Note: Robert Creeley was a Kelly Writers House Fellow in April 2000. I conducted a public interview and moderated a discussion on April 11 before an audience of eighty people. The recording (both video and audio) of the interview has been available both on the Kelly Writers House site and at PennSound. Recently Michael Nardone transcribed it. We expect to publish the entire transcript in Jacket2 before too long. Meantime, below we present the portion of the discussion in which I ask Creeley about William Carlos Williams.
Al Filreis: Now back to Williams, your initial response to Williams — according to something you said at Camden in December [1999] — was that what mattered to you in reading Williams, particularly The Wedge, was that the work was driven by anger. This is what, at least, Ron Silliman posted to the Buffalo poetics listserv afterwards. And then he went on to comment on how Williams had a huge impact on him as well, but it was a very different Williams. So, if anger is not quite operating as much, what’s your Williams now? How does Williams animate you now?
Robert Creeley: Back to Ron’s point, that that wasn’t the Williams he read, he reads the later Williams.
Filreis: The Desert Music.
Creeley: Yeah. Which is not an unangry poem, so to speak. But it certainly isn’t nearly as angry as the poems he was writing in the thirties or twenties. Spring and All, for example. Or The Descent of Winter, or “March First.” Many of the early poems are really angry, and their emotional base is their revulsion and anger at the world he finds around him.
Filreis: So, now when you look back at Williams, how does it feel?
Creeley: Well, it feels very much like my own life. I, when young, felt a dismay, let’s put it, that such things as the Holocaust or the Second World War or the Depression or many other factors in one’s real life, that these could be so unremarkable to the body politic, that it seemed not to matter.
Rimbaud
We recently uploaded a recording of Wyatt Mason talking about Rimbaud. The event took place in November 2005, and the audio is here.
Wyatt is a contributing editor of Harper's where his essays regularly appear. He also writes for the New Yorker, the New Republic, and the London Review of Books. Modern Library has published, in three volumes, his translations of the complete works of Arthur Rimbaud. Translations of Dante’s Vita Nuova and Montaigne’s essays were in progress last I checked, as was his book of essays about American fiction.
Oh, yes, and I'm proud to say that Wyatt was once my student here at Penn.
(Please note: the beginning of the recording is over-run by the intro music we used to use at the Writers House before programs began. Sorry about that. Be patient.)