20 pages • 40 minutes read
For Love
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Further Reading & Resources
Related Poems
“Love Song” by William Carlos Williams (1917)
Creeley’s long friendship with and admiration for Williams shaped Creeley’s own sense of poetic concision even when, or perhaps particularly when, the poet explores the careless, reckless energy of love. Love creates an excuse to get careless, to allow lines to implode under the stress of emotional excess. Here, one of Williams’s most passionate poems reflects Creeley’s sense of tight precise phrasing, how the intellect of the poet contains and controls the emotions of the man. The ties to “For Love” are evident in the poem’s opening line: “I lie here thinking of you” (Line 1). As in Creeley’s poem, the poet, lost in thought, is at once with and without his love, handling the lurking threat of the intellect trumping the heart.
“The Kingfishers” by Charles Olson (1949)
No contemporary poet of Creeley’s generation influenced Creeley’s work more than his personal and professional friendship with Charles Olson. Although never achieving the stature or success of Creeley, Olson directed Creeley toward embracing his sense of what Olson termed projective verse, a kind of riff on free verse that inclined poetic expression to minimalism, compressing powerful emotion into lines that seem at first sterile, even cold. The poet designs lines tailored to fit the content, rather than allowing inherited forms to tell the poet how to design lines. Olson’s poem, although not specifically a love poem, explores in lines that reflect the poet’s own thought processes the contradictory nature of reality and the implications of perception itself. It does so by using a bird that is at once elegant and beautiful but predatory and animalistic as well.
“The Rain” by Robert Creeley (1962)
Like “For Love,” this poem offers an exploration of how the mind sorts through the tectonic impact of an emotion it cannot entirely explain. As in “For Love,” “The Rain” uses enjambment to convey that contradictory sense of the poet both in control and total panic. The lines here also fragment into suggestion rather than complete thoughts, and the diction is at once conversational and cryptic. The poet also listens to the rain and thinks about his lover, fears ultimately “[…] locked in this / final uneasiness” (Lines 15-16), that is, the cloaking threat of loneliness.
Further Literary Resources
“‘It Is I’: Robert Creeley’s Deictic Subjectivity and the Sublime Self” by Andy Weaver (2018)
Creeley wrote some of the most contradictory and yet sublime Postmodern poems about love. Although burdened with excessive (even intimidating) critical jargon, this article positions Creeley’s love poems in the tension between the hunger of the heart and the fears of the intellect, fears that such passion is ultimately an expression of the mind and not the heart. This fear gives a darkness to Creeley’s love poetry, always distrustful of the heart and always fearing that in the end a person merely and absolutely falls in love with a sublime construct created by the self.
“Solipsism and the Sexual Imagination” by John G. Hammond (1975)
This is an exhaustive investigation into Creeley’s exploration of sexuality in both his poems and his short fictions. Hammond starts with the curious irony that a poet at once so cerebral and intellectual can offer such highly charged celebrations of sex. The article suggests that, for Creeley, the failure in relationships comes not from the loss of love but rather from the loss of faith in sexuality as an essential expression of intimacy. That failure results in the highly sensitive individual (a character in a story or the speaker of the poem) left to create a private world, a space apart where love cannot reach them.
“Address and Posture in the Poetry of Robert Creeley” Kenneth Cox (1969)
By one of the most respected scholars on Postmodern poetry, the article specifically looks at Creeley’s poems in which the poet/speaker addresses another, sometimes named (as in “For Love”), most often not, and thus addressing more the universe itself. In either scenario, the poet still appears in animated discussion ultimately with himself. Never does the intended audience speak. Indeed, Bobbie has no lines, no retort, offers no break from the insulating voice of the poet talking to himself. The article examines ways in which for Creeley dialogue and monologue become essentially, existentially the same thing. In this, Creeley both embraces and despairs over subjectivity. He talks to others largely to console himself, and he talks to himself largely to give his otherwise lonely voice an audience.
Listen to the Poem
Creeley himself recorded the poem twice, both available on YouTube. The readings are separated by close to 30 years, one from 1961 and preserved in Penn State University’s massive audio archives of American poets, the other recorded in 1991 as part of the Arizona State University’s poetry series. It is the first recording, however, that reflects more authentically the edgy experimental poet who first wrote “For Love.” It is like listening to Charlie Parker or Thelonious Monk. The recitation is slow and hesitant, forward and rushed, reflecting the poet’s unease and difficulty with the topic. His voice barely audible, Creeley reveals how these lines, so artlessly artful, encourage innovative and unexpected recitation, pauses not reflected in the lines, the opportunity to linger over the occasional long vowel or rapidly move through the staccato of hard consonants. Like listening to Parker or Monk, there’s an assumption that next time Creeley recites the poem the text will provoke an entirely different riff.
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