Robert Creeley and the Poetics of Indeterminacy

Robert Creeley’s poems have a particular aesthetic, marked by a certain abstract quality that exudes disjointedness, anxiety, and dispassionate detachment. Despite their ambiguous content, his poems are meticulously structured – although not formal in a conventional sense. In his poem The Language, each stanza is three lines short with only a few words in each one. Opting for shorter, simpler words inspired by day-to-day banality, the poem steadily teeters between natural and constructed speech. This paper argues that Creeley’s use of undecidability in The Language isolates words from its external signifiers through the perspective of the ambivalent “I”, causing a context collapse that denies the audience any indicative meaning. As a result, the poem becomes a self-reflexive entity, hence forcing the audience to pay attention to the material qualities of its language instead.

The Language is a non-narrative that is only contextualized by its very title. While “I love you” hints at a romantic angle, the poem chooses to center on the utterance of the phrase instead of its thematic content. Both appearances of this phrase are separated by a line break that severs the “I” from the “love you”, indicating a momentary hesitation that attempts to distance the self from the supposed “meaning” of the statement. Therefore, “I love you” is not necessarily a projection of one’s love, whatever that may be, to the receiver; it is merely an expression of language that materializes in words. This foregrounds the rest of the poem in which the material quality of language is a running theme. Words are given physicality, where they are not just an abstract vessel for meaning but also embodied as something for the addressee of this poem to “locate” and “bite”. The poem goes a step further and personifies words as capable of “say[ing] everything” and “aching”. Not only are they visible, they are capable of interacting with the material and are subject to interaction as well. As such, words are like malleable building blocks used in the construction of something, and in this instance, that something is poetry.

Similar to Creeley’s other poems, The Language doubles down on its artificiality and constructedness. Visually, each stanza looks like a brick chiseled by empty spaces on the page, and stacked on top of each other to form an ornamental pillar. Or alternatively, its narrow appearance looks like a shriveled-up trachea cinched at regular intervals, eager and primed to stutter the breath of its user. The enjambment creates unnatural pauses during its recital; even when one tries to enforce continuity, it is inevitable that it would sound unnatural due to the sporadic lengths of the sentences, some incomplete, causing a fragmented speech pattern that feels stunted. Creeley’s recorded readings of this poem corroborates this idea, separating the individual words in a style that sounds monotonous, or impersonal. That being said, it is not lifeless, because ultimately the breath – rapid and irregular – steps in and carries the speech, creating an air of anxiety that emulates suffocation, hence reminding one of their own mortality.

The fragility of the breath is significant in describing the relationship between speech and writing as manifestations of language. One of the biggest differences between the oral and written form is temporality: while the writing is permanent and occupies a medium (say, a sheet of paper or a computer screen), the voice is fleeting and immaterial. Writing is always a past action, captive to the moment of the act; speech, on the other hand, is always done in the present, and for the purpose of the present. Note the imperative diction used in the first sentence:

Locate I

love you some-

where in

teeth and

eyes, bite

it but

take care not

to hurt, you

want so

much so

little.

Consistently employing the present tense, The Language is a text that always exists in the now, and its written form on its own eliminates the breath, or at least places a stranglehold until someone eventually reads it. The poem begins with two distinct instructions to “locate” and “bite”, suggesting that the narrator is addressing this poem to a person revealed to be “you”. Using simple, conversational words, there is a pragmatic quality to this text which inspects the use of language in its most utilitarian sense. As noted by Marjorie Perloff, “Creeley’s vocabulary includes precisely those words and locutions others would avoid as “unpoetic””; however, they are by no means colloquial. Its “ordinary” vocabulary has been defamiliarized due to its unusual context, which is a lack thereof. For instance, imperatives are only useful when there is a material need or goal for the audience to accomplish, but this is contradictory to the indefinite nature of the poem which mostly deals which the abstract. Therefore, I contend that The Language is in a way, an affectation of natural speech. The effect is similar to a live transcription of a television broadcast without sound or visuals.

A misconception about natural speech is that it is unaffected and uninhibited, whereas in actuality, it is as much of a construction as poetry is. Take this, for example:

I

love you

again,

then what

is emptiness

for. To

fill, fill.

The narrator acknowledges that this utterance of “I love you” is not the first in this poem; it is being said “again”, yet its significance differs from the first. The materiality of the first “I love you” has been replaced with the word “emptiness”. There is no inherent meaning or consequence embedded in a phrase because the malleability of language allows for it to be subjected to its present utility. This section might feel like a series of non sequiturs as disjointed phrases are followed with other phrases that do not explicitly refer back to the former. Suppose The Language is a product of Creeley’s mind transferred onto a piece of paper, then the poem appropriately describes the internal process of thought, which are often disjointed and comes in fragments of semi-related phrases. A truly natural and present speech would have to be syntactically imperfect. However, unlike a stream-of-consciousness narrative, The Language is restrained and brief – suggesting that there might be eliminations between the disconnected phrases.

This recalls what Jose Ortega y Gasset wrote, which is that “speech is composed above all of silences. A person incapable of quieting many things would not be capable of talking”. In the poem, speech as a method of self-censorship is exaggerated through its patchy presentation and through Creeley’s anxious oral delivery. Here, the transitory element of speech has been crystallized into poetic form, which makes it subject to analysis and scrutiny. Transference from the written to the oral (Creeley’s reading of the poem) exaggerates language performativity by emphasizing on the silences quite heavily. The silences threaten to externalize the unsaid; as stated in The Language, “words” are “full/of holes/aching” that demand to be “fill[ed]”. As such, the existence of a text ultimately dictates some sort of interpretation from the audience, some of which can be gleaned by looking at the silenced. Maybe a psychoanalytic reading might be fitting as a look into masculine vulnerability in the context of domestic conflict, or sexual connotations related to the word “hole”, but ultimately, the non-contextualized nature of the poem means that it is self-reflexive. While it sometimes reaches for an external confirmation through the reader, it is only an intimate investigation into the space it occupies. The reification of language in the final line, “speech is a mouth” embodies this well. Speech is merely a series of bodily processes that produce sounds; perhaps it would not be wise to assign weight onto words as if its utterance bears an essential truth.

read the full poem here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49024/the-language-56d22abc283f2

Works Cited

Gasset, José Ortega y. "The Misery and Splendor of Translation". Translation Review (0737-4836), 13 (1), p. 18.

Perloff, Marjorie. “Robert Creeley’s Radical Poetics”, Electronic Book Review, October 13, 2007