creeley treats it as both earnest and suspect. You can feel the hand of the storyteller nudging the camera: next episode we’ll check the splash, then the backstory, "and so on". That last phrase is a shrug that cuts. It admits the engine is recursion, not revelation.
Context matters: as a Black Mountain-associated poet, Creeley was famously suspicious of grand, prepackaged forms and more interested in the mind’s real-time pivots. Here, he’s not rejecting story; he’s showing its seams. The subtext is less "stories continue" than "continuation is the seduction". The form survives by promising answers while quietly feeding on deferral.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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