Robert Creeley, Virginia Woolf

Take Creeley, seize him by his surname, and Virginia Woolf, to give her both her names, set his tiny Hanuman book, printed in Madras, beside her Penguin Classic mode, and you have the shock of our common yet multifarious pasts, his awkwardly analytical, hers embedded with relief in her words.

Creeley pauses towards the end of his autobiography on a line from Ginsberg—'And the sky above, an old blue place'—that Zukovsky was shy of, he said, because it fouls up the gauges, makes them stick. I have read the previous 99 pages waiting for gauges to be fouled, if not shattered, if not rhapsodised.

In 1939 when she was 51, Virginia Woolf wrote in 'A Sketch of the Past', that it was her shock-receiving capacity that made her a writer, writing puts the severed parts together, that Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet are the truth about this vast mass that we call the world.

But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself. And I see this when I have a shock.

How would 'A Sketch of the Past' read as in a Hanuman Book printed in Madras?

I like to read the page as well as the words, the non-being as well as the being. Poets of the Creeley mode are less concerned with the page, or unlucky with their publishers. Tiny Hanuman does for his thoughts on this life for which he has responsibility, as he puts it on page one, 'a substantial life, like a dog, but hardly as pleasant, to be dealt with no matter one could or couldn't, wanted to or not'.

Creeley the poet is uncomfortable with the task of autobiography; Virginia Woolf tunes her sketch of the past into her writing mode. Her life or the life of someone she sits opposite on the train down from London to Sussex, one she knows and the other she can imagine: tis all the one.

Creeley is a poet, unconscient of the page, the shock, keeping everything under his surname. Virginia Woolf is a poet also,