Robert Creeley, Autobiography

Robert Creeley's Autobiography published in tiny, wonky, format by Hanuman Books, Madras and New York, in 1990, you can read alongside anything, alongside Chopin, and the ripeness of summer.

A friend's father showed us how to make willow whistles and a more enduring kind from short lengths of copper or lead pipe we'd cut with a hacksaw, to make the notch, then pull partially with wood at one end. I recall there being endless things to learn and do of that kind, slingshots, huts (as we called them) in the woods, traps, and a great proliferating lore of rituals and locations, paths through the woods, secret signs, prisons for all manner of imaged possibility including at one point the attempt to make a glider out of bed sheets and poles tied together.

I have been a shy reader of poetry, preferring what poets say once they've slipped into something more comfortable, once they've made a flute out of willow and written a hundred hand sewn pages, approx 3 by 4 inches, of autobiography in an apartment block in Helsinki in the late eighties.

Creeley, we are in a land of surnames, like Ginsberg, Zukovsky, Williams, Duncan, Olson, makes his world, or he knows where it is, and it's somewhere along the road to his understanding of what consitutes manhood.

So it's probable that what I most wanted was a world, if not of that kind, at least of that place. ... It seemed absurd to go where there were no relationships.

He has his place, his people, but not his father or his left eye or his daughter Leslie, who died age eight. He has a measure of success. The kind that poets concede rather than enjoy. He has the span of literature to situate himself among. Homer and Hesiod onward. These men, they take comfort in each other's surnames. And there are some ground rules.

'To tell the truth the way the words lie.'