Life & Wisdom Quote by Robert Creeley

Creeley is quietly drawing a boundary line: not between good and bad writing, but between prose that behaves like a person and prose that behaves like a product. The opening jab at editorials that have "nothing to do with anything" reads like a poet's impatience with institutional voice - language that performs relevance without actually bearing responsibility for meaning. He isn't only critiquing journalism; he's critiquing the evasions of public rhetoric, the way a supposedly authoritative form can drift into abstraction, self-protection, or mere positioning.

Then he pivots into an almost ethical definition of prose: "responsible and perceptive, thoughtful, intimate". Those adjectives carry a social demand. Responsible to what? To lived experience, to specificity, to the consequences of saying something in public. Perceptive and intimate suggests attention not just to events but to the texture of consciousness - a Creeley hallmark, given his association with the Black Mountain poets and their suspicion of grand, omniscient narration. He wants prose that feels overheard, not broadcast.

The last phrase, "contriving a quote statement", is the tell. He's wary of the prefab line engineered to travel - the soundbite before soundbites. Even as he gestures toward "a quote", he exposes the fabrication involved: language shaped to be extracted, repeated, credentialed. The subtext is a poet's complaint about a culture that rewards the quotable over the true, and the exportable over the intimate. Creeley is arguing that prose should be accountable to perception, not optimized for circulation.