That ambivalent, oblique, laconic way of speaking, it’s very self-defensive, but it thinks of itself as very up-front.

A really charming guy last night, one of the musicians, said to me ‘Hey, man, you got a really interesting voice.’ You know, I was very charmed. And he said, ‘Yeah, the way you really push it out there--you can hear every beat.’ [laughs.]

That’s terrific. That’s the way I feel it.

These words, taken from an interview with Anne Waldman in Ron Mann’s 1982 documentary Poetry in Motion, come from the most laconic of 20th century laconic American poets, Robert Creeley. The film has Creeley appearing before John Cage, who talks about the “sounds of the silence along Sixth Avenue,” and after Amiri Baraka, who talks about poetry’s success as “having something to do with high speech, the relation of sounds with words.”

Creeley’s placement to me seems appropriate--his sound-driven poetry is in a sense halfway between Cage’s silence and Baraka’s fire. As a 20-year-old wanna-be poet commuting to Rutgers University’s Camden satellite campus, I first saw the film at a Philadelphia documentary festival -- the documentary was 4-5 years old by then -- and then rented it on countless occasions--accumulating some serious late fees--from a video store in Philly. Sometimes, I took the train across the Delaware River for the sole reason of hearing John Giorno (see a couple days ago's post) yelp his poems an octave higher over a prerecorded track, or to hear saxophonist Dave Murray and Baraka again, or Jayne Sanchez duel with Jamaaleen Tacuma’s bass.

The documentary’s angle or thesis was that poetry, as a heard form, can be freed from the academy's grip, which according to several of the featured poets, is “so hard to understand.” As someone forced to read Pound and Eliot at a premature point of my writing life, I agreed with these assertions wholeheartedly. Watching the film again, I also recall feeling that I was somehow more hip than the academics.

Creeley, a poet in academia almost all of his writing life, then, at first seemed staid and laid-back to me, certainly not as viscerally satisfying as the poets reading with the bells and whistles, like Ed Sanders of the Fugs, for instance, with his "musical tie."

Creeley’s comments that immediately follow his reading of “Self-Portrait,” however, have always helped me appreciate the poem. On the surface, the speaker does seem rather coy, “laconic,” and “oblique” in his meaning and intention. Over the years, I grew to like the poem more and more as my ear changed; Creeley’s pauses in his performance and line, after tens of listenings, I learned, provided a perfect form for the sound and meaning contents of the poem. It indicated deeper ambiguities. Here's the poem: