PARTISAN REVIEW
415
Robert Creeley
Some years ago an elder friend was much disturbed by
"campus unrest," although any instance of its literal effects was very
unlikely to reach her.
It
seemed her fears were really the fact of her
being increasingly unable, physically, to defend herself or to "get out
of the way," should some "violence" occur in her environment. There
must be a large number of people indeed who, biologically one wants
to say, find themselves unable to respond to any change of this order
and who want it "as it was," just that that stasis, they feel, secures
them in their own increasing limits of possible activity.
I find that attitude deeply human. I remember Pound's saying
somewhere, that "after .fifty one can't k«:!ep one's eye on all the sprout–
ing corn," that one has to get one's own work done if it ever is to be
got done. Hopefully, one learns something about the possibilities of
an art, be it sewing or singing, and having done so, one wants the
center of that information and the possibilities of working with it to
stay put.
Perhaps even more to the point, art is by nature conservative–
which is to say, it pays a strict and constant attention to the materials
and modalities wherewith it comes to make a thing. In that sense I
remember Charles Olson's insistence that "we are the last conserva–
tives," those who were given to care, in John Winthrop's phrase, about
the kind of world we live in.
Politics, sadly, does not seem to care about that world except in
small, preferential segments of its existence. The only political group
I find myself consistently attracted to is, paradoxically, that of the
black community. They would seem to be engaged in both gaining
and saving the possibilities of distinct human life. That their actions
are often "radical" only emphasizes for me the precise conservatism
of their intent. They are not fooling, so to speak, and their action tends
to follow the literal pattern of their commitment. The Farm Workers
are another, if smaller, instance of the same nature of action.
As a poet I will do anything to secure my own realization of what
the possibilities of imagination are. Obviously such a commitment can
be at times a destructive and isolating phenomenon. But the
conserva–
tism
of my own nature - that endlessly insistent "save the baby" de–
mand I feel - will not let me act otherwise. I am a literalist. I am
confused by what seems to be, yet when actually approached or met
with, proves not to be at all. To recognize that another artist is pain–
fully and arbitrarily limited in what he or she feels possible because
some group "doesn't like it" strikes me as outrageous. In that sense
I have tended to be far more open to other artists in their work thfln
I have been to their critics, radical or conservative.
