For the thousand manifestations that dotted the American landscape yesterday, I want to post this broadside poem by Robert Creeley. It has always seemed a kind lurching effusion of a politics, a consequence of the state of mind he wrote it in without doubt. Creeley was often convulsive, and that is to the point of his aesthetic, even concerning details. But here the subject of his “attack” in William Carlos Williams’s sense is broad, vast, gestural, involuntary. It is worth remembering that much poetry that followed shelters in the shadow of that attack. Thus it bears some comment at a later moment, as late as the one we are in, where the poem resonates anew. … More
