Life & Wisdom Quote by Robert Creeley

A poet’s way of slipping the knife into our most obedient habit: expecting stories to wrap up. Creeley’s line refuses the contractual ending we’ve been trained to want, where narrative behaves like a well-made machine and closure is the reward for paying attention. “Never of necessity” is the tell. Endings, he implies, aren’t natural laws; they’re cultural paperwork. We stop a story because we’re tired, because a magazine needs its last line, because grief has to be made legible, because capitalism prefers products that ship.

The phrasing is almost perversely plain, yet it’s doing sophisticated work. “Pattern” suggests something we read into events as much as something that’s truly there. Creeley, associated with Black Mountain’s anti-ornamental, breath-and-line poetics, often treats meaning as a lived, ongoing adjustment rather than a finalized statement. So the sentence doubles as an aesthetic manifesto: the poem doesn’t need to “resolve” so much as keep registering experience. The lack of flourish is itself an argument against the melodrama of closure.

The subtext is both liberating and unsettling. If narrative never has to end, then our identities - the stories we tell about who we are, what happened to us, what it all “meant” - are provisional edits, not definitive cuts. Creeley is also quietly rebuking the myth of catharsis: some lives don’t conclude cleanly, and insisting they do can be a kind of violence. The line makes room for the unfinished, the cyclical, the ongoing - not as failure, but as honest form.