Robert Creeley has been absent since his death in 2005 but survived at the same time by his distinctive poetics of absence characterized by the moments of hesitations and syncopations. One must arrive, while reading Creeley's poems, at an enormous sen...
Robert Creeley has been absent since his death in 2005 but survived at the same time by his distinctive poetics of absence characterized by the moments of hesitations and syncopations. One must arrive, while reading Creeley's poems, at an enormous sense of void or absence generated by the words and lines that are abruptly cut off or unwillingly held together. His language is continually hesitating, being interrupted, and breaking off without a sense of direction provided by conventional grammar. Not only does Creeley reveal many places of absence in his poems but many of his poems indeed survey the underlying conditions that create the voids, which is one of the distinctive characteristics of his poetry. This paper examines Creeley's poetics of absence, demonstrating that the absence is a moment of struggle for Creeley to reject the language of any rational ego and encounter language as a thing in itself. This is possible only when he participates himself in the process of creation as another object which has its own biological rhythm. His words are juxtaposed as things themselves while it is the pulse beat, the breath of the poet that give a particular shape to the language. This is a place where the natural energies of the poet and language collide or coalesce in an instant of time to create an utterance, where the original encounter with the firstness of body and language can evoke the most adequate expression. When the two objects or things collide with high energies, as observed in modern physics, the energy of the two colliding objects is redistributed to form a new object. Much like the field of energy in modern physics, where energy turns to matter, matter to energy, Creeley's absence or gaps are full of potentials or possibilities of words. This place of absence allows Creeley to achieve a true reconciliation between the body and language, a certain kind of unity between subject and object, achieved, however, with great difficulty.