Quotes from Robert Creeley

Thought is a process of work, joy is an issue of work

Oh stay awhile. sad, sagging flesh and bones gone brittle. Stay in place, aged face, teeth, don't go. Inside and out the flaccid change of bodily parts, mechanics of action, mind's collapsing habits, all echo here in mottled skin, blurred eye, reiterated mumble. Lift to the vacant air some sigh, some sign I'm still inside.

Let's build a house of human pieces, arms and hair, not telling any one.

Bless something small but infinite and quiet.

A Token" My lady fair with soft arms, what can I say to you—words, words as if all worlds were there.

I'll win the way I always do by being gone when they come. When they look, they'll see nothing of me and where I am they'll not know. This, I thought, is my way and right or wrong it's me. Being dead, then, I'll have won completely.

The tree cannot walk, all its going must be violence. They listen to the saw cut, the roots scream. And in eating even a stalk of celery there will be pathetic screaming.

To be in love is like going out- side to see what kind of day it is.

How dear you are to me, how love- ly all your body is, how all these senses do commingle, so that in your very arms I still can think of you.

The plan is the body

What's inside, what's the place apart from this one?

Now love also becomes a reward so remote from me I have only made it with my mind.

The Tunnel" Tonight, nothing is long enough— time isn't. Were there a fire, it would burn now. Were there a heaven, I would have gone long ago. I think that light is the final image. But time reoccurs, love—and an echo. A time passes love in the dark.

What am I to myself that must be remembered, insisted upon so often?

The Language" Locate I love you some- where in teeth and eyes, bite it but take care not to hurt, you want so much so little. Words say everything. I love you again, then what is emptiness for. To fill, fill. I heard words and words full of holes aching. Speech is a mouth.

Bless something small but infinite and quiet. — Robert Creeley, from "A Prayer," The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1945–1975 . (University of California Press; 2nd ed. edition October 23, 2006)

The Sentence" There is that in love which, by the syntax of, men find women and join their bodies of their minds —which wants so to acquire a continuity, a place, a demonstration that it must be one's own sentence.

I thought if I were broken enough I would see the light like at the end of a small tube, but approachable.

Love comes quietly, finally, drops about me, on me, in the old ways. What did I know thinking myself able to go alone all the way.

The Token" My lady fair with soft arms, what can I say to you—words, words as if all worlds were there.

All of which was OK, as that proved then, I certainly wouldn't contradict it as a necessary sense of things.

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.

Don't name it, as they say, because instantly you offer it to this peculiar authority.

There are a lot of editorials that have nothing to do with anything like that. But I was just thinking of that sense of prose as being very responsible and perceptive, thoughtful, intimate, and contriving a quote statement.